This was the second literary analysis that I wrote for a course on Jane Austen, taught by Professor Jessica Richard, which I took in the Fall of 2020. For this assignment, I was asked to write five to eight pages on one of Austen’s works. I examined the forms of masculinity presented in the novel Sense and Sensibility and focused particularly on the connection between Colonel Brandon’s rising social class and his performance of gender. This paper demonstrates an engagement with the writing expectations of the English department as an academic disciplinary community. In this essay I demonstrated my acquisition of the specific lexis of the English department with jargon such as “liminal” and “sensibility,” which appear in the title as well as throughout the essay. I was also writing within the community of nineteenth century and Jane Austen scholars by heavily utilizing terms from the lexicon that we had built in class, through lectures and critical readings, to shape my essay. Referencing such terms as Austen’s habitual treatment of the “charming young man,” as well as my allusions to the social hierarchy of the Regency do somewhat limit the audience for this essay. I chose to incorporate ideas from notable scholars such as Claudia Johnson, with whom Dr. Richard studied, to enact discourse.
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This paper was written as the final assignment for a course titled Studies in Victorian Literature: Nineteenth Century Sensation Literature, taught by Professor Jenny Pyke, which I took in the spring of 2020. For this assignment, I was asked to write on one of the novels which I had read over the semester; engagement with an outside source was an option, but not a requirement. I chose to write on the Victorian anxiety over the maintenance of the patriarchal class hierarchy and the manifestation of this anxiety in Lady Audley’s Secret through the close bonds of the male characters and the threats posed to the those bonds by the women present in the novel. In writing this, I foregrounded close textual analysis and my own argumentation. Though I used ideas from a critical text, I placed the emphasis on interrogating and interpreting textual evidence. The arguments of this paper are rather discipline specific. I included references to Freudian concepts such as projection, which are of little use outside of literary analysis despite their origins in psychology—to my knowledge, modern psychologists place less importance on Freud than literature scholars do.
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I wrote this paper in the spring of 2019, for a course on American poetry written before the twentieth century taught by Professor Eric Wilson. I was assigned to write three to five pages of analysis on one of Emily Dickinson’s poems. I chose to write on the positioning of the speaker in the liminal space of the seaside, between mundanity and creative freedom, in poem 656. Performing sustained analyses of poems, which are typically much shorter and rather more abstract than novels, required a significant adjustment in my writing. For this class, I was not expected to consult secondary sources, but rather to pay close attention to the language of the texts. As a result, this paper required more formal analysis than the majority of my essays; I devoted paragraphs to metaphors and diacope rather than to the social forces at work in shaping scenes. The ambiguity of poetry, especially that written by Emily Dickinson, also required me to pay attention to how I presented my argument. In many literary analyses, it is acceptable to write as if your interpretation were the correct one, but in a Dickinson poem, there are so many possible meanings that to advocate one to the exclusion of all others would be ludicrous.
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