Critical Response Papers |
For your critical response paper, you will locate a scholarly article on one of our course readings and write an overview of the article’s analysis. Please use the MLA Bibliography to locate your article; MLA increasingly has links to many of our electronic journals, so you should be able to find a full-text article without much trouble. For your first critical response paper, you may select any reading from the Romantic period of the course. For the second response paper, you may select any reading from the Victorian or Modern period. If you have selected a lesser known work, such as Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition,” you may also need to use Project Muse to identify an article. The MLA Bibliography includes articles and book chapters, which you may use if our library holds the book, but it also includes Dissertation Abstracts International listings, which you may not use.
The critical response paper should be approximately three pages in length (750 words). The first half of the paper should review the article’s overall content. What argument does the author make about the work? Does the author tie information about the author’s biography to the interpretation of the work? Your review of the content should essentially follow the structure of the article in laying out the interpretation presented in the piece. The first half is effectively a summary of the article you have read.
The second part of the critical response is the more difficult element. In this part of the paper, you must evaluate the effectiveness of the article’s interpretation. Does the author of the critical essay make a valid interpretation of the literary work in question? Does the critic’s assessment of the author or book seem well argued and supported? Does the critic use sufficient source material beyond the text itself to make an argument? Do you agree with the critic’s interpretation? In responding to these questions, you may consider your own interpretation as well as our class discussions of the work as well.
An effective critical response paper will demonstrate that you have thoroughly read and understood both the primary source (the literary work we have already discussed in class) and the critical article (the article you are reviewing that you located in the MLA Bibliography). If you do not fully understand the work or the article, at least your critical response paper should ask relevant questions that reveal careful and thoughtful reading. The review will both describe and analyze the contents of the critical article and will evaluate the effectiveness of the interpretation offered there. The writing will be clear and will be largely correct.
Please submit your paper in Blackboard in the appropriate area under Assignments, naming your file Your Last Name Your First name critical 1.doc.
This page copyright 2000-2007 by Lisa Hammond | last update 12 November 2006