4. ESSAY #2
HOW TO WRITE A
RESPONSE TO
LITERATURE
A D A P T E D F R O M A H A N D O U T F R O M T H E
W R I T I N G C E N T E R , U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O R T H
C A R O L I N A AT C H A P E L H I L L
5. Hardy, “On the Western Circuit” Not on Exam
Hardy, “Hap” “The Darkling Thrush”
Yeats, “September 1913” “Easter, 1916” “The Second
Coming”
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Lawrence, “Odour of Chrysanthemums”
Joyce, “The Dead”
The War Poets
• Brooke, “The Soldier”
• Sassoon, “The Rear- Guard”
• Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches”
• Owen, “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
• Cannan, “Rouen”
Eliot, The Waste Land
Forster, “The Other Boat” Not on Exam
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Beckett, Waiting for Godot
ESSAY #2 EXAM #2
6. INTERPRETATIONS OF FICTION ARE GENERALLY
OPINIONS, BUT NOT ALL OPINIONS ARE EQUAL.
A good, valid, and interesting interpretation will do the
following:
avoid the obvious (in other words, it won’t argue a
conclusion that most readers could reach on their own
from a general knowledge of the story)
support its main points with strong textual evidence from
the story and/or secondary sources.
use careful reasoning to explain how that evidence
relates to the main points of the interpretation.
7. A good paper begins with the writer having a solid
understanding of the work. Being able to have the
whole text in your head when you begin thinking
through ideas will actually allow you to write the
paper more quickly in the long run.
Spend some time just thinking about the story. Flip
back through the book and consider what interests
you about this book—what seemed strange, new,
or important?
Be Familiar with the Text
8. EXPLORE POTENTIAL TOPICS
Even though you have a list of topics from which to
choose, you must develop your own interpretation.
Consider how you might approach each topic.
What will your answer to each question show about the text?
So what? Why will anyone care?
Try this phrase for each prompt to see if you have an idea:
“This book/poem/play/short story shows
______________________. This is important because
______________________.”
9. Narrow down your list of
possible topics by identifying
how much evidence or how
many details you could use
to investigate each potential
issue.
Keep in mind that papers
rely on ample evidence and
that having a lot of details to
choose from can make your
paper easier to write.
Jot down all the events or
elements of the story that
have some bearing on the
two or three topics that seem
most promising.
Don’t launch into a topic
without considering all the
options first because you
may end up with a topic that
seemed promising initially
but that only leads to a dead
end.
Select a Topic with Plenty of Evidence
10. Skim back over the story
or poem and make a
more comprehensive list
of the details that relate to
your point.
As you make your notes
keep track of page
numbers so you can
quickly find the passages
again when you need
them.
Make an extended list of evidence
11. Once you’ve made your expanded list of
evidence, decide which supporting details are the
strongest.
First, select the facts which bear the closest relation to
your thesis statement.
Second, choose the pieces of evidence you’ll be able to
say the most about. Readers tend to be more dazzled
with your interpretations of evidence than with a lot of
quotes from the book.
Select the details that will allow you to show off your own
reasoning skills and allow you to help the reader see the
story in a way he or she may not have seen it before.
Select your evidence
12. Now, go back to your working thesis and refine it
so that it reflects your new understanding of your
topic. This step and the previous step (selecting
evidence) are actually best done at the same time,
since selecting your evidence and defining the
focus of your paper depend upon each other.
Refine your thesis
13. Once you have a clear thesis, go back to your list of
selected evidence and group all the similar details
together. The ideas that tie these clusters of evidence
together can then become the claims that you’ll make in
your paper.
Keep in mind that your claims should not only relate to
all the evidence but also clearly support your thesis.
Once you’re satisfied with the way you’ve grouped your
evidence and with the way that your claims relate to
your thesis, you can begin to consider the most logical
way to organize each of those claims.
Organize your evidence
14. Avoid the temptation to load your paper with evidence
from your story. Each time you use a specific reference
to your story, be sure to explain the significance of
that evidence in your own words.
To get your readers’ interest, draw their attention to
elements of the story that they wouldn’t necessarily
notice or understand on their own.
If you are quoting passages without interpreting them,
you’re not demonstrating your reasoning skills or helping
the reader. In most cases, interpreting your evidence
merely involves putting into your paper what is already in
your head.
Interpret your evidence
15. KEEP IN MIND
Don't forget to consider the scope
of your project: What can you
reasonably cover in a paper of that
length?
Eliminate wordiness and repetition
to ensure that you have room to
make all of your points.
See me if you are lost or confused!
Use this link for help with MLA
formatting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=8xAc4yZ8VSA&t=6s
16.
17. MRS. DALLOWAY:
THE CHARACTERS
Clarissa Dalloway
Richard Dalloway
Elizabeth Dalloway
Septimus Warren Smith
Dr. Holmes
Hugh Whitbread
Lady Rosseter (Sally
Seton)
Peter Walsh
Doris Kilman
Lucrezia Smith
Sir William Bradshaw
Lady Millicent Bruton
18. MRS. DALLOWAY: THE PLOT
CLARISSA
Same June Day
Rezia
WWI/ Evans
Hat Making
Terrifying hallucinations
Insanity
Mental health
professionals
Suicide
SEPTIMUS
A June Day in London (June
13, 1923?)
Party at her home
Peter Walsh
Husband accepts a lunch
date
Elizabeth and Miss Kilman
Emotional Kinship: Septimus
Warren Smith
Death and Life
Everyday life experience = major
significance
20. REALISM VS. MODERNISM
• Realism (aligned with the Victorian
Period) generally deals with
everyday lives of middle class
people.
• The most unique feature of realism
is that it is free of ornamentation .
The language represents the
average person and is often simple.
While it lacks decorative language,
the tone may be comic or satiric.
• Realism pays attention to detail,
and endeavors to replicate the true
nature of reality in a way that
novelists had never attempted. The
novel’s function is simply to report
what happens, without comment or
judgment.
• Events and plot in realism will be
reasonable, and valid, and truthful.
It doesn't entertain or present the
sentimental or over-dramatic.
• Modernism (aligned with the first half of the 20th
Century) generally presents characters from
middle class families.
• POV and narrative complexity in novels makes
modernistic writing difficult to understand. It uses
tools like "stream of consciousness,”
“perspectivism,” and “distributed subjectivity” to
interrogate thoughts and views about life. Events
are not necessarily either sequential or connected
unlike realism literature, with its fixed time lines.
• Modernism portrays reality of life, without the
optimism and romance in Victorian and Romantic
literature. There is not generally a central heroic
figure in the story. Instead, we are offered many
characters and multiple experiences.
• Themes of modern literature include self-
reflection, questions regarding existence of God in
the modern world, overwhelming technological
changes, and the struggle of man find balance in
urban life.
21. Maureen Howard asserts that “if ever there was a work
conceived in response to the state of the novel, a consciously
‘modern’ novel, it is Mrs. Dalloway. The novel, [Woolf] knew,
had only to be re-imagined, an enormous task, but what a
grand and immediate occasion.” How exactly is this novel
“modern”--consciously or unconsciously?
Multiple narrators
Stream of
Consciousness
Experimentation
Religion
Ethics
Sexuality
Identity
The Unconscious
Time
Destruction
Loss
Social Change
Scientific Innovation
Urbanism
Impressionism
Cubism
Fragmentation
22. Woolf from the essay“Modern Fiction”
“Examine for a moment an ordinarymind on an ordinaryday. The mind receives a myriad
impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all
sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape
themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old […]. Let us
record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the
pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident
scores upon consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is
commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.” (Norton 2152)
What is life made up of?
What should fiction do?
This is a point about style.
but also a judgment
about value—about what
matters.
23. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses a third-person omniscient narrator. From this
point of view, the narrator knows all the thoughts, actions, and feelings of all
characters. Woolf moves from character to character to show how each one
factors into the plot. The narrator knows Mrs. Dalloway's private thoughts. This
opening scene is a good example. Mrs. Dalloway is on her way to buy flowers in
London for a party she is holding later that night. She has just heard the bells of
Westminster and is moved to think about how everyone loves life and how she
is connected to other people through hearing the bells:
For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it
up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but
the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps
(drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by
Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life.
The narration presents her stream-of-consciousness thoughts that are excited
by what Mrs. Dalloway sees or hears around her. This passage reveals her
strong attachment to life and the concept of life as her own invention. The long,
galloping sentence, full of commas and semicolons, mirrors her excitement at
being alive on this June day.
Modernism, Point of View, and Stream of Conciousness
24. 1. How would you describe the style ofthe novel?
2. Find an example of an interior monologue?
How the monologue function as a narrative
and expository device. That is, how does the
interior monologue help to tell the story?
Septimus Warren Smith is introduced as a shell-shock
victim. He slowly loses his grip on reality as he falls
into his bouts of hallucinations. His wife, Rezia,
becoming increasingly irritated and embarrassed of his
episodes continues to try to talk him into the present
moment. He thinks, “There was his hand; there the
dead. White things were assembling behind the
railings…Interrupted again! She was always
interrupting.”
25. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their
hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa
Dalloway, what a morning —fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a
little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the
French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how
calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of
a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she
then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that
something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with
the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking
until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it? —“I
prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one
morning when she had gone out on to the terrace —Peter Walsh. He would be
back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters
were awfully dull;
it was his sayings one remembered; his
eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his
grumpiness and, when millions of things
had utterly vanished —how strange it
was! —a few sayings like this about
cabbages.” (2156-57)
26. EXPLORE AND DISCUSS THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN PETER AND CLARISSA
So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still
making out that she had been right — and she had too — not to
marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence
there must be between people living together day in day out in the
same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he
this morning for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.)
But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into.
And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little
garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would
have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced;
though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow
sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of
the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had
married a woman met on the boat going to India! Never should
she forget all that! Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never
could she understand how he cared. But those Indian women did
presumably — silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops. And she wasted
her pity. For he was quite happy, he assured her — perfectly happy,
though he had never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life
had been a failure. It made her angry still.
27. WOOLFAND PERSPECTIVISM
Perspectivism
--old philosophic concept
--productively revived by Nietzsche
--knowledge of the world is only
possible through individual
perspectives
• rejection of the idea of perspectives
that have a privileged access to the
true state of things.
• the existence of a true state of
things. (objective reality beyond
perspectives)
Mrs. Dalloway offers a version of this.
“[Clarissa] stiffened a little on the
kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van
to pass. Acharming woman,
Scrope Purvis thought her
(knowing her as one does know
people who live next door to
one in Westminster); a touch of
the bird about her, of the jay,
blue-green, light, vivacious,
though she was over fifty, and
grown very white since her
illness. There she perched, never
seeing him, waiting to cross,
very upright.” (2157)
28. Modernism in
Art: Cubism
Picasso and Braque
This is “Nude
descending a
staircase, no. 2” by
Marcel Duchamp.
What do you notice
about this painting?
He positioned the figure in a descending diagonal from upper left to lower
right. A tangle of shattered geometric shapes suggest the stairs in the lower
left corner of the composition while rows of receding stairs at the upper left
and right frame the strangely multiplying female form as she descends.
29. What do you notice
about this painting?
Are you, the viewer,
looking at the action in the
painting from one stable
position in the world?
What happens to time in
this painting? Is there one
stable moment of time
that the viewer inhabits?
Multiple times, multiple
visual perspectives.
30. “Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of an aeroplane bored
ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out
white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something!
making letters in the sky! Every one looked up.
Dropping dead down the aeroplane soared straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank,
rose, and whatever it did, wherever it went, out fluttered behind it a thick ruffled bar
of white smoke which curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters. But what letters? A
Cwas it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they lie still; then they moved and
melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the aeroplane shot further away and
again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Yperhaps?
“Glaxo,” said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice, gazing straight up, and her
baby, lying stiff and white
in her arms, gazed straight up.
“Kreemo,” murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-walker. With his hat held out
perfectly still in his hand, Mr. Bowley gazed straight up. All down the Mall people
were standing and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became
perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then
another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells
struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls.
The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a
skater —
“That’s an E,” said Mrs. Bletchley — or a dancer —
“It’s toffee,” murmured Mr. Bowley —(and the car went in at the gates and nobody
looked at it), and shutting off the smoke, away and away it rushed, and the smoke
faded and assembled itself round the broad white shapes of the clouds.
2166-67
31. It had gone; it was behind the clouds. There was no sound. The clouds to
which the letters E, G, or Lhad attached
themselves moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a
mission of the greatest importance which would never be revealed, and yet
certainly so it was — a mission of the greatest importance. Then suddenly, as
a train comes out of a tunnel, the aeroplane rushed out of the clouds again,
the sound boring into the ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in
Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent’s Park, and the bar of smoke curved
behind and it dropped down, and it soared up and wrote one letter after
another — but what word was it writing? Lucrezia Warren Smith, sitting by
her husband’s side on a seat in Regent’s Park in the Broad Walk, looked up.
“Look, look, Septimus!” she cried. For Dr. Holmes had told her to make her
husband (who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a
little out of sorts) take an interest in things outside himself.
So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in
actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet;[…].
It was toffee; they were advertising toffee, a nursemaid told Rezia.
Together they began to spell t . . . o . . . f.. . “K . . . R. . . ” said the
nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear […].”
(2166-67)
What strikes you as potentially cubist about this passage?
32. 1. Time is an important modernist
theme that shows itself in Mrs.
Dalloway. How do you see time
pass? How does Woolf mark time
in the novel? How else do you see
time appear in the novel?
2. World War I affected all the
characters in the book to some
degree. Discuss how the war
influenced two or three of the
characters.
3. Explore and discuss the
relationship between Septimus
and his wife, Lucrezia.
33. “Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking
on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat’s; or
she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china
cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred,
Sally Seton — such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons
plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She remembered
once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered;
what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did
it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter
that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her;
did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended
absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow
of things, here, there, she survived,
Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the
trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it
was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the
people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the
trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she
dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’ shop window?” (2159-60)
34. DISTRIBUTED
SUBJECTIVITY
What is happening here?
Commonness (banality) of memories as
part of subjectivity
But there’s something else:
◦ some part of subjectivity is outside
of her, will exist after death.
◦ where? Peter, the trees, the house,
people she has never met
◦ her self is “spread ever so far”
between people and places
◦ exists like a mist.
What is this part of her?
This is another aspect of style in
Mrs. Dalloway:
◦ this book focuses on a lot of
other characters and people. but
Clarissa Dalloway’s self is
spread out over (and in) those
characters as well.
It’s a type of distributed
subjectivity—parts of Clarissa
exist outside of herself—in other
people and other places.
35. WHAT IS UP WITH MISS KILLMAN? HER
RELIGION? HER RELATIONSHIP WITH
ELIZABETH DALLOWAY?
She had lent her books. Law, medicine, politics, all professions are
open to women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. But for herself,
her career was absolutely ruined and was it her fault? Good gracious,
said Elizabeth, no.
And her mother would come calling to say that a hamper had come
from Bourton and would Miss Kilman like some flowers? To Miss
Kilman she was always very, very nice, but Miss Kilman squashed the
flowers all in a bunch, and hadn’t any small talk, and what interested
Miss Kilman bored her mother, and Miss Kilman and she were terrible
together; and Miss Kilman swelled and looked very plain. But then
Miss Kilman was frightfully clever. Elizabeth had never thought about
the poor. They lived with everything they wanted — her mother had
breakfast in bed every day;
36. When Clarissa reflects on Septimus’s death at the end
of the novel, she experiences a moment of being, or an
epiphany. What truth becomes clear to her, and why is it
significant?
The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but
she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two,
three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old
lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with
this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no
more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an
extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him — the young
man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it;
thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved
in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But
she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and
Peter. And she came in from the little room.
37. MORE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Compare Septimus and Clarissa.
How do they double each other?
How are they very different?
Woolf originally planned to have
Clarissa commit suicide. How would
that have changed the effect of the
novel?
38. Q: Does Woolf believe that marriage
sucks the brains and the life out of
women? Does she think that women
are incapable of maintaining a creative,
productive life when there are
husbands and children in the mix?
Q: Why are Woolf’s
characters so
miserable?
Q-Why does Woolf use red and
green images throughout her
novel? What do these colors
signify?
