English 563 Eighteenth-Century British Novel Fall 2006
Dr. Morillo

First Paper: Due Friday, Sept. 22


This paper will be on your choice of one of the first three novels, Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, or Roxana.  Choose a brief passage or scene (no longer than several paragraphs) that best captures any critical problem or issue you consider especially relevant to interpreting the whole novel in which the passage appears.

Consider the language of your chosen passage in as much detail as possible, and then write a brief essay explaining what problem or issue is at stake, and how the particular details of language in the passage work to make the passage significant and noteworthy. This will help you to learn to read prose fiction with the close-reading care (and slow pace) sometimes relegated to studies of lyric poetry. Pay particular attention to the sentence-level detail of image, tone, syntax, diction etc.

The assignment helps you practice your skills in close-reading, but you may bring in other opinion as long as you footnote any sources and explicate the passage sufficiently in your own terms, keeping other opinions subordinate to your own.  You do not, however, have to consult any text beyond your chosen novel. Even though close-reading skills grew out of the New Criticism, you are not obliged to find their ideals of harmony or unity in your reading. You may wish to work out a passage that instead reveals some interesting disruption of structure, complication of apparent theme or moral, or contradiction (logical, ideological, etc.) between apparent authorial intent and textual meaning as you understand it.

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