Ode on a Grecian URL

Essay grades on the final were slightly stronger than those on the midterm -- averaging 29.2/35 on the final compared to 24.5/30 on the midterm -- which suggests that your improvement in textual analysis exceeds my expectations. Rather than post strong examples of essays written in answer to these topics, I'll offer some general remarks about success and failure on these prompts.

1. Masculinity. (16 answers; average score: 30.0/35.) Although I was fairly bored with hearing echoed back to me the sorts of answers we began developing in discussion last week, for many of you our conversation about this prompt served as a kind of foundation for much more interesting observations. One particularly strong essay suggested that the sorts of domination we see play out inside the narratives of these texts is replicated by the texts themselves -- for example, Jane Austen's use of epigrams suggests a sort of verbal or textual violence at the heart of masculine authority.
   
2. Narrative gaps. (18; 27.4/35.) These answers were on average weaker than answers to other prompts because so many writers neglected the prompt's italicized injunction to "examine the thematic importance of narrative gaps." So many blue book pages were dedicated to discussions of how gaps keep the reader coming back for more that I was inclined to wonder whether there was some gap in the middle of the essay question to account for this astonishing commonality. This is not to suggest that all the answers to this prompt missed the point -- one particularly strong response began with the idea that in some texts these narrative gaps serve two thematic purposes: to excise conventional events (engagement, marriage, rape, murder) from readers' considerations of unconventional characters, and to suggest the comparative unimportance of events when we could instead look at the effect of events on characters.
   
3. Liminality. (14; 29.8/35.) This was my favorite prompt, and it inspired some of the most interesting essays. One favorite of mine used houses as exemplars of liminality -- Longbourn, for example, was in a state of suspens as it would not remain in the Bennet family; logically, then, this liminal space is inhabited by women who are themselves between houses. Satis House -- itself suspended between life and death -- functions similarly as a liminal space that transforms Pip from a comparatively happy future blacksmith to a miserable wannabe-gentleman, and which later transforms him from an emotionally satisfied lover of the inaccessible Estella into an emotionally satisfied friend to the same.
   
4. Reading reading. (14; 29.5/35.) We addressed this topic so frequently in class that answers were likelier to be boring than bad. One of the more interesting treatments of this question paralleled Franklin Blake's self-discovery in The Moonstone to Elizabeth Bennet's self-discovery in Pride and Prejudice -- different kinds of rereadings, but with several procedural similarities that suggest, the author suggests, the larger emotional and intellectual relevance of texts as portals of self-discovery.

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