Paper One Assignment: Explicating Othello

Explication is a reading practice that asks you to focus on a small part of a text. It helps you develop an interpretation, claim, or argument about a text by asking you to identify details that seem important, speculate about their significance, and turn this speculation into a conclusion about the text as a whole. Explication is not a summary, nor is it a word-by-word explanation of the text. You can think about explication as an analytical tool, a way to break down language and complex ideas so that the meaning of the text becomes more apparent to you. Explication takes what is implicit or subtle in a work of literature and makes it explicit and clear. Articulate for your readers what they haven’t seen before because they haven’t interpreted the evidence as you have. For this paper, you are to locate a passage of about ten lines that contains a moment of irony and explicate it. We’ve seen how Iago’s soliloquies create dramatic irony.

And the fact that at the play’s end almost everyone is dead while Cassio lives, when so much of the drama had been about his potential demise, is one of Othello’s greatest situational ironies. See the attached handout “The Ironies” that describes yet other types of irony. How and why is the irony you find important for our understanding of the play? (You’ll also find this handout on this week’s Context Page). Again, don’t tell us something we can all see readily ourselves. Try to bring to light aspects of the play that might be otherwise missed without your close study of the passage’s language. Above the title of your paper include the passage you have chosen (single-spaced). Your paper should be about four pages in length (not including the passage) and follow all other formatting guidelines listed on the course wiki. Generate initially more thoughts about the lines you’ve selected than you can use in a final reading. After generating, narrow the focus of your analysis, first by drawing connections across your interpretations, and second by sorting and editing those connections into a cohesive and organized reading. We’ll practice in class how to prioritize and edit your ideas. Close reading is often a circular process. You usually must go around and around – details, associations, and conclusions – and back through the cycle again to really arrive at solid analysis.