“Emma Undiscovered”, one of my earliest papers,
shows a development
from a summary to a reader-response approach.
The
paper is a character analysis of the title character Emma. My
earlier papers were highly subjective:
I had written in first person and had failed to support my arguments with the text
or outside
sources. At this stage of my writing,
I had learned to abstain
from using first person point of view while making my argument. In the paper, I argue that Jane Austen
fails to develop
the character Emma, thus subverting the “coming of age” motif. However, I fail to explicitly mention this
motif. Several
of the arguments crumble under lack of textual evidence. I fail to “unpack” a few of my ideas. The organization of the paper is
sound, yet I did not construct any sort
of outline while preparing it. My basic approach was to take notes while reading the
text. The paper opens with a literary
allusion to Shakespeare’s Polonius.
