ENG106: Composition II
WRITING ASSIGNMENT TWO:
This essay should build on our online discussions and work produced in the summaries that you have written individually or in groups. While you should always employ a scholar’s habits of mind and good writing practices for your essays, the writing objectives specific to this assignment are:
1. To reading and analyzing one text through another and
2. Focusing — using ideas in one text as a “lens” for the other. This is
the beginning of what we might call “putting the texts in conversation
with each other.” While the authors in question are not addressing
each other, WE as scholars attempt to make them speak to each other.
This process involves your reaching some understanding of what is
implicit and explicit in the text.
Here is what you will do:
Write at least a three-page essay using some of the ideas from either Orientalism or Not You/Like You as a “lens” for one of the texts we have read. You can choose a passage from any of the poems, the novel, or even the excerpt from A Passage to India. You will probably not want to include EVERYTHING each author says, but you may give a sense of the scope of the texts you are using. Do not be afraid to acknowledge what remains bewildering to you, despite your own close reading. Does it seem to you that there are facets of our values, our understandings of the world in which we live, and our human response to it, which these works leave out in their depiction or accounting? How do the articles illuminate your understanding of the text? How do they make you see it differently? What kind of “lens” is the article providing for you in order to look at the poem? Pay close attention to the organization of your essay — there might be several different tasks that require different sections. One of these tasks might be a short, focused summary of one or both of the texts.
My Instructions: Please use some of the ideas from “Not You/Like You” by Trinh T. Minh-ha as a lens for “The Schooner Flight” poem by Dereck Walcott. Thank you.
