Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

2202235  Reading and Analysis for the Study of English Literature

Puckpan Tipayamontri

Office: BRK 1106.1

Office Hours: M 1–3 and by appointment

Phone: 0-2218-4703

puckpan.t@chula.ac.th

Section 2

T 1–3 (BRK 512), Th 1–2 (BRK 507)

Developing an Argument

Here is an exercise in developing an argument that you can try. The same skills apply to coming up with an idea for a reading response, an exam essay, or a class paper. Study the text with your group, brainstorm ideas, and develop a thesis. Let's take sight as a topic.

1. First ask yourselves some progressively specific questions about sight, such as how does sight figure in the novel, that is, how is it portrayed, what is its function in the work, is it described in any consistent way? How does it related to other sensory perceptions, themes or literary elements (hearing, smell; identities, imprisonment; characters, setting)? Is sight about nonvisual things? How does characters' sight correlate with their beliefs? What makes characters believe, regardless of what they see, that certain people are barbarians?
   
2. Next you'll want to read closely passages or lines that reveal something about these relationships. You might focus on this description of the Magistrate's musings:
   

   The barbarians, who are pastoralists, nomads, tent-dwellers, make no reference in their legends to a permanent settlement near the lake. There are no human remains among the ruins. If there is a cemetery we have not found it. The houses contain no furniture. In a heap of ashes I have found fragments of sun-dried clay-pottery and something brown which may once have been a leather shoe or cap but which fell to pieces before my eyes. I do not know where the wood came from to build these houses. Perhaps in bygone days criminals, slaves, soldiers trekked the twelve miles to the river, and cut down poplar trees, and sawed and planed them, and transported the timbers back to this barren place in carts, and built houses, and a fort too, for all I know, and in the course of time died, so that their masters, their prefects and magistrates and captains, could climb the roofs and towers morning and evening to scan the world from horizon to horizon for signs of the barbarians. Perhaps in my digging I have only scratched the surface. Perhaps ten feet below the floor lie the ruins of another fort, razed by the barbarians, peopled with the bones of folk who thought they would find safety behind high walls. Perhaps when I stand on the floor of the courthouse, if that is what it is, I stand over the head of a magistrate like myself, another grey-haired servant of Empire who fell in the arena of his authority, face to face at last with the barbarian. How will I ever know? By burrowing like a rabbit? (16–17)

   
   
3. Now, make a list of as many observations as you can about the language of this passage, grouping them into these preliminary categories:
   

   a). Evidence suggesting a link between barbarians and other characteristics b). Evidence suggesting a contradiction or conflict between different characteristics of people c). Things in the text that seem unrelated to barbarians/barbarism/being barbaric

   
   
4. With these observations in mind, reconsider your original question in 1. Reformulate your question in more specific terms. Don't feel bound to keep key terms or topics if your discussion and analysis lead you to a different concern. At this point, you might shift focus from "sight" to "hearing," for example, or from "barbarians" to "colonialists." A form of this question may eventually be useful in helping to structure and write your introduction.
   
5. Now, re-examine your observations in 3. and begin to organize the meat of your argument. Give special scrutiny to those items in list c). that seemed unrelated to barbarians. Sometimes these incongruities serve as a compelling way into the heart of the issue. Start with an obvious statement but then tease out the implications of each detail in that statement. Be thorough and creative.
6. Now that you have demonstrated the connections as you see them, for a conclusion, do not merely agree or disagree with the rewritten question. Instead, discuss the nuances raised by the question, or how the question was even wrong-headed in its formulation, or lay out the details of why the question is a good or bad one for you to have asked. Here, you can link evidence from 5., which is the core of your argument and findings, to your final impressions of the issue and the text.
   

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Last updated March 8, 2012