THE EXPLICATION ESSAY IN ENGLISH 233

 

What:  One short-story explication essay, 3 typewritten pages in length, due on September 19, 2003, explaining your interpretation of one short story, to be chosen by you.  An explication essay explicates the meaning of a story, that is, it explains it.  “When you explicate a text, you unfold its meaning in an essay. . . . A good explication concentrates on details, quoting the text of the story to bring them to the attention of a reader who might have missed them” (Charters 1757). 

 

Note that your developing an interpretation of some aspect of the story is key to explication. “An entire story is usually too long to explicate completely. . . so you will usually select a short passage or section that relates to the idea you are developing.  Often this short section is a key scene, a crucial conversation, or an opening or closing paragraph where the implications of the text can be revealed to develop the central idea of your essay” (Charters 1757). As this quotation implies, explication should follow an idea about the work, not the development of its plot or content.  For this reason, you will want to be careful not to re-tell the story.  Instead, you will want to interpret the story, but focus systematically, point-by-point, on the passages, plot events, quotes and evidence that support your interpretation and your thesis.

 

For an example of an explication essay, see Charters, pages 1759 – 1760, where there is a student essay on “Young Goodman Brown” that explicates the story by pointing to and analyzing  selected passages that reflect Goodman Brown’s pride. Charters also has helpful information on writing about literature on pages 1752-1757. 

 

When:  Due Friday, September 19, 2003, during our class period.

 

How:  To produce your paper, take the following steps:   a) Identify a story read up to and including September 19 that has touched you, interested you, or made you think. (It can be a story on which you have previously done an analysis.)     b) Read the general guidelines for writing about short fiction in The Story and its Writer on pages 1752 – 1757.     c) Read the specific guidelines for writing literary explication papers on pages 1757 – 1763 in The Story and Its Writer.   d) Write a 3 page double-spaced typed essay in which you share your interpretation of the story, remembering that your theories about the story must be backed up by systematic explication of specific passages and evidence in the text of the story itself. Essentially, you will prove the validity of your interpretation by analyzing carefully quoted passages from the story and supporting details and evidence from the story.

 

Standards for grading essays: 

Your explication essay will be evaluated according to the following standards, on a 100-point scale, then reduced to the equivalent point value out of 15 (the maximum number of points you can earn on this assignment).

 

A (90-100) ~ Excellent work. The essay is clearly organized, with strong evidence supporting the analysis.  The paper requires no substantive or stylistic revisions.  Its insight and understanding are clearly superior.

B (80-89) ~ Good work. The essay show a solid understanding of the short story and concepts required to analyze it.  The paper may be partially incomplete, involve weak evidence (or lack thereof), or demonstrate organizational problems.  Substantive revisions are required to content, but few or no stylistic revisions are needed. 

C (70-79) ~ Satisfactory work. The essay shows effort by the student, but the demonstrated understanding of the short story is incomplete, includes inappropriate evidence or a lack of evidence, or shows significant difficulties with organization.  Written work requires significant substantive or stylistic revisions.

D (60 – 69) ~ Less than average work.  The written assignment shows some lack of effort and engagement with the assignment.  The essay lacks substance (analysis, evidence, organization); many substantive and stylistic revisions are necessary.

F (<60) ~ Inadequate work.  The relevant assignment for the course has not been completed; or, written work shows significant lack of effort as well as lack of engagement with the subject matter of the course.  Analysis, evidence, and organization are absent from the paper, which needs to be completely reconceived in order to be acceptable.

Some notes on writing about literature (you will be responsible for knowing all this):

 

The basics: a topic, a thesis, and exposition:  As Ann Charters notes, writing about literature helps you clarify your ideas (1753).  If you want your essay to communicate these ideas clearly to a reader, you must understand that it always requires two things to be effective: a strong thesis sentence or central idea about your topic, and an adequate development of your thesis sentence.

 

Discovering a thesis or claim:  Before you start your essay, you should be sure to understand thoroughly your chosen subject, the particular literary work about which you want to write.  Read it several times; underline important words and sentences; makes lists in your notebook of key insights and quotations from the work.  Finally, remember that a topic (your chosen work and your focus in analyzing it) is not the same as a claim or thesis.  A claim or thesis makes clear to the reader the approach you are taking to your topic by making a statement about the topic.  You need a topic, of course, but you need a thesis just as much or more!

 

Developing your thesis or claim:  Once you have come up with your thesis or claim, plan to develop it by providing a mixture of supportive generalizations and specific, detailed evidence that proves the validity of those generalizations and of the thesis itself.  Quoting passages from the literary work to support your interpretation is always more effective than giving a summary of events or of the ideas in the piece.  Summarizing the plot or the thought-movement of a work is a common error of inexperienced essay writers.  You can assume that, once you have identified the short story you are writing about, and its author, the instructor shares your knowledge of and interest in the piece; there is no need to summarize or describe.  Rather than summary, an essay develops your interpretation of the work and is organized according to logic as you systematically give evidence to develop your thesis sentence by quoting from the text and pointing to its important features. 

 

Some pointers:

  1. Handling tense: When you write about literature, assume that it dwells in an eternal present and use your verb tenses accordingly.  Thus you use present-tense verbs to describe what the author is doing in the work and to describe what the work itself is doing.  For example, you say

On the other hand, if you are describing a historical fact which is relevant to the story or author, use the appropriate past tense. 

·         World War I ended in 1918.

·         Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941.

  1. Titles: Remember that titles of long works (novels, anthologies) get underlined or italicized.  Titles of shorter works contained within those long ones (short stories, chapters, individual poems) go in quotation marks. For example, James Joyce’s collection of short stories would be identified as Dubliners or Dubliners. A story within Dubliners, however, would be identified as “Clay.” 
  2. Quotations marks, periods, and commas: Remember, when you are quoting, that periods and commas go inside quotation marks in American English.

·         For example, you write: Hamlet said, “To be, or not to be,/That is the question.”

The only exception to this rule is when you are using in-text citations identifying

sources, lines, or pages.

·         For example, you write: Virginia Woolf’s novel begins with a famous sentence, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” (3).

  1. Acknowledging sources:  You should not be using sources for this paper—except the text of the story itself.  Refer to the story by putting the appropriate page numbers in the text in parentheses, as in the example directly above.