What Is a Critical Introduction?

Main texts: Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847); Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852); Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895); Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

You have been commissioned to write a brief introduction to one of our main texts for a series placing the Victorian World in dialogue with the present. 

Your job will be to start from your own experience and interpretation of the book, whatever feels most pressing, exciting, confusing, resonant, or relevant about it to you, and to work towards building a dialogue with four other critics’ (or writers’, artists’, etc.) interpretations of the text.

Your main goals should be:

1) To explain to general and academic audiences your perspective on why the text is significant, and

2) As a literary scholar, to put forward an interpretation of the text, hopefully one that guides your reader towards a new perspective or insight about this book.

Some Examples

(I’ll add to this section as we work on the assignment.)

• Nicola Bradbury’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Bleak House. (Notice where she paraphrases and incorporates an interpretation from an earlier introduction by J. Hillis Miller on page xxv.)

Skills That I Am Asking You to Practice

• Create links between primary and secondary sources. Synthesize them and offer your insights into the ways these texts speak to each other.
• Make informed decisions about which critical methods you will draw on and which scholarly conversations you will participate in.
• Compose texts that integrate a stance with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation.
• Find and evaluate relevant scholarship using the library’s databases.
• Practice systematic application of MLA citation conventions.

Requirements

• Choose one of the main texts listed above. (These are the texts that we are reading in their entirety. I’ve excluded brief excerpts and essays, which won’t give you enough to go on in writing a critical introduction.)

• Use a minimum of four additional sources. These sources should help you explain different critical lenses that people have used to write about this text. These sources can include:

1. Articles from scholarly, peer-reviewed journals
2. Chapters or books from a university press 
3. Creative works (novels, movies, poems, images, nonfiction, etc.) that directly comment on, adapt, or respond to the main text that you have chosen. (Ex. if you are writing about Jane Eyre, you could discuss Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea as a creative work that develops a reading of Jane Eyre.) 
4. Some (but not all) can be secondary sources from the syllabus for the class.

• Adopt a stance on the tradeoffs of the approaches and perspectives in your secondary sources.

• Use proper MLA formatting for your parenthetical in-text citations and Works Cited section at the end of your paper. Your Works Cited information will not count toward your final word count. Feel free to include links and images if they add to the content.

• 2000 words (not including headings or works cited listing)

Collaborative Rubric

We will establish a rubric of requirements for the assignment together in class.

Due dates

Submit a few rough ideas for which main text you might want to write about	4/11
Source Report	4/18
Proposal and Annotated Bibliography	5/7
Second draft	5/14
Final draft	5/22
Reflections on Revision	5/22