From the Beginning to the End: What I Learned in Literature Classes
James Banks
I never like
looking over what I have written, but it is an important task.
The papers in this portfolio were all improved because I disfigured the
first drafts with a red pen. Three
of these essays represent my work at their best, one represents my writing at
its worst, and I included the third essay (in chronological order) because of
what it might have been, rather than for what it is.
But this essay that I am writing now, this introduction, would be much
worse if I had not written any of the five analyses included here.
I begin my
portfolio with a paper that I wrote in English 208 during my freshman year.
The paper that I included has significance for me not because I like it,
but rather because I believe that it is the worst longer assignments I wrote for
an English class. By the time I finished
this paper—on Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”—I still could not figure
out what I meant to say.
Uncertainty is not a problem if unity emerges during the writing
process—incidentally, I do not usually know exactly what I am going to argue in
a critical essay until I put my ideas down on paper—but, for this essay, I not
only did not know what I wanted to argue, I also had no clear idea of how I
wanted to start analyzing my subject.
I began with a thesis statement: “In [the] universe [of
The Things They Carried], human
beings exist . . . but humanity is gone” (1) and I devoted the first few pages
to proving this point. For example,
I wrote of how the men in the story are more defined by their material
possessions than by anything that they say or do (3), but I began contemplating
how the dehumanization of the story coalesces with its genre (“the fact that
O’Brien withholds judgment and excludes historical context is almost a judgment
in itself” [4]). During this
process, I lost track of my original thesis and instead began to reflect upon
Tim O’Brien’s theory of didactic fiction.
By the time I reached the end of this paper, I concluded that in fiction
objectivity and subjectivity is the same thing, because subjectivity is,
inevitably, projected onto the work by the audience (6).
Reading through the paper again, I noticed an embarrassingly prevalent
correction I added to the last paragraph during the editing process.
While editing, I realized that I ended in a vastly different place than I
had suggested I was going in my introduction.
To correct this error, I acknowledged that “‘The Things They Carried’
does have a theme . . . the inherent dehumanization in the story’s setting” (6),
but I failed to tie it to my theories of postmodern interpretation in any
significant way. Perhaps I could
have done worse, but I cannot remember any essays during my college career which
were so clumsy.
The second essay I have included in this collection, “Rationality Lost:
The Sophoclean View of Human Intelligence,” is my favorite among the essays that
I wrote for 100-200 level English courses, even though my instructor for the
class preferred a paper that I wrote on Ibsen’s
A Doll House later in the semester.
I like this essay because, from the first paragraph, I found a theme
(“the play does not attack reason or intelligence, it merely demonstrates that
[these are] incapable of explaining all of the mysteries of existence and
reality” [1]), and I stayed with it until the end of the paper.
The rest of the essay is devoted to proving this point by investigating
the relationship between the characters’ knowledge and their actions.
The thesis that I was trying to communicate was that, in the universe that Sophocles depicts, fate and free will are far from irreconcilable; instead, Sophocles meant to imply that they are the same thing. Viewers and readers of the play make the same mistake as Oedipus when they think of the oracle as being a removed entity instead of an actor within the narrative. Skimming through it again, I realize that there are many stylistic errors and constructions which I regret, and, even though no critic whom I have read has argued precisely the same points that I do in this essay, my reading of Oedipus the King has probably already been expressed by others in better prose. Nevertheless, I still hold the same opinion of Oedipus the King that is expressed in this essay and hope one day to study the same theme in greater depth.
My third essay in this portfolio, “Shylock the Puritan: Allegory, The Merchant of Venice and Anti-Calvinist Sentiment,” was written for a class that Rick Fehrenbacher taught on Shakespeare. Again, I do not believe that it is my finest prose, and the final product lived up to neither Professor Fehrenbacher’s expectations nor my own. But I have included this essay because of the idea I had which turned into it, rather than the pages with which I was disappointed. As the title suggests, I wanted to establish that the ethnic and political readings of the play—in particular those which tried to attack it for or defend it against charges of anti-Semitism—undermine proper interpretation, and I also sought to provide a new lens through which it could be interpreted.
The idea for this paper came to me after I read the play and a number of
supplementary readings. I noticed
that almost all of the supplementary readings discussed religious conflict, but
the institutes of religion are hardly mentioned by any of Shakespeare’s
characters. I was also perplexed by
the question of why Shakespeare would write a play that so many readers
interpreted as anti-Semitic when the playwright probably knew never met a Jew
during his career. The conclusion I
came to was meant to represent the bourgeoisie Puritan society which was
prevalent in
The last two essays in this portfolio are the most recent and, even though their subjects are far removed from one another, they were written during their original drafts were written during the same weekend; therefore, they should be discussed together. The first paper, “A Controversy of Morals: An Ethical Debate from ‘the Physician’s Tale’ through ‘the Shipman’s Tale’,” has a broader thesis than any other paper in this portfolio (“. . . the reader finds that [‘The Physician’s Tale,’ ‘The Pardoner’s Tale,’ and ‘the Shipman’s Tale’] are linked by morality, particularly as this abstraction relates to . . . lust and avarice” [1]), but the paper is stronger than others in this collection because I was amused by the material, particularly the utter absurdity of “the Physician’s Tale”. Furthermore, I remained closer to the text in this project than I did in a paper like “‘The Things They Carried’: Message vs. Moralism.” This gave me a stronger sense of security, since I felt that I was actually performing exegesis with the text, rather than reading my own meaning into it. I was glad when Professor Fehrenbacher said that my paper was well-reasoned and insightful, even though he did not know of any other critics who had made the same arguments.
“The Departed Glory: ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and the End of Aristocracy” is the last essay in this compendium. For this essay, I used an old formula: I tried to think of the most conventional reading of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and then argued against it. (This formula is not particularly original but which has served me well.) Because “the Legend” is so alive in the American imagination and, in so many ways, distinctly American, I argued that it is actually an anti-American satire. I doubt that many people would be convinced by my claim that Brom Bones is actually the hero of the tale (4) or that ‘the Legend’ is “a highly anti-egalitarian work” (9), but stylistically this is one of my better essays. The quote at the beginning, which was suggested by my father, sets the tone for the essay, even though the implications of it are never directly discussed. I believe that this is the essay’s best quality: while it interprets the ambiguities of “the Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the analysis still remains vague enough so that the reader has to work to interpret it.
The one consistency in these essays is that I learned more from writing them than I believe anyone could from reading them. As for the first paper, it is one of the worst things that I have ever written, but I do not regret writing it; otherwise, I may have fallen into the same error elsewhere. The paper that I wrote on Oedipus the King is probably not revelatory enough to edit and publish, but eventually I hope to teach this play—which I believe to be the best-structured play in Western literature—and, if I ever get the opportunity to do so, I may review what I wrote here to put together discussion notes. I still like the central idea of my essay on The Merchant of Venice, even if the finished product was not what I had hoped for; I have considered using the idea as a point of departure for a master’s dissertation (if I ever write one), though I hope to be a Spenserian rather than a Shakespearian. Of the last two essays in this collection—the two that I would preserve if I had to make that decision—I believe that the paper on Chaucer is valuable to me because I branched out to use more research methods. (I used Project Muse for the first time to find sources on “the Pardoner’s Tale.”) In doing so, I was able to enter the critical conversation of Chaucer in a more intimate way than I had done with previous poets. The paper on “the Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is still valuable to me because it was in this paper that I learned the importance of ambiguity in criticism as well as literature. Having reviewed these papers and parsed their significance, I now primarily wonder if I will use what I learned from the writing processes which produced these for my final project on John Milton. I certainly hope so.