Honors English II: Hamlet Critical Essay
Assignment Instructions, Audience, and Purpose
Write a 4-6 paragraph literary analysis, applying your choice of critical lens to Hamlet
Your purpose is to illuminate the work in question, help a high-school reader get more out of it, and convince such a reader that your analysis of the work in question is valid.
The purpose of the assignment itself is to give you practice applying one of the critical lenses we’ve worked with this unit. You should also write with an audience of high school teachers in mind. Follow these steps:
1.After selecting the critical lens you’d like to use, look at the critic’s questions on the back of each handout and select the question you’d like to apply and answer. You can answer more than one.
2.Analyze Hamlet with that question in mind.
3.Answer the question, and from that answer formulate a thesis. Provide an especially focused
INTRODUCTION which clearly states your thesis, and a similarly focused CONCLUSION which reaffirms that idea.
You will need to:
1.Include a title which identifies the critical approach you are taking.
2.Write the question you are answering somewhere under the title.
3.Develop your argument fully, with focused paragraphs and good supporting evidence (reasons, examples, details, quotations, paraphrases) for your claims.
4.Keep your audience clearly in mind.
5.Write engagingly. Write with imagination, insight, and, more than anything, clarity.
6.Avoid all types of plagiarism.
7.Carefully edit and proofread your work for lapses in clarity, stylistic problems, and mechanical errors. Sources must be properly credited using MLA format.
You CAN: 8.Research what other critics have said about the same work.
9.Acknowledge and refute counter-views. (This might be a good place to discuss other critic’s views a bit.)
10.Document any sources using MLA format. 11.
Format your essay according to MLA guidelines.
Suggestions
1.An easy way to come up with a topic and approach is to review the questions typically asked for each kind of criticism.
2.Also helpful would be to research articles and essays in which others have written about your particular topic or idea. eminist Examples:
●When Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” was written in 1898, it was generally considered unnatural for women to have sexual desire. How does Chopin’s story critique this patriarchal belief? What other patriarchal ideology does the story critique? What does the story suggest about the intersection of patriarchy, religion, and socioeconomic class?
●In what ways might we say that William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1931) plays with traditional gender categories, revealing the biases and limitations of traditional definitions of gender? Psychoanalyst Examples:
●How might we use an understanding of the superego to help us interpret William Golding’s Lord of the Flies ?
●How might an understanding of denial and displacement (in this case, displacement of negative feelings for one’s husband onto one’s child) help us analyze the narrator’s relationship to her troubled daughter in Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” (1956)?
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