Tartuffe

nstructions
Second Written Assignment: Critical Essay

Your assignment is to write an essay in response to one of the two topics listed here. As noted in the course schedule, a rough draft of this paper (see below) will be needed for our workshop on Wednesday, December 1; that draft must be submitted on D2L by Monday, November 29 (6 pm), and the official deadline for the final draft will be Friday, December 28th (6 pm).

As to format, the paper should be at least six (no more than seven) full, double-spaced pages in length, and it should be written in appropriate MLA style with a Works Cited page and parenthetical page references for all quotations used as evidence. (Again, see the MLA section of your Seagull handbook.) To receive full marks for this assignment, which represents 30% of your course grade, you must submit a preliminary draft (at least 3.5 full pages in length) as noted above.

Though they are meant to be reasonably specific, the topic suggestions below are worded broadly enough to enable you to define your own specific focus and approach within the framework of the assignment. In fact, they will require narrowing down: the task of defining the scope of your essay is an important feature of this assignment. The critical part of the assignment involves a) developing a clear argument as to what the text “says” on the topic you’re discussing; and b) proving that your argument offers a convincing interpretation.

Your success in defining and proving your argument will depend heavily on the primary evidence you discuss, namely the episodes and passages you choose to quote or paraphrase in detail. The relevance of this evidence should be clear at a glance, and the reader should also be satisfied with the completeness of your evidence. In a perfect paper, no scenes or passages that reveal anything significant about the central topic would be left unconsidered. The scope of your paper, in other words, depends directly on how much evidence you think you can interpret in detail. While a “perfect” or comprehensive standard of coverage may prove very difficult to achieve in a five-page essay on a longer literary work, it still represents an ideal worth striving for. For any fundamental historical/biographical backgrounds, you are encouraged to consult the historical introductions, headnotes, and footnotes provided in your Broadview Anthology.

Finally, note that this paper is meant to be an independent interpretation, not a research assignment (that will come in 200B). Although you will of course be reading academic criticism on both Lazarillo de Tormes and Tartuffe, you are not required, or even encouraged, to refer to that criticism for the purposes of this paper. If you do take ideas from our critics (or any other sources), however, you must cite them responsibly and list them in your Works Cited, in MLA style.

Topics

In The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, the narrator learns from a series of masters—but what are his main “lessons,” and what attitude or outlook enables him to value these lessons (painful as they often are) and the ways in which they shape him?

The ending of Tartuffe has often been described as relying on a “Deus ex Machina” resolution of the sort classically regarded (esp. by Aristotle) as inartistic; and yet the alternative solution of having Orgon witness Tartuffe’s duplicity clearly fails. What point does the play have to make about the limitations of witnessing and recognition as a means of defeating Tartuffe?