Literary Essays
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Literary Essays...

  • Argue a point

    • The key thing here is to argue a point.  You must have some notion which you want to get across to the reader within your essay, something which focuses your discussion and drives your analysis itself.  In a literary essay, this "something" is going to be a THESIS.
      • A thesis is your expression of the point you'd like to concentrate upon, and the idea you'd like to explore, within your essay.  An idea must be a specific claim -- not "craziness" but "craziness reveals rational ideas."  You'll note that in that statement an idea comes out in the form of a general sentence, something true about the literary work which you want to discuss in your piece.
         

  • Use Evidence

    • What this means is that you must use quotations in order to support your thesis.  I realize that the first essay gives you the quotation to examine, so I've sort of taken the first step for you.  However, in order to show me what you understand about that quotation, you have to tease out every significant element of it and talk about it.
      • This takes three steps.  First, read it a lot.  Then break it down.  Most speeches/quotations will have movements to them:  first it talks about this, then this, then this.  Once you figure out where the speeches break down, then you have given yourself the units which you can discuss together.  For instance, if you're looking at the first passage II.iv.305-328, then you're likely to make the first four lines (up to "Thou art a lady") go together as one opening idea.  Well, pull those four lines into a paragraph of their own, introduce them with a sentence that sets up something specific you want to highlight about them (such as "At the start, King Lear connects "need" to both people and "nature" itself.") and then take each sentence in turn to see what it might show you.  Here, I'd talk about how "reason not the need" just really means "Stop yelling about what I need" and then show how the first two images give answer to that notion of what a man "needs."  (Even beggars who have nothing don't really "need" even that they have; if we don't give ourselves more than nature calls for --like shelter and basic clothes -- then we're no better than animals.)  This second step is the one that's going to take the most time and effort, because you want to read the groups of lines you set up and then connect one set to the next and the next via the ideas they lay out.
      • Finally, you want to show how the ideas in these two passages (you'll be writing on only one of them, though, remember) relates to the overall events and themes of the play.  You may do this either by connecting them at the end or connecting them throughout as the passage reveals them.  Only by reading closely at the text, then connecting outward to that overarching idea about King Lear which is your thesis will you succeed in this writing task.
         

  • Gets the Writing Right

    • All of you will have a copy of the Bedford Handbook from Introduction to Liberal Arts.  Use it to make sure that your sentences are sentences -- no fragments and run-ons (section 19 and 20 of the Handbook: look them up).  Make sure that your pronouns refer to something specific.  And, most importantly, make sure that your discussion of the text points to the specific moments of the text which you're addressing.  (Thus not "poor people have more than they need" but "When Lear says that 'basest beggars/Are in the poorest things superfluous' what he really means is that even the lowest people there are have something of their own, something that they don't need.  This is important because if we don't "allow nature more than nature needs" we're going  to be like animals and our lives will be just as "cheap" as theirs.")  The idea here is to be specific, specific, specific, specific.  Got the point?