Close Analysis of a Key Passage

When working with a large text like a novel or a movie, it’s always a good idea to think carefully about which scenes are most important for defining the theme you’re interested in. The opening scene is often a good bet for focusing at least part of your analysis. Or, as in the present case, a later scene or chapter may jump up and down saying “Pay Attention!”

As an example, I’d like you to read Chapter Five of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a famous satirical novel first published in 1961.

Before reading, take a moment to write down expectations: what do you expect to find in a novel about the experience of American soldiers during World War II? Will it be funny? Somber? Heroic?

After reading, answer the following:

1. What does Heller do to undercut your expectations? Point to one or two particular events, images or phrases.
2. If you could only choose two passages from this chapter to quote and analyze, which would you choose? Why? Retype the passage and then in your own words explain their significance.
3. If you were forced to choose just ONE sentence that typifies Heller’s style of writing, which would you choose? Why? Retype the sentence and then in your own words characterize Heller’s method as an author.

Slices of History

List two or three distinct aspects of the history or culture of Cold War America which your central text references. Check out the topics covered for Unit One: Second-Wave Feminism, Imagining Nuclear War, etc. But you may find you need to tweak an existing topic to better suit your central text—or you may need to invent a new one out of whole cloth: as for example someone writing on Shane might want to look into gun ownership and gun control.

For each topic or “slice” of history that you identify as potentially of interest, you should specify where and how your central text interacts with it: what page, what character(s), what attitude the novel/film expresses about that aspect of life in the 1960s. You should also specify how your slice might need to be tweaked to serve the needs of your central text, and if you’re inventing a new slice, give some thought to naming it, and to how you might go about researching it. (I will, as promised, help you get started.)

For the next assignment, you will narrow your choice to one particular slice of Cold War culture and research that topic.

Invoking the Historical Context

Read Louis Menand, “Cat People: What Dr. Seuss Really Taught Us,” an essay published some years ago in The New Yorker. Mark passages where Menand grounds his analysis of Seuss in the historical context. What does Menand do to set this past era before his reader?

Looking at Children’s Lit

The late 50s and early 60s saw a revolution in the style of books produced for children, spearheaded by Theodor Geisel, a.k.a Dr. Seuss. While Seuss began publishing as early as 1937 And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street, many of his most characteristic publications date from the late 1950s and the founding of Beginner’s Books.

Download and read

• Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (1957)
• Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (1958)
• Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (1963)

Download, print and fill out Cat in the Hat notepad

Midpoint Transition

One crucial move in your essays will be the transition from the first body of evidence to the second. For this isn’t simply a matter of shifting focus from one set of primary sources to another. You need to gather up the threads of your initial analysis to form a midpoint understanding, then introduce the second half of your essay as an effort to complicate that understanding.

As an example of what I’m looking for, look at what Jennifer Frost does on p 118 of her essay on movie star suicide. Make a quick list of 3 or 4 specific things she does to make this transition clear and distinct, to shift her essay’s focus, and to make sure her readers know what’s been learned up to now and what new claim will be argued in upcoming pages. For each thing you list, identify its function.

Now create a transition of your own for the essay you’re writing. In the comment section below, paste the ¶ that leads into the transition along with the ¶ that makes the transition.

Presenting Evidence in a Deepening Sequence

This assignment asks you to draft two paragraphs that might appear early in the body of the upcoming essay.

The first ¶ should be a 3-4 source mashup, like we did in HW 6.1: F5 | F6 | F7.

1. Start with the collection of sources that make up your body of evidence. What pattern do you see? Write a topic sentence that names that pattern, using language like “most” or “many” or “8 of 10 ads” to convey a sense of its prevalence.
2. Follow up with sentences presenting 3-4 samples in quick succession, one sentence each. Aim to name each piece of evidence (“In a New York Times article dated 10/16/63″ or “In a 1967 ad”) to give some sense of the granularity of your evidence—but leave most bibliographic details to the footnote. Use the rest of each sentence to provide a quick description that shows how this piece of evidence fits the pattern. For example, if I was interested in how ads present women in supporting roles: “A 1965 Norelco ad shows not just a clean-shaven husband, but his admiring wife.”
3. End the ¶ with a conclusion that leaves a blank, “_______,” to be filled in once you’ve written your second ¶.

The second ¶ should do one of two things:

• Zoom in to examine one particular source from your body of evidence, in an effort to explain the pattern identified in ¶1;
• Identify a contrary trend in the same set of sources, complicating our understanding of the pattern identified in ¶1.

In either case, you’ll note how deepening understanding comes from giving a second look to the same piece or pieces of evidence.

Once you know where you plan to take analysis in ¶2, you can go back and fill in the blank you left in the conclusion of ¶1. Sum up what ¶1 argued while at the same time setting up the new insight offered in ¶2. Avoid naming the new insight—naming the new insight is the job of ¶2’s topic sentence. It’s like a comedy routine: the concluding sentence plays the role of straight man, while the topic sentence of the following ¶ gets to voice the punchline.

Paste your 2-¶ sequence into the comment below. Be sure to give two ¶ breaks between paragraphs, so as to help the website format your HW properly.

“They call me Mister Tibbs”

For Class watch the movie In the Heat of the Night. It’s available on Amazon Instant Video and on iTunes for $3.

Take notes as follows:

Make a digest of key characters, memorable lines and focal scenes from your central text.

Then, in a separate section, discuss a key theme of the work, something which might serve as a starting point for answering the question, “What is this movie about?”

In class How to take notes on a movie.

Also, preliminary analysis of how our understanding of this movie changes when we consider it in light of 1960’s American culture and society.

Presenting Evidence

Back in HW 6.1, I urged you to organize ¶s around ideas, not around bits of evidence. Here’s a list of possibilities, by no means exhaustive:

• Statistics (comparing one year to another, or noting the fraction of articles on X that also mention Y)
• A pattern identified in X articles, with specific instances discussed in the body of the ¶
• An emotional tendency in a group of related articles
• An odd exception: one article discussed in depth for a full ¶

Rather than mechanically creating one ¶ for each source in your collection, much better to fashion ¶s in response to the qualities you perceive in your sources.

To get you thinking about this in greater depth, here’s here’s an article I wrote last summer on the first fifteen years of Marvel’s character, Iron Man. It’s a long essay, so you needn’t read past page 20 (¶24) in preparation for class.

Post as a response below:
List three ¶s (identified by the # in the left margin) where you find me using primary sources. For each one:

• quote the ¶’s first sentence,
• note the kind of source being presented
• describe how sources are presented (as statistics, as examples in quick succession, as examples in depth, etc.)

In regard to that last bullet, aim for variety; in your three examples, see if you can identify three distinct ways of presenting evidence.

Making Evidence Count

In past years, many drafts for this first essay had significant problems with evidence. Some essays didn’t have evidence, others had it but lacked a preliminary understanding based on a secondary source authority. Others had evidence and a preliminary understanding, but hadn’t worked out how their evidence impacted their preliminary understanding.

For class please download and fill out this worksheet on evidence. The sheet is deceptively easy: give thought to how to briefly characterize (1) each of your bodies of evidence, (2) the particular details you plan to focus on in discussing each one, and most especially (3) why those details complicate or enrich our understanding of the topic.

Print out and fill in OR simply post the key info in a comment below.

Content moved due to snow day

Visions of Futures Past

Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” and a Star Trek episode, “The Omega Glory” (Amazon Instant | Netflix).

After reading, as HW and as preparation for our in-class discussion, fill out this handy notepad

Inventive use of a Body of Evidence

Reading HW Download this article by scholar Jennifer Frost on “Movie Star Suicide.” Read the first and last page in detail, and skim through the rest.

Frost’s article will serve as our second sample of the sort of scholarship I’m looking for in the upcoming essay, informed by prior scholarship but drawing mainly on primary sources. So, as with the chapter we read last week from Brett Harvey’s book, I want you to focus on the body of evidence that Frost assembled in order to write this article. After reading, answer the following in writing, and post here on the website:

1. What serves as Frost’s “Body of Evidence”?
2. What research question does Frost’s essay aim to answer?