Now it can be told

After I wrote about the joy of writing an essay question (read about it here), several readers asked to see the question in question. Your wish is my command:

For my Representative American Writers class, I wanted a question that would require upper-level literature students to reflect on the entire semester's reading, demonstrate some breadth of understanding of the works of Kate Chopin and Stephen Crane, and analyze specific works in depth. Here's what I wrote:

Representative Writings by Representative Writers
Most college students encounter only a few representative works by Stephen Crane and Kate Chopin: "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel," The Red Badge of Courage, "The Story of an Hour," "Desiree's Baby," and The Awakening. You, on the other hand, have read a great variety of works and have therefore developed a thorough understanding of these authors' stylistic choices and important themes, so you are aware that the above list is not entirely adequate. What is missing? What two works by these authors should be added to the list and why? Your task is to argue that students' understanding of Crane and Chopin is incomplete unless they read two works that you will select, one by Crane and one by Chopin. You must select works that are not on the above list and explain what they add to our understanding of the authors.


How did my students respond? I threw them a strike and they hit it, some of them right out oft the park. They selected interesting and sometimes surprising works and analyzed them with wit and passion. Several students argued for Crane's The Monster and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (which, one student wrote, "moves Crane's readers off of the battlefield, out of the water, away from the West, and into the mind of a desperate, urban young lady"). Kate Chopin's "The Storm" made a few appearances, while other students examined the puzzling story "A Vocation and a Voice."

The most unusual selection was an early example of muckraking journalism by Stephen Crane, "In the Depths of a Coal Mine," which, wrote my student, "touches upon the sublime, his work creating a nightmare world that drags the reader's imagination downward--he writes with such gripping and fluid detail that it is hard for one to not sink slowly into the depths." This, really, is what Crane repeatedly tried to do--immerse readers in the gritty reality of extreme situations--and this early piece of journalism provides an excellent frame for his more renowned later works, introducing techniques and ideas he would develop throughout his brief writing career.

My students took good advantage of the opportunity to sum up the impact of an entire semester's reading, and they analyzed the works with such insight that they made me want to go back and read all those stories again. The question accomplished everything I asked it to do, and so (mostly) did my students. The test passed the test! That's something to celebrate.