Ode on a Grecian URL

Meeting with students in conferences this past week, I have been overjoyed to find that nearly all of you are struggling actively to explain why your essays are important to our understanding of these texts. While the struggle might not feel particularly pleasant right now, trust me when I say that it will help you craft a more pleasant paper for me to read and grade.

If you are still struggling and uncertain how to explain the importance of your essay, here are a few tricks that usually work for me:

• Connect your reading to one of Prof. Ortiz-Robles's comments. Look back through your lecture notes. What has Prof. Ortiz-Robles said are the main problems of the novel you are writing about? What has he said are some of the main problems or styles of the nineteenth-century novel as a whole? How does your essay connect to the ideas he has raised in lecture? (You might, for example, connect your essay to his discussion of spectacle and surveilance in today's lecture.)
• Connect your reading to the introduction, epiphany, or conclusion of the novel. Look closely at the critical moments of these novels -- their first and last chapters and those chapters that discuss massive changes in their main characters -- and connect your reading with the thematic or moral revelations of these critical moments.
• Assume that your reading reveals something about the society in which it was written. Extrapolate from the narrow confines of the text to the broader context of the society in which it participates. How does Austen's discussion of the marriages of the Bennet girls suggest changes in the way marriage itself should operate in society? What does Pip's search for identity in an industrial world say about how our identities are changing as our nations change?
• Argue that your theme reveals the main problem of the novel. Take a risk: how does your reading exactly express the central problem of the text? Assume that the passage you are closely reading is in fact the central passage of the entire novel: what is the author saying in this passage about the meaning of his or her larger work?

If you are working on Great Expectations and don't think you will be able to connect your analysis to the text's central problem or question until you have finished the text, I am happy to entertain requests for short extensions.