House of Mirth-Microcriticism
Micro assignments on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, you are free to choose the topic but it should be very narrow. This is not a short or a small, “micro” assignment, but an eight- to ten-page effort that looks “microscopically” at an issue of interpretation or rhetoric, as it gives a close reading of a narrow, minute textual issue or contingency within one literary text, without any assistance from secondary literary criticism.The literary critical essays we read should also provide examples when they engage with the literary text directly. Operating within quotations and rhetorical analyses of apparently minor details of your chosen text, argue a matter of interpretation, its development at a subtle level throughout passages or chapters of a text, and/or its implications as the text ages, or as critical schools of thought on the novel fall out of fashion.