Close Reading of a Novella in the Context of a Historical or Theoretical Source
Argue for your interpretation of the novella The Heroic Slave. Use a question as the starting point of your interpretation. The main argument of the paper should be supported by close reading of passages from The Heroic Slave. In the close reading, quote and analyze 2 to 3 passages from the novella and use your analysis of those passages to argue for your interpretation of The Heroic Slave. Along the way, briefly make use of one secondary source that we have read in connection with the novella. The secondary source can be a historical document, the excerpt from Delbanco, or the (theoretical) excerpt from Gates. The secondary source should be used briefly in the paper to establish a context that furthers your main argument.
SEEK ANSWERS TO THE QUESTION THAT YOU HAVE POSED ABOUT THE MEANING OF THE NOVELLA BY DOING AN ANALYSIS OF EVIDENCE (that is, PASSAGES CULLED FROM THE HEROIC SLAVE THAT ADDRESS YOUR QUESTION)
At this point, it is worthwile to think about how well (or poorly) the passages from The Heroic Slave that you have identified (as potentially useful for writing Essay 2) appear to “fit” the question that you want to ask about the novella.
Do passages in the novella that you have marked, thought about, and begun to analyze, address and engage the question that you want to write about? Or, do they address other questions? What are those questions?
To answer these queries confidently, it usually is necessary to reread the passages that you marked in the novella, perhaps take new notes about them, and/or review your previous notes and posts about them.
If the evidence that you have identified does not help you answer the question that you have asked, then there is a mismatch between your “evidence” and the question you are asking. This is not that unusual. If this happens, I recommend that you bring your evidence and your question into a better alignment before you begin to write the first draft. (If you do not take this step beforehand, the organization of your rough draft is likely to be very loose and to require significantly more work from you later on.)
Bringing your evidence and the question that you ask into alignment requires making some choices.To do it, you will need to choose either to
(1) modify or change the question that you ask about the novella;
(2) come up with a different, no less persuasive, way of looking at the existing evidence that you have; or
(3) find some new pieces of evidence (passages from the novella) that do address your question; or
(4) do some combination of any of the above.
Choosing option 1 A good way to to come up with a new question about the novella is to reread several passages from the novella that you are most interested in and, then, try to generate and formulate a compelling question
TO SUM UP
A good way to start developing the idea for your essay is to return to, carefully reread, and then analyze the evidence, or passages in the novella that you have identified, which address that idea. To find this evidence, look to your notes and previous posts.
Remember: the essay that you write is an argument. It will develop and support the idea that you propose (in your thesis) about how to interpretThe Heroic Slave.
Somewhere in the essay, you will refer, relatively briefly, to information from one historical document or from the excerpt by Gates, or the one by Delbanco, in order to offer a wider perspective (or context) for the main argument. That reference may be brief since it is not the length of the reference that counts, but the quality of the support that the reference provides to the argument.
The heart of the argument occurs in the body of the essay. As you will recall, body paragraphs are the paragraphs that come second, third, fourth, etc., in the essay. These paragraphs follow the first paragraph, that also is known as the introductory paragraph, and they come before the last paragraph or conclusion.
The body paragraphs are the place for you to present the evidence that you identify in passages from the novella that is important to the argument that you are making in the paper. This is where your close reading of The Heroic Slave occurs. Crucially, body paragraphs also contain your analysis of the evidence that you present from the novella. One of the body paragraphs may contain your reference to a historical document or other secondary source. But, that also might happen in the introductory paragraph. Most importantly, in the body paragraphs, your analysis explains the significance that the evidence being presented from the novella has for your thesis and tells us how that evidence advances the argument of the essay. As an illustration of a body paragraph that does these things, consider this
EXAMPLE OF A WELL CONSTRUCTED ANALYTICAL (BODY) PARAGRAPH.docx
10级美女:
Note, especially, the clearly stated, controlling idea of the paragraph in sentence one, the substantive examples, given as evidence in support of that idea, that follow, the presentation and integration of quotes and paraphrased passages from The Heroic Slave that support the main point of the paragraph, the analysis of these quotes and paraphrases, and the quoting from the secondary source (Delbanco, in this case) with an explanation of the meaning that the secondary source has for the main argument of the paper.
If now, or later, you are looking for a more rigorous treatment of how an “analytical” body paragraph is constructed, see pp. 9-12; 14; and starting with the section called “Analysis”, read pp. 15-16 from ch. 2 on “Analyical Paragraphs” in The Wiley Guide to Writing Essays about Literature which is accessable online
via the QC library site at
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qc-ebooks/reader.action?docID=1337649&ppg=23
