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