Essay two

Critics spend large amounts of energy looking for faults in others’ work that could better be spent building on it. ~Deborah Tannen (Agonism in Academic Discourse,” p. 1661)

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your allys assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. ~ Kenneth Burke (The Philosophy of Literary Form 1974, p. 110-111)

We might imagine its the job of an academic essayist to stage a debate with sides and a winner and a loser. However, a more nuanced and accurate metaphor for scholarly argumentation is conversation. In intellectual conversation, the goal is not to defeat the opposition but to advance the collective understanding of a community of interested readers. In such writing, the author’s own contributions to the conversation are crucial. If the writer is not present in the essay as participant and mediator, the essay will devolve into a mere report of what others have said. In essence, the goal of an essay is to build on others’ ideas in order to produce new knowledge. The goal of scholarship is not to have the final word, but to have the next word.

Task: The first 3 assigned texts for this section of the course respond to intersecting notions of the role of the doctor-patient relationship, dimensions of care, and the self in health and illness: Charons Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust, Broyards Doctor Talk to Me and Alcabess The Twilight Self.

• Write a 1,500- to 2,000-word essay that puts at least two of these readings in conversation. Then become the next interlocutor in the conversation. As the other authors do, your job is to locate a scholarly problem in a status quo and destabilizer that you find across these texts, optionally in concert with a separate object of analysis, and then make your own contribution that moves the conversation forward into new understanding.
• You have the option to bring an object of analysis into the conversation: some real-world event, experience, text (including The Knife or Contemplating Beauty in a Disabled Body), physical object, work of art, or other thing that dramatizes the scholarly problem. Working with an object of analysis that is not a traditional written text allows us to apply close reading in a broader range of contexts and transfer these skills to other disciplines. In Essay 1, the object of analysis was a written text.
• Please use MLA style, 9th edition, to format your essay, correctly cite all the sources you use, and include a Works Cited page at the end.

Your final draft must also:

• Follow all formatting guidelines specified in the course syllabus
• Specify the word count at the end of the essay and before the Works Cited page. Example: Word count: 1,750. For purposes of calculating word count, please include the title and main essay text, but exclude the header info and Works Cited page.
• Include a one-paragraph explanation of how the final draft is a substantial revision of the first draft. The purpose of this paragraph is not to make the case that the final version is better than the earlier drafts, but rather to describe your revision process and the choices you made that led from first to final draft.

Write like a real world event