English 209: Paper Topic #3

Below, I have given you brief critical statements about several of the texts we have read (with the exception of Wright, who, as you know from the longer version of the criticism you received in class, is writing about a different Hurston text).

Your assignment is to write an essay that responds to one of the critical statements below.  Your response should not be simple agreement, however; chose a statement that you find worth challenging in some way or another.   If  you cannot find a statement below that you can engage with, you are more that welcome to find a quotation from another critical text (i.e., an article or review).  In that case, however, you must provide me with a full citation.  If the critical text is not available in the library, you must provide me with a photocopy of the relevant parts of the text.

You should support your argument with attention both to the critic's language and to the fictional text in question.   Make sure by the end of the essay that you've explained what's important about your challenge to the critic's words.
 

1.  Bronte, Jane Eyre

CRITICAL RESPONSE: Joyce Carol Oates, "Introduction," Jane Eyre (New York: Bantam, 1987) viii.

"Jane Eyre's hunger and that of Bertha Mason are not seen to overlap, for one is always qualified by intellectual scrupulosity and a rather fierce sense of integrity; the other is, and was, sheerly animal."

2.  Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

CRITICAL RESPONSE: Francis Wyndham, "Introduction,"   Wide Sargasso Sea (New York:  W. W. Norton, 1966/1982) 12-13.

"Only the West Indian flashbacks in [Rhys's novels] Voyage in the Dark and some episodes in The Left Bank strike a different note -- one of regret for innocent sensuality in a lush, beguiling land.  In Wide Sargasso Sea, which is set in Jamaica and Dominica during the 1830s, she returns to that spiritual country as to a distant dream: and discovers it, for all its beauty (and she conjures up this beauty with haunting perfection) to have been a nightmare."

3.  Hurston, "The Gilded Six-Bits"

CRITICAL RESPONSE: Richard Wright, "Between Laughter and Tears," New Masses (October 5, 1937) 25.
"In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.  She exploits that phase of Negro life which is quaint,' the phrase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the superior' race."

4.  Joyce, "The Dead"

CRITICAL RESPONSE: Kenneth Burke, "Stages" in "The Dead," in Dubliners: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin Books, 1996) 401.

"...Once we have been brought to this stage of generosity,' where Gabriel can at last arrive at the order of ideal sociality, seeing all living things in terms of it, we return to the topic of snow...standing for the transcendence about the conditioned. . . . Upon all the living and the dead.'  That is, upon the two as merged.  That is, upon the world of conditions as seen through the spirit of conditions transcended, of ideal sociality beyond material divisiveness."

5. Joyce, "The Dead"

CRITICAL RESPONSE: David Daiches, "Dubliners," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Dubliners: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968)36.

"The snow, which falls indifferently upon all things, covering them with a neutral whiteness and erasing all their differentiating details, is the symbol of Gabriel's new sense of identity with the world, of the breakdown of the circle of his egotism to allow him to become for the moment not a man different from all other men living in a world of which he alone is the center but a willing part of the general flux of things."