Sample Essay Reviews
Below are links to some sample essay reviews, some that are published and some that are in response to a similar assignment for other graduate courses.
The published examples all review books rather than articles, but the format (as you'll see) is generally the same: An introductory paragraph which introduces the material under review, providing a brief summary and a sometimes implied rather than explicit claim about the reviewer's response to the material; summary and evaluative paragraphs of the material; a closing paragraph or two which renders an over-all critical evaluation of the material reviewed. For your assignment, you will want to offer in your introduction an explicit claim about your evaluation/response to the book-length study or 4 articles; you can organize your summary of and response to the book/articles as you think best, offering a conclusion at the end of the essay review. Four sample essay reviews by former students offer examples of how to meet the assignment's expectations.
- A review of Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America which I wrote a few years back, included below. This review is about half of the length of the essay review I'm expecting you to write, coming in at 2 pages rather than 4-5 pages. To develop the review for this assignment, one would develop the second and third paragraphs, at least doubling their content.
- A review of two books on contemporary American literature -- Timothy Melley's Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America and Arthur Saltzman's This Mad "Instead": Governing Metaphors in Contemporary Fiction -- which Phil Nel wrote. This review is about 4-5 pages in length, and you can read it through access to Project Muse.
- A review of two books on London -- Mike Phillips's London Crossings: a Biography of Black Britain and C. L. Innes's A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain 1700-2000 -- by Steven Barfield. This review is about 4 pages in length and was published in the online, peer-reviewed journal Literary London.
- The essay review "Generational Hauntings: The Family Romance in Contemporary Fictions of Raced History" by Kimberly Chabot Davis reviews two books as well, though is a bit longer than the assignment : Caroline Rody's The Daughter's Return: African-American and Caribbean Women's Fictions of History (2001) and Ashraf H. A. Rushdy's Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction (2001).
- The essay review "James Joyce after Postcolonialism" by Susan Harris is also a bit longer than the assigned length for your essay review. In her review of David Attridge and Marjorie Howes's Semicolonial Joyce (2000) and M. Keith Booker's Ulysses, Capitalism and Colonialism: Reading Joyce After The Cold War (2000), Harris's opening two paragraphs illustrate an alternate way to begin an essay review.
- Posted in K-State Online are four sample essay reviews from graduate classes I taught before, all written to fulfill this assignment. (If you only have time to read one of them, read Sample Essay Review 3 or Sample Essay Review 4.)
- Sample Essay Review 1 fulfills all of the expectations for the assignment, faltering just a bit on a clear global organization of ideas. It earned an A-.
- Sample Essay Review 2 fulfills nearly all of the expectations for the assignment, but requires additional evaluation of the articles reviewed and appropriate formatting at the start of the review. It earned a B+.
- Sample Essay Review 3 fulfills all of the expectations for the assignment, faltering only on incorporating an evaluative claim into its current thesis claim.
- Sample Essay Review 4 fulfills all of the expectations for the assignment.
Michael Kimmel. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press, 1996, 1997. 544 pp. Illus.
In his recent book, Michael Kimmel provides a thoughtful, carefully researched, and extremely readable cultural history of manhood and masculinity in America, beginning with the eighteenth-century debates about the new man for a new country: Will he be the Genteel Patriarch, a founding father with a slight air of the Continent and its foppery? The Heroic Artisan, a hardworking patriot whose physical labor is an art as well as a product? Or the Self-Made Man, who can craft his body and image many times over to traverse the shifting cultural shoals of the ensuing decades? With the help of historians and theorists like Nancy Cott and Eric Lott as well as cultural texts ranging from the novels of Herman Melville to the "M-F Test" of the 1930s that tested for appropriate gender role identification, Kimmel retraces the journey American society has asked its men to take towards that ideal of the Self-Made Man, a journey often completed at the expense of women, minorities, and their own happiness.
Just as women have been asked to survey themselves and shape their bodies and minds towards cultural ideals of the feminine, Kimmel neatly illustrates the degree to which men have been asked to perform an analogous task. As the ideal of manhood (a state attained at adulthood which signaled maturity of the inner self) gave way in the early nineteenth century to the ideal of masculinity (a state which must constantly be proved and re-proved), America's men started down a parallel path to the one that women tread—albeit one that provided greater scope for adventure on the frontiers of the Wild West or greater privacy in the domesticated "den" of the bourgeois home. Kimmel's discussion of American men’s increasing lack of control in the workforce at the end of the nineteenth century echoes the recent work of Susan Faludi, who traces the effects of America’s downwardly mobile culture upon the men of the 20th century. Fears of feminizing effects motivated these men to exert their masculinity by escaping to the "homosocial island hideaways" of drinking, fraternities, the gym, and magazines like Playboy, as well as asserting control over traditionally female preserves, like elementary education in the 1930s.
Indeed, reading Kimmel's cultural history one is struck by how familiar the situations are across the decades -- how men in the nineteenth-century struggled to find and maintain a self commensurate with the consumer capitalist ethos of competition, just as they do at the end of the twentieth century. Kimmel addresses this recurring pattern in his "Epilogue" to emphasize that this identity of the Self-Made Man is not natural, that it has a history, as his previous chapters so clearly illustrate. It is, therefore, an identity that can be altered. Kimmel concludes by calling for a new conception of masculinity, one not based on the "trail blazed by Self-Made Man," for this trail is in truth but "a spiral path leading only back to itself, to a relentless retesting of an unprovable ambition" (333). Instead, we must initiate "a democratic manhood" that "renounces" the battle to prove manhood, since that battle cannot be won as it is currently configured (335). Claiming that "the real 'man-haters'...are those right-wing zealots who believe that men cannot change their violent ways," Kimmel advocates support for a feminism that recognizes men and women as socially constructed beings who can be equal and still remain different. Too optimistic? While Kimmel spends most of the book marking the extremely well-worn road men have followed to self-made manhood, he does note those who have advocated a different path, like William Lloyd Garrison and sociologist Lester Ward. Perhaps, then, we have a right to be optimistic as we look into the next century -- perhaps we must be, if we wish to resolve the cultural tensions that fray the selves of both men and women at the end of the twentieth-century.
from The Forum: Women's Studies at the College of Charleston. III.1 (1999).
