I Still Can’t Write Conceptual English Lit Essays And I’m Tired Of Faking It
I’m sitting in the third floor of the university library right now, my oat latte went cold an hour ago, and there’s a crumb of salted chocolate chip cookie stuck to the corner of my marked essay. I just got it back yesterday, and the red ink jumping out at me is the same comment I’ve gotten on every essay this semester: “Good grasp of plot, needs more conceptual depth.”
I don’t know how to do that. I love the books we read. I stayed up until 1am last week finishing Wuthering Heights and couldn’t fall asleep after because I kept thinking about how creepy it is that Heathcliff digs up Cathy’s coffin just to lie next to her. I texted my best friend at 2am about it, ranted for 10 minutes about how no one talks about how much he just likes being miserable, how his big grand love is half just wanting to punish everyone who ever made him feel less than. That’s a thought, right? But when I sit down to write an essay, that thought turns to mush in my head. I start panicking that it’s not “conceptual” enough, that it’s just some dumb thing I noticed, and then I start rummaging through JSTOR for fancy phrases to stick on top of it.
Last essay, on Pride and Prejudice, I copied a line from a journal article that said “Austen problematizes the nineteenth-century marriage market.” I thought that sounded really conceptual, so I stuck it in the introduction, built the whole essay around it, and when I got it back my prof wrote in the margin next to that line: “Do you actually believe this? Where’s your reading?” I wanted to sink through the floor. Of course I didn’t believe it, not really. I just thought that’s what you’re supposed to say. My roommate, who’s in the same lit program as me, writes stuff like that all the time, and she gets A’s. She explained to me last week over ramen that conceptual just means you don’t just say what happens, you say what the text is really talking about, underneath the story. But that’s what I did with Heathcliff in my 2am text! Why is that okay for texting but not for an essay?
I went to office hours last month to ask my prof what conceptual writing even means, anyway. He leaned back in his chair, sipped his terrible office coffee, and said “Just stop describing the plot and ask what it means.” That’s it. That’s the advice. That’s like telling someone who can’t swim to just stop drowning. I left his office more confused than when I went in, and then I ran into him at the grocery store ten minutes later, he was grabbing a frozen pepperoni pizza for dinner, I was getting a gallon of milk, and we made awkward eye contact and I just waved and hurried down the cereal aisle before he could ask me anything else. I still think about that sometimes, how he’s just a regular guy who eats frozen pizza, but I can’t bring myself to ask him any more questions because I feel stupid for not getting something that everyone else seems to just get.
Here’s the weird contradiction: I think about books all the time. I overanalyze the little things when I’m walking to class, I argue with my roommate about whether Nick Carraway actually likes Gatsby or just feels bad for him for an hour every Sunday. When I do that, I’m being conceptual without even trying. Last week I told her that I think Nick is just as fake as all the old money people he judges, he just hides it behind being the quiet narrator. That’s a concept! That’s an idea no one handed to me, that’s just something I got from reading the book. But when I have to write it down for a grade, suddenly I’m convinced it’s too simple, too obvious, not big enough. I start adding all these extra layers that don’t need to be there, I use words I don’t normally use, and it ends up sounding like someone else wrote it.
I saw a thread on Reddit once where all these lit majors were talking about how they fake conceptual writing by just taking their real thought and rephrasing it with academic words. Like, if you think “Heathcliff is weirdly into being sad,” you write “Heathcliff’s attachment to posthumous grief interrogates Romantic conceptions of redemptive love.” I tried that for my last essay. It still didn’t work. I got that same comment back: needs more conceptual depth. Maybe I’m bad at swapping the words. Or maybe that’s not actually what they want. I don’t know anymore.
What I do know is that every time I open a blank document for a lit essay, I get this tight feeling in my chest. I have a post-it note stuck to my laptop that says “what’s your big idea?” and I just stare at it for 20 minutes. All the model essays the department puts up online are so perfect, they have these huge concepts tying everything together, they connect 19th century novels to modern identity politics or whatever, and I read them and think I’ll never be able to do that. I’m still just over here noticing that all the mothers in Jane Austen’s novels are either dead or kind of terrible, and I can’t figure out how to turn that into something conceptual enough for a grade.
I don’t have a neat wrap-up for this, by the way. I didn’t suddenly figure it out this morning while I was eating my cookie and drinking my cold coffee. I still don’t know how to write the kind of essays they want. I think maybe I’m getting a little closer, though. I realized yesterday that the problem isn’t that I don’t have concepts, it’s that I think conceptual means it has to be big and fancy and come from someone else’s book, not from the thing I actually noticed when I was reading at 2am. I’m still scared to write that thing down, though. What if it’s actually too dumb? What if I get that same comment again?
My roommate just texted me, she’s at the boba place down the street, she asked again if I want a drink. I think I’m gonna go with her. I’ll leave this blank document open, leave the half-baked idea about Heathcliff and his weird miserable grudge sitting there. Maybe when I come back I’ll just write it how I’d say it, and adjust the words a little to sound less like a 2am text, and see what happens. If I get another comment about needing more conceptual depth, so be it. I’m tired of faking it anyway. (Word count: 1182)
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » I Still Can’t Write Conceptual English Lit Essays And I’m Tired Of Faking It