PHILOSOPHY
PROFESSOR
ESSAY #2 – 3-4 pages, plus cover letter and references page
Use Glover’s analysis of Nazism to critically analyze what happens to Primo Levi and others in Survival in Auschwitz. Your introduction should briefly discuss the subject matter of your paper and clearly state a thesis. Please be sure to put your thesis statement in boldface type. Please use one of the following ideas to focus your thesis:
- Engage the concept of moral imagination Glover discusses and use this concept to advance your understanding of what happened to Primo Levi and others in Auschwitz.
- What is more dangerous: the availability of technologies for mass killing or the fading away of a widely accepted moral law?
- How do social pressures against harm to others become weaker or stronger and to what extent are these social pressures related to propaganda or to people’s moral identity?
- If you want to focus your thesis on a different idea that is fine but you must clear it with me by sending me an email with your idea no later than Thursday 7 November 2019.
Be sure to demonstrate your knowledge and mastery of both Humanity and Survival in Auschwitz.
The general purpose of an analytical essay is to present surprising and new interpretations of a text. The essay should grab the reader’s attention and make her wonder: “Really? How could that be?” The reader should want to see what you see happening in the text because your thesis and supporting claims are not obvious and are definitely interesting. Please keep in mind that I will be really, truly supremely bored by essays that are mostly summaries and by essays that simply offer your opinions about a controversy.
I do not endorse the use of grades as a punishment or control mechanism, but I do want to be very clear: essays that are largely summaries of the assigned reading, or that are based on a basic and general thesis that repeats the assigned reading, will earn no higher than a C grade, and possibly substantially lower than a C grade. Your essays should be free of errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, citation, etc.
I am, in the strongest possible terms, encouraging each of you to make an appointment at the College Writing Center (see our syllabus for additional information about the Writing Center) prior to turning in your final version of this essay. As an incentive to your taking necessary and concrete steps to improving your writing I will add 5 POINTS on to the final grade of your essay #1 IF you attend a one-on-one tutoring session with a tutor and a rough draft, prior to the due date for this essay. You will need to turn in hard copies of your tutor slip and rough draft, marked up, to get this point addition.
In addition to your essay and references page, I am asking each of you to write me a short (no longer than one page) cover letter that you will hand in with your essay. In this cover letter I want you please to tell me anything you would like me to know about your essay, your experience writing the essay, etc.
Remember that one of my most important aims is to help you develop yourself as a curious and independent thinker, reader, writer, and speaker. Please, for your own sake, do not seek the opinions of others on non-scholarly websites, mass media, infotainment, etc. Wrestle with the texts. Read and re-read. Ask more, and more deeply engaged, questions in class. Pursue the ideas that other students raise in class. Disagree with what people say in class. Ask your parents, friends, co-workers what they think of your ideas, the subject matter of the readings, etc. And so on!
Please consider the following approaches to writing analytical essays:
- Offering a different reading from the dominant, commonly accepted interpretation of a text.
- Offering new ways to interpret the text by putting it in dialogue with another text.
- Offering a reading of an aspect of a text that has largely been ignored or considered.
- You have the option to try any of these approaches.
