English 373

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Suggestions for Reading and Writing

The following questions offer you a number of ways to begin formulating your ideas for the papers you will write and the project you will complete by the end of this class. Don't look at these questions as outlines for the way you should structure your paper but rather as a means to deepen your examination of the works.

• How can you classify the novel -- is it primarily a character study, an evocation of a period or place, a fictionalization of a central idea or theme, or a combination of all of these?
  
• Is the novel's main emphasis sociological, philosophical, moral, political, or aesthetic?
  
• What are the novel's major and minor themes?
  
• Does the novel develop any important pattern of imagery and/or major symbols to contribute to the theme?
  
• What point of view is used? Why? Is the point of view maintained consistently through the novel?
  
• How is the novel divided or structured -- into conventional chapters or by another means?
  

• Does the author seem concerned about the valid depiction of the roles of women in society?
  
• Does she create or criticize stereotypical male or female characters?
  
• Is her novel prescriptive or propagandistic? How?
  
• Does she deal with traditional female subject matters (courtship, marriage, domestic life) or on unconventional female issues or even on the world at large?
  
• How would you describe her tone? Is it angry, complacent, satirical?
  
• How authentic (with regard to her historical context) is the writer's depiction of women's needs, values, roles, and activities?
  

• How does the film's narrative structure reflect or diverge from the novel's or the text's?
  
• What changes in fictional point of view are brought about by the substitution of the camera's eye for the narrator's voice?
  
• Do the novel and the film delineate the character similarly? Are some characters changed, eliminated, or added in the film version?
  
• Does the film achieve the same thematic dimensions as the novel? What themes seem central to each or both?
  
• How is setting, the evocation of time and place, handled in the film? Is the tone of the fictional work conveyed by the film?
  
• Are there any significant images or symbols in the film? Are they the same as the ones in the novel?
• Do the feminist concerns in the novel get equally stressed in the film?
  

I might suggest three handbooks for students out of practice at writing critical essays. They are Sylvan Barnet's A Short Guide to Writing About Literature, Edward Gordon's Writing about Imaginative Literature, and Edgar Roberts' Writing Themes about Literature. Your shorter papers are intended to be analyses of your own, and only if you are manic compulsive should you try to research to write them. If you do research, then you must document any material you use, quote, or paraphrase according to the most recent MLA style. If you are unfamiliar with these conventions, see me. Also remember that any plagiarism on your part will result in the consequences spelled out in your university catalogue.

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