When you write the paper, you should devote one or two of the early supporting paragraphs to giving a concise account of the source you’ve selected as the lens and of the claim, concept, fact, interpretation, or context it provides to your argument. Be sure to quote and cite as necessary, even with this material. Then, use the rest of the paper to apply that claim, concept, etc. to specific passages from the novel, showing how the lens helps us to understand those passages better or differently. Remember to keep the big picture in mind: don’t get lost in reinterpreting a random assortment of passages, but instead work towards supporting a thesis that makes a claim about the ways in which the lens helps us to understand some aspect of the novel.
Guidance for Works Cited for Information Fluency Paper—Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Your finished paper should include in-text citations and a works cited list. Please use MLA formatting. Your works cite should look something like what’s below (I’m using Johnson’s essay as an example; just slot in your author and page numbers as relevant):
Johnson, James Weldon. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Jacqueline Goldsby, ed. W. W. Norton: 2015.Johnson, James-Weldon. “Dilemma of the Negro Author,” in Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, pgs. 355-368.
In text citations should look like this (Johnson 43). The works cited should be alphabetized.
For this paper, be sure to make a clear claim as a thesis, suggest what is at stake in your thesis, offer supporting claims in each supporting paragraph and support those claims with specific evidence from the text that you analyze in detail, showing how the evidence bears out your claim and, ultimately, your thesis. You will also be asked to integrate a secondary or additional primary source from our edition of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Please use MLA formatting. This paper should be at least 3 pages long.
For this assignment, you will be writing a “lens” essay using a primary or secondary source from our edition of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Start by selecting one of the readings from the “Backgrounds and Sources” or “Criticism” sections that begin on pg. 129. Read your selection with an eye to the idea, fact, concept, or other information that will help you to understand the novel better or in a new light. Then, apply that idea, fact, concept, or information to a reading of a specific passage or two from the novel. How do we see the passage(s) differently or better, thanks to the lens source?
Start here for an overview of what goes into a “lens” essay. You might think of the advice given here as guidance for formulating your thesis, introductory paragraph, and structure of the paper: https://harvardwritingcenter.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/the-four-parts-of-a-lens-essay-argument/
You can use whichever of the “Backgrounds and Sources” or “Criticism” readings you would like, but I’m going to use Du Bois’s “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” (pgs. 179-186) and Johnson’s “Dilemma of the Negro Author” (pgs. 258-265) as examples here to illustrate what you should be doing in this assignment.
If you choose Du Bois for your paper, you might remember the passage on pgs. 13-14 of the novel, where the narrator describes the ways in which Black Americans perceive the world differently from white Americans and that, in his estimation, “the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them” (14). You could then read the selections from “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” on pgs. 179-186 with an eye to how what Du Bois describes as “double consciousness” applies to what the narrator is saying on pgs. 13-14 of the novel.
Having read Du Bois, what can you now say about the narrator’s claims about the effects of race and racism on African American identity and on how, as an African American, one might perceive oneself and how one might perceive white people as a result? What can you tell your reader about this passage of the novel that you couldn’t before? How does an understanding of Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” affect your understanding of what the narrator says?