You are expected to make reference to particular works we have read or ideas the class has discussed, but no additional research will be expected.

This essay, as any academic essay, should have an introduction, thesis statement, body, and conclusion. It should be formal in tone, though it need not be written entirely in third person.

It should be at least 900 words in length.

Write an essay which explains the idea and argues either in its favor or against its claim.

The study of literature "is the place—there is no other in most schools—the place wherein the chief matters of concern are particulars of humanness—individual human feeling, human response, and human time, as these can be known through the written expression (at many literary levels) of men living and dead, and as they can be discovered by student writers seeking through words to name and compose and grasp their own experience. English [that is, literature] in sum is about my distinctness and the distinctness of other human beings. Its function, like that of some books called 'great,' is to strive at once to know the world through art, to know what if anything he uniquely is, and what some brothers uniquely are. The instruments employed are the imagination, the intellect, and texts or events that rouse the former to life . . . . [T]he goal . . . is to expand the areas of the human world—areas that would not exist but for art—with which individual man can feel solidarity and coextensiveness." [Benjamin DeMott, Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America 143 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969)]