Topics for the Micro-Essay

The micro-essay is due by 5 PM on Monday, 9/14. Turn it in as a Microsoft Word document attached to an email. (If you don't use Word, talk to me before the due date to make alternate arrangements.)

The purpose of the micro-essay is to give you practice in the fundamentals of writing literary criticism: supporting a claim about the meaning of a text using specific quotes as evidence. Follow these guidelines exactly:

• The micro-essay should consist of a single paragraph of no more than one page.
• Begin the essay with a specific claim which is about the meaning of the text and which answers one of the questions below. Don't waste space on introductory fluff.
• The claim should be argumentative rather than descriptive--that is, it should be a claim which could be disputed (as opposed to a claim which states an unarguable fact).
• Support the claim with specific evidence from the text. Use quotes rather than paraphrases where possible--and even when a paraphrase is necessary (e.g. when your evidence is an event or series of events in the plot rather than a specific passage), try to bolster the paraphrase by including short quoted phrases.
• Be sure that the evidence is presented in a clear, organized fashion. The paragraph should "flow"--that is, every sentence should follow clearly from the sentence before and lead clearly to the sentence after.

An example of a micro-essay can be found in the syllabus.

The first two questions below refer to the following quote by Amiri Baraka. You do not need use the quote in your answer unless it helps you support your argument about the play. (As noted above, you do need to quote the play.)

Baraka has said that something like what happens to Clay has happened to him, and has described the play as follows:

...the play is about one white girl and one Negro boy, just them, singularly, in what I hope was a revelation of shared anguish, which because I dealt with it specifically would somehow convey an emotional force from where I got it--the discovery of America--on over to any viewer...

...But I will say this, if the girl (or the boy) in that play has to "represent" anything, I mean if she must be symbolic in the way demented academicians use the term, she does not exist at all. She is not meant to be a symbol--nor is Clay--but a real person, a real thing, in a real world. She does not represent any thing--she is one. And perhaps that thing is America, or at least its spirit. You remember America, don't you, where they have unsolved murders happening before your eyes on television. How crazy, extreme, neurotic, does that sound? Lula, for all her alleged insanity, just barely reflects the insanity of this hideous place. And Clay is a young boy trying desperately to be a man. Dutchman is about the difficulty of becoming a man in America.

1. What does it mean to say that Lula "is" America, or the "spirit" of America?
2. What does the play say about the difficulty of becoming a man in America?
3. There are a number of references in Dutchman to plays and acting (most directly on 19 and 27 when Clay and Lula banter about her being or not being an actress, but more subtly in other scenes throughout the play). What is the play trying to say about race and/or racial politics with these references to acting?
4. Lula says to Clay, "we'll pretend the people cannot see you. That is, the citizens. And that you are free of your own history. And I am free of my history. We'll pretend that we are both anonymous beauties smashing along through the city's entrails" (21). This speech suggests that both characters are in fact not free of their own history. Show how one or both characters is or is not free of history, in such a way as to show what being or not being free of history means.