Why I Still Panic When My Lit Prof Asks For a “Conceptual” Essay
I’m sitting in the third floor of the university library right now, and there’s a quarter-sized coffee stain blurring the prompt on my printed syllabus. The prompt’s for my 20th century American lit essay, due at 5pm tomorrow, and the last line is “Your analysis should be conceptual, not merely descriptive.” I’ve read that line twelve times in the past hour, and I still don’t know what it’s asking for. My copy of The Great Gatsby is splayed open next to my laptop, dog-eared at the part where Gatsby throws his silk shirts all over Daisy’s bedroom, and I have a smudge of blueberry muffin on the trackpad. The girl next to me has been sniffling into her hoodie for 20 minutes, and the heating’s cranked so high my socks are sticking to my ankles. That’s all I can focus on, instead of being conceptual.
I’ve gotten the same comment on every lit essay I’ve written since freshman year. “Too much plot summary, not enough conceptual argument.” Last semester, I pulled an all-nighter writing an essay about the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and all I said was that it’s pretty, that Gatsby stares at it when he’s lonely, that it feels like something you want so bad you can almost touch it, but never will. I got a C- back, and my prof wrote in big red pen in the margin: This is just your impression of the book. Where is the concept? I sat outside her office after that, eating a crumbly honey oat granola bar I’d bought from the vending machine, waiting to ask what a concept even was. When her door opened and she looked out at me, I just pretended I was scrolling my email, too awkward to go in. I waited until the next student went in, then walked away.
My friend Lila, who gets A’s on all her essays, says it’s easy. She says you just pick a big fancy concept that’s trendy right now, find three parts of the text that fit, and boom, you’re done. I tried that last month for my Frankenstein essay. I remembered the prof mentioned necropolitics in lecture once, and it sounded super smart, so I spent three hours paraphrasing a Wikipedia entry about it, stuck it in my intro, then sort of squinted and connected it to the monster being left to die by Victor. I got that essay back last week, and the comment was: This concept is interesting, but you don’t engage with it. What does it tell us that other concepts don’t? I felt so stupid. I knew it was bad when I was writing it. I just wanted to sound like I knew what I was doing, same as everyone else.
Everyone else in my seminar seems to get it, anyway. They’ll raise their hand halfway through discussion and say things like “This can be read through the lens of reproductive injustice” and the prof nods like that’s exactly what she wanted to hear. I’m over here sitting on my hands because the only thing I couldn’t stop noticing in Frankenstein was that Elizabeth Lavenza always brings Victor soup when he’s stressed, and that’s the only consistent nice thing that happens to him the whole book. That feels too small to say out loud. That’s just… an observation. Not a concept.
I was cleaning out my old backpack yesterday, getting ready to donate it because the strap broke, and I found a beat-up notebook from when I read Gatsby for the first time in 10th grade. I flipped to the back, and there was a messy note scrawled in pencil in the margin, all in capitals: Gatsby’s whole house is like my public Instagram. He posts all the fancy parties and all the nice shirts to look cool for the person he likes, but he never actually uses any of it. I stared at that for a minute. When I wrote that, I wasn’t trying to write an essay. I was just saying what I felt, after I’d spent a whole weekend taking 47 photos of my dorm desk just to post one that looked perfect even though I never study there.
But isn’t that a concept? Like, aspirational class performance, how consumerism turns your whole identity into something you perform for other people? That’s the same thing all those fancy JSTOR essays say about Gatsby, right? They just use bigger words for it. I’ve been staring at that note all morning. I was originally just going to write the same thing everyone writes about Gatsby, that the American dream is dead, that’s safe, that’s definitely conceptual enough. But now I’m leaning toward writing the Instagram thing.
I’m still scared, though. I still think it’s too dumb, too personal, not rigorous enough. I still spent an hour last night scrolling through old essays on JSTOR looking for a scholar who said something even a little bit like this, just so I can cite them and feel like I’m not making it up out of nowhere. I still catch myself thinking that if I just quote the right theorist, I’ll sound smart enough, even if I don’t fully get what the theorist is saying.
I don’t know. I’m still terrible at this. I still panic when I see “conceptual” written anywhere on a rubric. I still leave office hours more confused than I went in, because no one can actually explain what it means—they just know it when they see it. Half of me thinks I’ll turn this essay in with the Instagram idea and get another C minus, and a comment that says it’s not conceptual enough. The other half thinks… maybe concepts don’t just come from big books written by dead guys with PhDs. Maybe they start with the thing you can’t stop noticing, the thing that feels too small or too stupid to say out loud.
That doesn’t mean I’m good at it now. I still have three paragraphs left to write, and I keep getting up to get more water even though my bottle’s full. The coffee stain’s still there on the syllabus. I still don’t know if this is going to work. But it’s the first idea I’ve had in a long time that actually feels like mine.
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