What evidence might Gray use to support the idea that Brown casts doubt on both Enlightenment thinking and Christian mysticism? Cite specific examples from Wieland.

• exterior description of character and setting (at least three sentences)
• explicit thoughts about the setting (one sentence): “He thought,” “she thought”
• implicit thoughts/interior monologue (at least three sentences)
• character’s past or
• inner life
• explicit thoughts about the setting (one sentence)
• exterior description of character and setting (at least three sentences)

What breaks readers out of a character’s inner life? Abrupt movement back up this scale of closeness.

Try it.

How can you directly refute?

If you are conceding, what is the greater “support” to your thesis you can explicitly mention?

Brainstorm a brief plan for replying to each objection you are likely to encounter.

Because of such exclusions, much later American writing, and some would say the American imagination itself, revolted against Puritanism. In fact to many later artists the very idea of a “Puritan imagination” would come to seem a contradiction in terms. Hawthorne, one of whose ancestors was a judge at the Salem witchcraft trials, returned with a sense of curious ambiguity to the world of his steeple-hatted Puritan ancestors in The Scarlet Letter (1850). He tests the idea of “iron-bound” Puritan society against the world of nature, but discloses as well that the power of the Puritan spirit has not died. (31)

Or this one, about Anne Bradstreet:

But, though [Bradstreet's poem's] strongest subjects are drawn from the stuff of daily life . . . they have a metaphysical wit and texture that anticipate the works of a New Englander of two hundred years later, Emily Dickinson. This comes in part from the struggle between dissent and acceptance in the life of a strong-willed woman living in a commonwealth which required double submission, to domestic and divine duty, but also in part from the sense of felt experience she inherited from British poetry, mixing an alert vivacity with an apparent simplicity. Her love is marital, her landscape plain but brightly seen, her meditations troubled but ultimately pious, her awareness of nature acute but also respectful of the Maker of it. (22-23)

Trade machines.

Answer these questions about the thesis in front of you:

•            Is the thesis debatable? Exactly who would disagree with it? Why?

•            How could the thesis be made more focused, risky, and clear?

•            What question does it seem to answer? What ill-structured problem does it address?

•            What does the thesis imply about the essay? Reading the thesis, what predictions can you make about the essay?

•            What specific points do you think the essay will raise in support of the thesis?

Trade again. Answer the questions again.

1. How do your characters act in the face of opposition/desires that contrast with their own? Do they plan, try to persuade, take physical action, for example?
2. Describe three events that your central character remembers and that influence his or her current actions.
3. Who has power (physical, emotional, etc.) over whom and why? What’s the source of the power? How is it being used? Which of your characters’ actions express that power relationship? Which actions lead to shifts in that power?
4. What actions by which characters show relationships at risk rather than overt/obvious conflict between characters?
5. List scenes you currently feel you’ll need to write. Which actions should you summarize?