Scholarly Criticism Analysis Assignment Sheet
Assignment in Brief: For this assignment, each student will select, summarize, and analyze a peer-reviewed journal article that analyzes one of the texts
assigned for the course. The objective for this assignment is to analyze and understand how literary critics write about literature professionally. Your paper
(1500 words) should attune both to the article’s larger argument and structure and to its details, offering both a summary and an analysis and evaluation, one
that considers the article’s thesis, its use of evidence, its shortcomings, its organization, and its methodology.
Parameters:
Be sure to select a peer-reviewed journal article from the list below.
Your paper should be balanced between demonstrating an understanding of the article’s argument and structure (summary) and an analysis of what makes
the article work or fail, in part or in whole (analysis and evaluative).
Structure: Your paper should have a header that distinguishes “Summary” and another header that distinguishes “Analysis and Evaluation.” Each section
should be roughly half of the paper’s length.
Your paper should have in-text citations and a works cited page.
Final Product: The final product should ultimately demonstrate your ability to read, understand, analyze, and evaluate a piece of professional literary criticism.
Paper Rubric: Aside from the length requirement, this paper will be graded on the following criteria: 1) content, including the proper selection of an article, the
clarity and logic of your own summary of the article, the quality and clarity of the analysis and evaluation of the article, and the balance between the
summation and evaluation; 2) organization, including the presence and clarity of each of the two sections, organized into coherent paragraphs with topic
sentences, evidence, and development; 3) documentation, including signal phrases, in-text citations, and a works cited page; and 4) grammar and mechanics.
Available Peer-Review Journal Articles for the Scholarly Criticism Paper
“‘Pat Your Foot and Turn the Corner’: Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement, and the Poetics of a Popular Avant-Garde,” James Smethurst
“Bambara’s Feisty Girls: Resistance Narratives in ‘Gorilla, My Love,’” Elizabeth Muther
“‘Agent of Revolutionary Thought’: Bambara and Black Girlhood for a Poetics of Being and Becoming Human,” Maria Kromidas
“‘Like a Butterfly on a Pin’: Witnessing Genealogies of Whiteness in James Baldwin’s ‘Going to Meet the Man,’” Balthazar Beckett
“James Baldwin’s Confrontation with Racist Terror in the American South: Sexual Mythology and Psychoneurosis in ‘Going to Meet the Man,’” Paul Griffith
“Papa’s Baby: Impossible Paternity in ‘Going to Meet the Man,’” Matt Brim
“‘We the People,’ Who? James Baldwin and the Traumatic Constitution of These United States,” Shireen Patell
“‘I Can’t Breathe!’: Affective Asphyxia in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric,” Shermaine Jones
“The Journey of Self-Defense through Sound in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen,” Lana Lina Ajlani
“Reconstructing the Past: Reproduction of Trauma in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior,” Qiong He
“‘It Translated Well’: The Promise and the Perils of Translation in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior,” Stella Bolaki
“Publish or Perish: Food, Hunger, and Self-Construction in Maxine Hong Kingston’s ‘The Woman Warrior,’” Paul Outka
“Cultural Politics and Chinese-American Female Subjectivity: Rethinking Kingston’s Woman Warrior,” Yuan Shu
“‘Coerced Loss and Ambivalent Preservation’: Racial Melancholia in American Born Chinese,” Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides