Purpose
This exercise increases your ability to perform the basic tasks of a persuasive essay: state a thesis, present an argument in support of it that includes evidence supporting your position and rebuttals to plausible counter-arguments, and build a conclusion from the argument and thesis.
Background
In class discussions we talked about racist elements in Poe’s depiction of Jupiter in “The Gold Bug,”, and we connected this depiction to 19th century minstrel caricatures and began to discuss how similar caricatures still shape perceptions of African Americans and Africans today. In this essay, you will explore and expand on your own reactions to these discussions.
Activity
Write an essay of 3 to 5 pages in which you present and argue for some moral or lesson that you, or modern readers generally, can draw from our discussions of race surrounding “The Gold Bug.” This is a very broad writing prompt, and the next paragraph hints at some of my reasons for assigning it, which might in turn give you some more focused ideas to write about. In any case, I do not want you to simply say what I and the readings told you in class; I want you to write about what those ideas have become for you as you have thought about them, compared them to your previous beliefs, and listened to classmates respond to them. The central idea behind the essay should be “what those ideas have become for you,” and almost any essay motivated by that idea will be fine as far as subject matter is concerned.
While we covered a lot of ground in discussing race and “The Gold Bug,” we could have gone much further and deeper. For example, we determined that Jupiter is a combination of certain minstrel caricatures, but we didn’t consider in detail how closely he follows those caricatures or whether he also incorporates others. We left the entire history and influence of minstrel caricatures in the 20th century to the readings. I claimed that The Book of Mormon musical includes caricatures of Africans that operate in many of the same ways the minstrel caricatures of African Americans did, without acknowledging that the caricatures themselves are different (or are they?), and without having a really thorough discussion of how being used in a satire affects the caricatures. We didn’t even mention connections between racial caricatures and other current events (police shootings, protests against racist historic monuments, etc.) or whether there are caricatures of other ethnic groups similar to those of African Americans. Nor did we talk at all about what future courses of action would be appropriate in light of the past. All of these, among many other things, are loose ends from the classes that I hope you will keep thinking about. Any of those thoughts could be a starting point for this essay.
You may find yourself thinking about lots of “loose ends,”, and in many ways that would be good. However, academic essays are far more compelling if they pursue one line of thought in depth than if they talk superficially about many. For this exercise, you should therefore pick one idea you want to pursue from our discussion and do so in detail.
This essay should mainly be based on your personal reactions to our readings and classes, not on extensive additional research. Nonetheless, you should justify those reactions with evidence from our readings and discussions — try to persuade your readers to share your reactions.
Write your essay with a word processor. I recommend Google Docs, because it makes your essay easy to share with other people and easy for them to comment on. But if you would prefer to use Word or some similar word processor on your own computer you may.
Follow-Up
We will do peer reviews of drafts of this essay in class on September 20. If you use Google Docs to write the essay, just be prepared to share the essay with the person you work with in the peer review. If you write with a word processor that doesn’t support sharing documents with other authors (such as Word), bring two printed copies of the essay to class with you. In all cases, please bring your computer to class on that day so you can access other people’s essays online if you need to.
During the three school days following the peer reviews, i.e., September 21, 24, and 25, I will meet with you to share my thoughts on your draft and answer questions you have for me. You can make an appointment for this meeting via Google Calendar. Please make the meeting half an hour long, and schedule it to finish before the end of the day on September 25. So that I have time to prepare for these meetings, please share your Google Doc draft, or email me your non-Google-Doc draft, by the start of class on the 20th.
Following the peer reviews and meetings with me, you’ll have a chance to revise your draft essay. Share your revision with me, or email it to me, by 11:59 PM on October 2. If your second version is in a Google Doc you already shared with me for the first draft, sharing it again just involves emailing me a quick note that the document is ready for me to look at.
Note that INTD 106’s “Self-Reflection #2” assignment involves revising an essay you write for some other course, and is due at just about the same time this essay is. This essay would therefore be a logical one to use in the INTD 106 assignment, although of course you don’t have to. Should you want to use this esssay in INTD 106, you will need to do a bit of planning to be sure you have drafts and revisions ready by both my deadlines and INTD 106’s, suitable copies for INTD 106 (I think they want you to upload a Word document whereas I encourage Google Docs), etc.
Finally, recall that I grade things relative to what I expect you to be able to do on them. For this essay, I am expecting…
- A defensible thesis
- An organized argument in support of that thesis, using appropriate evidence from “The Gold Bug” and/or the readings we did surrounding it
I expect to see these things clearly in the second draft, and signs that you are working towards them in the first.