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critical response topics—no longer valid for submission:
1.1
Due
Saturday, January 24th: choose one, do not address both:
a) Discuss the most striking formal, technical features that "date" Moll Flanders. That is, focusing on the first half of the novel, and aside from matters of content and fundamental differences in language between 18th-century English and our American English today, how is Moll Flanders different from most contemporary fiction? Include at least three quotations to illustrate your observations.
b) Analyze Defoe's portrayal of a convincingly credible world peopled by believable characters in the first half of the book. Include at least three quotations to illustrate your claims.
1.2
Due Saturday, January 24th: address one, not both:
a) Some fiction is concerned primarily with external description of characters, places, events, etc. (action and adventure novels, for instance); at the other extreme is fiction dealing more exclusively with the internal psychology of the main character(s). Is Moll Flanders more internal or external in orientation? Quote three or more passages from the book's second half to support your claims.
b) Consider Moll's resolution at the end of the novel, that she and her husband will spend the rest of their lives in "Sincere Penitence, for the wicked Lives we have lived." Do you believe Moll's contrition is genuine? Why, or why not? Further, does Defoe seem ultimately more concerned with moral instruction truly, or with tantalizing sensationalism that may help book sales? Explain.
1.3
Due Saturday, January 31st: choose one, do not address both:
a) Which character or characters do you find most interesting in the opening 15-20 chapters of Pride and Prejudice? Do you care about Austen's character(s) more or less than you did Defoe's Moll Flanders? Why? How is Austen different from Defoe in presenting and developing characters? Explain, quoting from at least three separate chapters to illustrate your claims.
b) Focusing only on chapters 1-34, discuss Austen's satire or mockery of specific situations, characters, or character-types. Quote from at least three different chapters (with one between 20 and 30) to illustrate your claims.
1.4
Due
Friday, February 6th: Address one, not more than one:
a) Discuss two specific moments of "crisis" or "dramatic complication," points where we might say "the plot thickens dramatically," in Pride and Prejudice's chapters 35-61. Describe exactly what the complication is and explain how it pulls the reader deeper into the story. Include at least two quotations from each situation to illustrate your observations.
b) Discuss Elizabeth's and/or Darcy's maturation or growth following Darcy's rejected proposal of marriage. What important lessons does either or both learn, and how are these lessons likely to change their characters? You might also discuss growth or significant positive change in other characters as well. Include quotations from at least three different chapters to illustrate your claims.
c) Point out and discuss any two passages of a paragraph or more in length from the novel's last fifteen chapters that are particularly significant in illuminating or illustrating important aspects of the personality of any two of the following: any member(s) of the Bennet family (other than Lizzie), Lady Catherine, or any of the Bingley bunch. Explain what important insights into each character the different passages reveal.
1.5
Due
Saturday, February 14th: Open assignment, drawing from all three initial serial monthly parts. Comment upon one thing in Part 1, chapters 1-4 that strikes you as particularly interesting in any respect; then in a separate paragraph share any insight that occurs to you about something significant or intriguing or problematic in Part 1, chapters 5-7; lastly, make some observation in a third paragraph about one thing from Part 1, chapters 8-10 that your classmates might benefit from considering. Support all three points with quotations from the reading (at least one per paragraph).
1.6
Due
Sunday, February 22nd: Analyze Dickens's skillful plot management as the narrative continually shifts from one set of characters to another, regularly introducing new characters (or sets of them) well into the novel, even late in the narrative. Having such a large cast of significant characters as Dickens did in his 19-month serials is something of an unusual and difficult practice for most writers but an important skill for writers of the giant "triple-decker" of fiction's Victorian heyday. Our Mutual Friend's dramatis personnae numbers more than 40 "speaking characters"; in earlier novels Dickens sometimes included dozens more!.
So how does Dickens encourage and manage the reader's interest in these constantly shifting narrative strands? How does he build and maintain suspense when dropping one group of characters for several chapters and taking up another one, two, or even three different plot-lines before returning to the first one? For this topic you may consider the novel from its beginning in Part 1, Chapter 1 to the end of this unit's reading in Part 2, Chapter 12 (definitely addressing Part 2, Chapters 1-12). Quotations are encouraged, especially from chapter endings--but not required. You would do well to consider the "monthly part" divisions for the original serial publication here, as "the Inimitable" was particularly challenged in heightening suspense that would have to be sustained for a full month: https://chipspage.com/3700/OMFinOriginalParts.html.
1.7
Due
Monday, March 2nd: Identify two passages that demonstrate "authorial intrusion," where the authorial persona who narrates the novel (aka, the narrator) breaks that "fourth wall" by self-consciously addressing his readers in overt or implicit acknowledgment that he, the narrator, is telling us, the audience, a story. Focus on one passage in the first 5-6 chapters of Part 3, and the other from chapters 11-15 of Part 3. Explain the potential rhetorical (persuasive) purposes Dickens may be advancing through these obvious intrusions of the author's "own voice" in the novel--a tactic generally avoided in typical novels of today. Obviously, quotations for both examples are essential.
Sometimes the intrusions can be as direct as "Dear Reader, now we must leave Lady Loveless in peril as the gnomes surround her in triumph, and return to the adventures of Sir Sizemuch, where we left him in chapter 15, seconds away from being pelted with eggs by miscreant boys hiding in the hedge." Or it can be as subtle as "authorial presence" in the narrator's use of a modest simile, as in "Roderick pounced upon Sir Sizemuch as ferociously as a tigress defending her cub when he stumbled upon their lair." The more precise term for these moments that self-consciously reveal the narrator's presence as the person or voice telling the narrative's events is narrative discourse (as distinct from "story narration" (or the French Structuralists' "histoire narration"). See brief examples here: https://chipspage.com/4420/authorialintrusion.html.
