Sample Assignment 1

Final Essay Assignment
220 Fall 2000, Evans
Due in my mailbox, Murray Hall, no later than 9 AM, Dec. 21

Length: As short as possible. This will probably take at least 5 pages, but if you tighten it down to 3 or 4 great pages, all the better.

"So what" is your problem?

Light in August is maybe the second "hardest" book we've read this semester (maybe even the first hardest). It is filled with passages that insist upon active interpretation, as in the scene we looked at last week where Joe Christmas gets out of bed both "years" later and "an hour later" (155). Take a moment in the text that you found puzzling, personally, and use it as the focus of an argument about what Faulkner is (or is not) up to with his writing. What does the "hard" writing get Faulkner in the particular passage you have chosen - get him stylistically, thematically, psychologically, politically, etc…?

This assignment requires you to do two things which should, by now, be somewhat familiar: you are to explicate a particular passage with reference to other stylistic moments in the text; and you are to set up that explication in such a way as to open up some "bigger" questions about the text - questions of the "so what" variety. In other words, you "produce a reading" and, at the same time, ruminate about "what you get when you read like you do."