<p> C19 British Novel // Essay 2</p><p>Due Thursday, December 1, at the beginning of class, in hard copy</p><p>From the syllabus:</p><p>4-5 pages, normal-looking font. Conventional essays for an English class, but better. In other words: these are sharp, sustained, and formal engagements with one or more texts covered in class. I will hand out prompts for these papers but you are free, always, to break from my strictures and compose your own questions and topics and then formulate clear hypotheses about them. These analytical efforts should be grounded in close and sustained acts of reading. You may be required to submit the passages you intend to focus on, up to one week in advance of the due date.</p><p>Further directions: </p><p>Do not begin thinking about this paper the night before it’s due. Please construct a well- organized, revised, proofread essay of no fewer than four full pages on one of the following topics. You may also create your own topic, or (perhaps best of all) take a swerve on one of the topics I’ve provided, turning it toward your own intellectual purpose. Remember that a successful essay will make a point or interlocked series of points (i.e. an argument), then use evidence (close, local readings of specific moments in the text, logical transitions, and sound analysis) to argue in support of those points. </p><p>Note: If your paper does not have an argument, it will be returned ungraded; if your paper does not deal actively with specifics of the text itself, it will be returned ungraded. </p><p>Tips on writing: </p><p>Eliminate all extraneous words. Argue fearlessly. Support creatively. Edit mercilessly. Shine your prose to a glistening polish. The soul of writing is in active verbs. Mark Twain: “If you catch an adverb, kill it.”</p><p>ADDITIONAL TIP: READ CLOSELY Show how your points work at the level of the individual sentence and/or paragraph: get your hands dirty with the actual text. Grammar, word choice, metaphors and images – these are how literary critics make their money. Analyze them! Possible topics: Please note that these are provocations for essays; you should not answer every sub- question, but instead use these topics as a jumping off point as you create your own (creative, argumentative, well-supported) analytical attack. Remember to be specific about everything. Please see me if you have any questions at all – I’m here to help. Any text we’ve read to this point in the term is available for analysis. </p><p>1. Throughout our work this term we’ve focused on how novels – through point of view, characterization, and other means—depict characters who do or don’t exhibit sympathetic identifications with other, usually poorer or more miserable people. But we’ve also examined how novels themselves direct the sympathies of readers. Drawing on Adam Smith’s excerpt that we read in class, build an essay that examines the role of sympathy in The Lifted Veil or Tess. If Gaskell imagined sympathetic identification across class lines as the answer to her social problem, how do these novels turn sympathetic identification back into a problem? In what ways, in other words, does Eliot (or Hardy) expose the ethical and conceptual difficulties of sympathy as a way of relating to others? Please note that sympathy must be defined through Smith, and specifically. 2. The plot of the bildungsroman – think of Jane Eyre—presumes that a character will develop into something like a self-actualized free-agent: that they will become a subject, rather than an object, of their own story. In what ways does Tess’s story challenge this plot of bourgeois individualism? This is a question about Tess’ agency, or lack of it, or perhaps the way those categories get intertwined in Hardy’s novel. 3. A sharper way of asking the above: who is to blame for Tess’s fate? Or is “blame” inadequate for thinking through this problem? 4. In the Lifted Veil as in Tess, scientific knowledge seems to play an important role in the proceedings. Examine the role of knowledge, particularly the scientific kind, as it relates to other forms of knowing in either of those books. 5. The natural world figures prominently in Hardy’s fiction, and sometimes seems fertile and life-affirming while at other times pitiless and indifferent to human suffering. Write an essay on the status of “nature” in Tess. Take this any way you want, but some angles might include: can Tess escape ‘nature’? Is she part of nature, or outside of it – or, somehow, both? A related question might be: “why does Tess keep on living”? 6. When Hardy collected all his novels late in his career he placed Tess with “Novels of Character and Environment.” Write an essay examining how those categories—character and environment—intertwine in Hardy’s novel. Does character change from place to place in the novel? If so, how – and so what? 7. As we saw w/ North and South, Much Victorian discourse about modernization is concerned with the boundary that separates human life from life forms that are allegedly nonhuman, subhuman, or animal. Write an essay evaluating the rhetorical and political – that is, ideological-- distinction between “humans” and “nonhumans” in either Tess or The Lifted Veil: what qualities seem to separate the one from the other? (And for advanced thinkers: how do those separations break down or become complicated?) 8. Using close rhetorical analysis, make an argument that compares the progress of Tess’s biographical plot to the one articulated in Jane Eyre. Is Tess a novel of development? Does progress happen in Tess? If not what happens instead, and if so, towards what? Note that this is not really a yes or no question. 9. We’ve paid much attention to servants in our course so far, seeing labor as central to C19 class structure and tracing across multiple novels how class structure is both given form and rendered problematic in these novels. Write an essay that develops a thesis about Tess’s status in the class structure of her moment. 10. Is Tess’s future determined by her past? Elaborate the consequences of this question. 11. Is Tess’s future determined by her body? Elaborate the consequences of this question. 12. Are 9 and 10 both true, and related? Elaborate the consequences of this question. 13. The subtitle of Tess is “A Pure Woman.” Pure can mean both “faultless” and “thorough, through and through, exemplary.” Write an essay examining the proposal that Tess is somehow exemplary of womanhood. This is a way of asking you to elaborate, in sharp detail and through close reading and analysis of narrative structure, whether Tess is a pro- or anti-woman novel. 14. PLEASE DEVISE ALTERNATE TOPICS IF YOU WISH. Really. Any topic is possible here. Let us know how we can help. </p>