English 320
Spring 2011
Response to a Critical Essay
Due: Because so much will be going on in the remaining weeks of the class, you yourself will choose the deadline
for this assignment. Look over your calendar for the rest of the semester carefully—not just for this class, but for
all your classes—and decide when your schedule will permit you a few days to devote to this critical response.
On April 11th, the day you hand in your abstract for the conference paper, you will also commit to a due date for
this paper—by including, at the bottom of the page of your conference paper abstract, a brief note indicating when
I can expect to see your critical response paper. The only requirement is that you agree to hand it in sometime
between April 18th and May 11th. The earlier you hand it in, the more lavish and detailed my feedback will be;
if you wait till exam week, I’ll have no time for comments whatsoever, and you’ll have to be satisfied with a
grade alone. Remember that you’ll be working on the final draft of your conference paper during exam week, too,
so it’s probably not a good idea to leave this till the bitter end. In any event, I will hold you to your self-scheduled
deadline.
Over the next week, even after you’ve struggled to come up with an abstract for your conference paper,
we’ll continue to discuss in class the essays that will be the focus of this paper. Be sure to do the reading, take
good notes, and come to class prepared for discussion; active participation will help you decide which essay to
tackle.
Goals: We’ve all had the experience of being unconvinced by someone else’s “take” on a text that we’ve studied
carefully and feel strongly about. The purpose of a paper like this is fairly straightforward, then: to join a critical
conversation and to lay out some of your own ideas about a text (in this case, Heart of Darkness) in reference to
someone else’s. As Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein argue in They Say, I Say, “the underlying structure of
effective academic writing…resides not just in stating our own ideas but in listening closely to others around us,
summarizing their views in a way that they will recognize, and responding with our own ideas in kind…[T]he
best academic writing…is deeply engaged in some way with other people’s views.”
When someone else’s ideas are contained in a piece of dense academic prose, of course, it can be difficult
to make them out, let alone to articulate a response. Rather than ask you to frame your response in the form of an
essay, then, I’m asking you to complete a more formulaic exercise, one with a clear template and some “blanks”
to fill in. It’s not college-level Mad Libs, exactly; the “blanks” will sometimes need to be filled with sentences or
even paragraphs rather than words or phrases. But I hope that this will lower the degree of difficulty somewhat
and make grappling with dense prose and difficult ideas more manageable.
How to proceed: for this assignment, then, you’ll choose one of the critical essays that we’re slated to read
between April 11th and 20th—the essays by Miller, Smith, Brantlinger, and Said—and write a 4 to 6-page paper
responding to it. (Note that Achebe’s “An Image of Africa” and David Denby’s “Jungle Fever” are not meant to
be used for this assignment.)
Start by reading the essays carefully for class discussions: highlight and annotate each one, piece out the main
lines of its argument(s), paraphrase key points, assess your own difficulties with the text, etc. Come to class, pay
attention to what’s said, put in your own two cents, and take more notes. Then select an essay to work with.
Choose one that genuinely interests, intrigues and/or infuriates you. Then:

Begin by making sure you have a solid grasp of the essay’s argument and purpose. Obviously, if you
misinterpret or misrepresent what its author says, your response will be much less effective. Identify what
you consider the thesis of the essay, then write short, one-sentence summaries of each of its paragraphs.
(Read them through in sequence: can you in fact track an argument? And is it an argument that seems to
support what you identified as the thesis? If the answer is no, then check your work: perhaps you’ve
misconstrued the thesis and/or the point of one or more paragraphs.)

Consider the nature of your response to the essay. You might refer back to Barnet and Cain’s prescription for
a convincing interpretation. For instance: is the writer conveniently ignoring aspects of the novella that refute
her or his thesis? Do you detect what you think are some logical inconsistencies or contradictions in the
writer’s argument? Do you take issue with some of the premises of the overall critical or theoretical approach
that the writer is employing? Or, on the other hand, are you sympathetic to the approach, and perhaps even to
much of the argument, but take issue with some fairly specific details—i.e., would you in fact offer a
modification or a supplement to the writer’s position, rather than a wholesale disagreement? Spend some
time freewriting on those questions, turning your attention to what you see as key passages as well as to the
argument as a whole, and referring to Heart of Darkness itself as your ultimate yardstick.
Then the exercise itself, which will consist of two parts:
1. That paragraph-by-paragraph summary I was recommending? Do it for real. Enumerate your essay’s
paragraphs and condense each one to a sentence or two. Occasionally you may find a sentence within a given
paragraph that truly captures its essence; more often you will have to weed out what’s peripheral from what’s
essential and put the core thought of the paragraph into your own words (aided, perhaps, by a short phrase of
quoted text). All summaries inevitably adopt an evaluative point of view on whatever it is they’re
summarizing, especially if their ultimate purpose is critique. Just the same, try to be as neutral and accurate
as possible at this stage, and save any interpretive angle for later. A good of summary of a twentyparagraph essay is likely to take at least 2 double-spaced pages.
2. Now construct a response according to the following model, which is keyed in large part to certain passages
from They Say, I Say (see the online Course Reader). You may adapt or alter the specifics of the model, as
necessary, for elegance of phrasing or to reflect your purposes:
In ____________, X [argues/claims/asserts, etc.] that ____________. More specifically,
____________. As X himself puts it, “____________.” While some might [object that/wonder whether,
etc.] ____________, X contends nevertheless that ____________. In sum, ____________.
[Next, choose from among the Templates for Disagreeing, with Reasons (p. 60), Templates for
Agreeing (p. 62), or Templates for Agreeing and Disagreeing Simultaneously (pp. 65-66), and elaborate
upon them as appropriate. Make use of formulas such as “For instance, ____________” or “In addition,
____________” and so on, if they serve your purposes.]
[Finally, employ some variation on the Templates for Entertaining Objections, Templates for
Naming Your Naysayers, or Templates for Introducing Objections Informally (pp. 82-85). And finish
this way:] Yet I would [argue/maintain/intend, etc.] that ____________. Overall, then, I believe
____________ .
Again, you will sometimes need to fill these blanks or realize these templates with sentences or even whole
paragraphs rather than words or phrases. This portion, too, will probably take at least 2 double-spaced pages.
You may be saying to yourself right now, “Who am I to argue with Mr. Big Shot Critic Patrick Brantlinger? I’m
just a lowly undergrad; Bedford/St. Martin’s Press will not be busting down my door to publish my views any
time soon!” But these guys are not the boss of you just because they’re published authors with Ph.Ds. Your own
critical reading skills make you an authority on Heart of Darkness, too. Part of the business of criticism is
engaging with other readings—not to dismiss them or to worship them, but to improve your own understanding of
what happens in a text, and of how that text relates to the world we live in.