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). Some of these statements I have written myself; you should assume for the sake of the paper that I agree with them.
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 or expanding on in some way. 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, Wuthering Heights
CRITICAL RESPONSE: David Daiches, "Introduction," Wuthering Heights (New York and London: Penguin, 1965) 28.
"It is perhaps curious that Emily Bronte shows no sense of the otherness of the other person in a passionate relationship between the sexes. Ultimate passion is for her rather a kind of recognition of one's self--one's true and absolute self--in the object of passion....This notion makes contact with the suggestions of incest in the novel (Heathcliff and Catherine had been brought up as brother and sister) to suggest a kind of hoarding of passion which is related perhaps to Heathcliff's later avarice and to the Thomistic explanation of incest as a form of avarice (for it selfishly keeps love withing the family and does not offer it to someone outside)."
2. McPherson, "A Loaf of Bread"
CRITICAL RESPONSE: Kathryn Conrad.
"Ultimately, McPherson's text suggests to the reader that the only solution to the evils of capitalism lies in the women of the text. Their idealism is celebrated over the stubbornness of both Green and Reed; in them lies the solution to the problems of exploitation and the tensions of race relations."
3. McPherson, "A Loaf of Bread"
CRITICAL RESPONSE: Kathryn Conrad.
"The quiet dignity of Reed's principled response to Green at the end of 'A Loaf of Bread' suggests that Reed is the better man. This ending, however, completely undermines the text's earlier criticism of racism and capitalist exploitation. Reed and his final action are valorized, and McPherson's formerly critical vision slips into a simplistic celebration of personal strength and loses its challenge to systems of exploitation."
4. Joyce, "An Encounter"
CRITICAL RESPONSE: Kathryn Conrad.
"Joyce's choice not to state explicitly what the old man in the field is doing ironically reinforces the very abuse of power he is trying to expose. He holds the power over readers and we are at his mercy, just as the boys in the story are at the old man's mercy."
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."
6. 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."
7. Ellison, Invisible Man
CRITICAL RESPONSE: Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
"Ellison's emphasis on the irrepressibility of individual freedom essentially led him into a cul de sac from which the utter viciousness of racism and capitalism could not be comprehensively analyzed and attacked."
8. Ellison, Invisible Man
CRITICAL RESPONSE: Kathryn Conrad.
"Ellison implies that one of the biggest obstacles to freedom for African-American men is Woman. White or black, child or adult, Woman is cast as a temptress who blocks the heroic path both to self-realization and to political emancipation. The result is a heroic quest narrative that implicitly excludes women from positive transformation."
9. Ellison, Invisible Man
CRITICAL RESPONSE: Kathryn Conrad.
"Ellison's tale, albeit focused on an African-American man's quest for personal and political freedom, is ultimately universal. He uses archetypal images of rebirth to which all of his readers can relate; all of his readers, then, can undertake the same quest as the hero of the tale. This universality is the text's greatest strength."