Read “Procrastination and Tragedy in Hamlet”.

Steven Yu wrote this essay for his Perspectives on the Humanities course on the “Literary Hero.” The assignment asks students to critically engage with one of the two canonical tragedies they have just read – Oedipus the King and Shakespeare’s Hamlet – but does not specify how they should do it. Instead, students are encouraged to embark on an inquiry of their own, with the aim to explore the complexity of a chosen literary work, to understand it through the lens of a particular theory, and/or to resolve some controversy that it has provoked.

It seems that Steven has molded into one meaningful inquiry all of the above: he considers Hamlet’s situation, both psychological and social, with a fair amount of care and insight; he examines Hamlet’s status as a hero in the light of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy; he tries to correct the perception of Hamlet as a procrastinator by highlighting both his rationality and alienation. His essay is a useful illustration of how to converse with an all-too-familiar play in a way that is not trite or superficial.

—Chen Lin, Lecturer in the Writing Program

Read “Femininity, Ghosts, and Feminine Ghosts in The Woman Warrior”.

Isabella Baranyk’s essay, “Femininity, Ghosts, and Feminine Ghosts in The Woman Warrior” was written for her Perspectives on the Humanities class, “Embodied Language,” in the spring of 2016. The assignment called for a close examination of select passages from Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Students were asked to formulate argument-driven narratives that move beyond simple observation and achieve deep critical analysis.

Isabella presents a strong example of this kind of analysis. Her paper reveals how ghosts and women in the novel are both diminished by unequal relations of power, in overt and understated ways. Living people can be disregarded as “ghosts” and women are cast off, challenged, and policed, particularly for the ways in which they express their femininity. Over the course of the paper, Isabella calls attention to the strange and specific ways in which characterizations of ghosts and women intersect in Kingston’s work, alternately, to both unfortunate and empowering ends.

—Eun Joo Kim, Lecturer in the Writing Program

Read “Cardboard Cutouts: The Paradox of Female Power”.

A significant hurdle students face in writing courses is, simply, the essay prompt. Writing faculty lace them with important writing objectives. Unfortunately, students don’t always realize they’re not fully engaging the prompt—what it’s asking, why it’s asking what it does, and what it hopes to accomplish. In “Cardboard Cutouts: The Paradox of Female Power,” Josie Gidman zeroes in unerringly on her essay prompt, which, intending to cultivate students’ interpretive skills through close analysis, asked her to pinpoint a key quotation that she considered fit uniquely, like a puzzle piece, into her text’s whole in such a way as to illuminate its complex, rich meaning. Firmly rooted in the specifics of her astutely chosen quotation (two other key prompt intents), Josie’s essay delivers a striking, nuanced interpretation of the “love arts” of the sacred harlot-priestess Shamhat—initiator of Enkidu into manhood and the world of humans—adroitly constituting and navigating between dissonant poles of real and artificial female power that she exposes in the nearly 3500-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh.

—Amy Goldman, Lecturer in the Writing Program

Read “Should a Chinese Citizen Celebrate Western Festivals?”.

Global Perspectives on Society not only challenged students to come to terms with sophisticated concepts and texts, but also to connect those concepts to their everyday experiences and unique cultural backgrounds. In addition, students worked to join authors of multiple texts in inquiry-driven conversation. Hancheng worked toward this essay by first analyzing James Rachels’ inquiry into the uses and limits of cultural relativism and Charles Taylor’s theory of cultural identity and the “politics of recognition.” He then moved to identify a “personal stake” issue, a relevant concrete example that he could analyze within a conceptual framework drawn from the Rachels and Taylor texts. In drafting his essay, Hancheng added Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martha Nussbaum’s thinking about cosmopolitanism to the conversation, creating in the end a rich and timely essay relevant not only to his own personal experiences and concerns, but also to those of the greater NYU Shanghai community.

—David Perry, Lecturer in the Writing Program