This term, your midterm exam will take the shape of a 6-8 page essay in which you construct a narrative relating the critical approaches we've studied thus far to each other: formalisms, reader response and rhetoric, structuralism, and post-structuralism/deconstruction. Your essay should put these critical approaches into context--how does modern critical theory start, and how do these ideas build on--or work against--each other?

In your essay, I am looking for accuracy and effective selection of central ideas and texts. You will not be able to include every single essay we've read this term; instead, you must have a clear holistic sense of each approach and how it relates to others, which you should supplement with a few specific references to our theorists.

Your essay should be well-written and organized, and it should have a central organizing point--this may not be an original interpretive thesis, but it should function in a similar way. That is, your essay should not just be a grouping of paragraphs that bear no relation to one another in the broadest sense. Finally, it should conform in all respects to MLA formatting and documentation principles--please come and see me if you cannot remember how to do this from EN501.

Have fun!