What makes an effective researched argument?

Goal: The goal of any literary research paper is to add an original interpretation to a scholarly conversation about a literary text. Take a look at how rhetorical and literary theorist Kenneth Burke describes all acts of researched writing:

In a researched argument, you should:

1. Establish the scholarly conversation that you are entering.
2. Engage in debate with other scholars by analyzing the literary text
3. Form an original interpretation about the literary text through close reading

Introductions

Goals:

• Develops an interpretive or intellectual problem—either drawn from research into how other scholars have interpreted the poem or short story or drawn from a detail in the story itself that bears some tension, irony, ambiguity, or disjunction that connects to a larger scholarly conversation.
• Poses an original claim about the literary text that either:
  • Adds new evidence
  • Adds a new interpretation
  • Disagrees with a previous interpretation

Sample Introductions

The Introduction should accomplish four steps:

1. Establish an Interpretive Problem: Observe the juxtaposing elements in the story that have caused an interpretive gap or tension and establish the significance of these elements.
2. Describe a Major Interpretive Debate: Describe, in a couple of sentences, how various scholars have approached this text, genre, or work from this poet/time period. What problems have emerged in writing about this exhibit? What conversation are you joining?
3. Thesis Statement: After reviewing the previous scholarship, state your claim. What are you arguing in this paper?
4. Road Map: How are you going to support your argument? What’s the layout for this paper?

Take a look at the sample introductions from Laura Wilder and Joanna Wolfe’s Digging into Literature. ^[3] Where/How does this introduction accomplish each of these four steps?

Argument

• Engages in conversation with literary scholars throughout the essay, showing how their interpretation affirms, contrasts, contradicts and resolves the interpretive problem posed by literary scholars.
• Uses contextual and argumentative sources to support and challenge their analysis of the text.
• Uses close reading strategies to deeply analyze the literary text.
• Resolves the interpretive problem through a deep analysis of the text.

Conclusion:

• Discuss the significance of their analysis to the research being done on that area of literary study.
• Identify one question or problem that still remains for the field of scholarship on the subject.

Sample Researched Argument

The White Gaze in “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

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Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa, captured at a young age, and sold into slavery. Despite the violent history that she lives through, her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” opens by expressing gratitude towards a system only referred to in the poem as “mercy.” Due to this discrepancy between the violent history she lives through and the evangelical understanding of that history expressed in the poem, critics have long questioned whether her poetry is a true expression of herself. No one tells the story of Wheatley’s legacy better than Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who, in his article “Phillis Wheatley on Trial,” describes how the Black Nationalist movement zeroed in on “On Being Brought from Africa to America” because there was no outcry in the poem—no objection to being brought to America. The poem was absent of the longing to return back to Africa that the Black Nationalist movement invested in (Gates 87). These critics also decried her poetic style, which imitated White, Enlightenment poets like Alexander Pope (Baraka, Barnum, and Thurman, as cited in Gates 87). Despite this backlash to Wheatley’s poetry, the authenticity of her work remains hotly debated today. Debates over her poetry were revived in the 80’s/90’s when scholars like William J. Scheik, Sondra O’Neale, James Levernier, and Mark Edelman Boren began to document how the biblical allusions and metaphors of her poetry, when read closely, were more subversive than appeared on first glance. This is how Wheatley has continued to be read today, with scholars questioning to what extent her subversions were explicit enough to change the cultural landscape of eighteenth-century America.

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This paper will argue that the binary readings of Wheatley presented—one in which she is an “Uncle Tom figure” (Gross, as cited in Gates 87) and another in which she is a subversive, revolutionary poet (Levernier)—are both self-consciously represented by Wheatley in the poem. The poem is an example of early discussions of Black identity formation, one in which she is locked into two modes of being: gratitude and resistance. We will start by looking at the most contentious aspects of the poem—the gratitude for Christianity. Looking at the rhetorical construction of the speaker/reader relationship, we will uncover how the poem imagines her White, Christian reader and, in turn, how that White, Christian reader imagines her subjectivity. Following, we will then look at the allusions to the Transatlantic Slave Trade to affirm that these allusions demonstrate the subversiveness of her poetry. Subversive both in demonstrating the White reader’s understanding of her diasporic identity and in showcasing the fluidity of that identity in its early formation.

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Arguments against reading Wheatley in a subversive light hinge on the evangelical Christian sentiments that open the first lines, particularly the idea that Africa consists of a “pagan land.” As Henry Louis Gates discusses, for Black nationalist thinkers, her description of her African origins as a “pagan” place was a rejection of her Black identity, an attempt to assimilate to her white readership. However, these opening lines are particularly interesting because of the pronoun usage in the opening lines. The opening line says, “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,” (Wheatley 1). While on the surface the line looks like a benign Christian gratitude for salvation, the pronoun usage in these early lines suggests an alienation that Wheatley feels between herself and her African origins. She has been “brought,” perhaps we might imagine “removed” from her land. The disjunction between “me” and “my pagan land,” suggests a fundamental bifurcation of the self that begins the poem. In many accounts of Wheatley’s Black identity, she is conceived to be assimilationist because her poem suggests, “ludicrous [departure] from the huge black voices that splintered southern nights with their hollers, chants, arwhoolies, and ballits,” (Baraka, as cited in Gates 87). But, I want to suggest that the bifurcation of the self that begins the poem, which initially may look like an assimilationist rejection of Africa—is actually a meditation on how the transatlantic slave trade has shaped her identity—an early example of Du Bois’s “double consciousness” of African-American identities.

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As many scholars have noted, the poem seems to subversively contend with her relationship with evangelical Christianity, which we may note was a condition of her education. The reference to “mercy” in the first line is particularly troubling—as we know that it was not mercy, but the transatlantic slave trade that brought her to the U.S. How are we to read this reference to mercy? Are we to read it as a moment of cognitive dissonance between Wheatley’s understanding of her history and herself? Are we to read it as an imitation of forms of poetry that she was reading as part of her education? I suggest that we read it as ironic. In both of the interpretations mentioned above, there is a fundamental tension between the reader’s awareness and, supposedly, Wheatley’s awareness. In fact, the title page of the original publication announces that she was a “servant to John Wheatley”—the 18th century reader would have been well-aware of the implications of this position of servitude, would have been aware of the conditions of life that brought Africans to the U.S. Rather than looking at this line for absence of reference to the transatlantic slave trade, I think we should attend to the passivity of the line—the lack of agency she expresses in this opening of the poem. The passive construction of the sentence gives agency to mercy rather than any singular person for the double-consciousness that she is expressing in the rest of the line. It is because of this passivity that she is able to call the land “pagan,” the italicization of which suggests irony. In fact, Mark Edelman Boren suggests that stress is being put on the term pagan in order to undercut the conventional association between the idea of Africa as a pagan landscape and the Africa that Wheatley comes from (45). In this opening line, Wheatley seems to be undercutting the conventional notions that the reader might have of African poets—undercutting the idea that they are grateful for the violence being inflicted on them.

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This passive construction continues to influence Wheatley’s perception of herself in the next line of the poem: “Taught my benighted soul to understand” (2). Based on the claims I’ve made in the previous paragraphs, we can trust that Wheatley has already unmoored the reader’s associations between both: the evangelical conception that the transatlantic slave trade was founded on benevolence and the association between Africa and paganism. The poem continues to make her identity the focus of the poem. In this line, she is now thinking about her “benighted soul.” While we may look at the denotative definition of this line and think that it suggests that her soul was lacking of the opportunity to be saved before she was enslaved, we might also continue to look at the passive construction of this definition. Wheatley uses the term benighted because, while suggesting that she lacked the opportunity to be saved, it also suggests that the lack of opportunity was bestowed on her by another force or person. There is an external influence shaping Wheatley’s identity in the poem—perhaps, that of the reader. As James Levernier notes, despite, or because of, the reader’s awareness of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, the poem would not have been published if Wheatley expressed explicit protest of the conditions of her enslavement (174). At the same time, this passive construction as well as the irony in these opening lines suggests that Wheatley is self-consciously aware of the suppression of her ideas brought about by the presence of the reader. As she constructs the image of herself as a poet, she has to remove herself from her African origins, has to invest in the gratitude conditioned by evangelical Christianity, has to alienate herself from the consciousness of her enslaved condition.

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In other words, our reading of the first two lines of the poem suggests that this poem is actually about her identity as a Black poet. In W.E.B. DuBois’s “Strivings of the Negro People,”, he describes “double-consciousness” as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” In the first two lines of the poem, we see the measurements of White evangelical Christianity—with its expectation that an African poet is grateful for her servitude—being ironically unsettled by Wheatley. If we look at the pattern of pronouns being used throughout the poem, we can see a self-consciousness in the first half of her octave, with a consistent attention on “me…my land…my benighted soul…I…” (1, 2, 4). Then, in the second half of the poem, as Wheatley shifts from a discussion of Christianity to a more overt discussion of the perceptions of Africans, her pronouns shift as well: “Our…Their…Christians…” (5-7). While the first half of the poem may look assimilationist, the second half of the poem showcases a conscious alignment with an African race. She is, as DuBois writes “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

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In the opening lines of the poem, Wheatley seems to be contesting the White reader’s idea that the Black poet, Black person, is ultimately grateful for their condition. In the second half of the poem, her task is to define the Black identity. As she tries to do so, she realizes that she is limited by the terms given to her by the White Christian establishment. In the final lines of the poem, she writes, “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,/May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train” (7-8). It is here that we get our first references to the transatlantic slave trade, if we choose to read them that way. The final line describes the condition of reformed Black Christians as “refin’d” an oddly classed word to use if we perceive that line as depicting the conversion of Christians (8). However, the word would also have been used as a reference to the process of ‘refining sugar,’ a process by which manufacturers remove impurities and color from the unprocessed cane. Given its most popular usage in the eighteenth century, I suspect that the eighteenth century reader would have associated the word “refined” with sugar manufacturing (“Refine, V.”). Levernier also notes that these words had already taken on the association with these industries in Quaker circles—that is, circles that sought to abolish slavery it the Americas (182). Upon further looking at the language of the last two lines, we may also see the simile “black as Cain” as contributing to our imagination that she is referring to sugar (7). While she is making a biblical allusion to the more violent of Cain and Abel, the homophone also makes the allusion to sugar cane, which is black in nature. By looking carefully at the language she is using, we can see that her description of the religious system of conversion is also an allusion to the process of refining sugar. As White Christians take indigenous people and convert them to Christianity, so too do enslaved Africans farm black cane and refine it into white sugar. In these final lines of the poem, Wheatley seems to acknowledge that the language of Christianity can’t escape the slave trade. As a poet and author, neither can she.

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As Wheatley tries to define and articulate a Black identity, she finds herself limited by the language of the transatlantic slave trade. In other words, we can read her poem as an articulation of the ways Black identity becomes founded on the violence of the transatlantic slave trade. While the reference to the sugar refinement process is her most referenced subversive metaphor, she also refers to her Black-ness as a “die” and the race itself as “sable.” In other words, when Wheatley constructs race, she does it under the metaphors of the valuable industrial trades: either a dye used for clothing or a valuable fur. We can read these metaphors in two complementary respects. First, the metaphors are skin-based, suggesting that this early social construction of race is partially based on skin color. Second, the metaphors are both references to a violent process enacted on an object that is then likened to violence being perpetuated on the bodies of African slaves—either through the burning of skin as a result of the dying process or the skinning of an animal. As Gates notes, Seymour Gross has said that Wheatley was a “perfect Uncle Tom Figure” (87). However, this ironic use of dialogue suggests otherwise. This suggests that, while criticizing the White reader’s perception of Black writers, she also must criticize the transatlantic slave trade, for limiting her ability to articulate Black identity in the first place.

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In other words, we may re-read Wheatley’s poem as an early articulation of Black diasporic identities. In Michelle Wright’s Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora, she discusses the difficulties of expressing diasporic identities in Western literature. “On one end stands the…hypercollective, essentialist identity, which provides comfort of absolutist assertions in exchange for the total annihilation of self…” she writes. “On the other end stands the hyperindividual identity…which grants a hyperindividualized self in exchange for the annihilation of ‘Blackness’ as a collective term” (2). Wheatley’s poem seems to be straddling these two identity positions—one in which her individuality as a poet, something she is praised for in the opening advertisement of her 1773 volume of poetry, is founded on a rejection of her African heritage and one in which she can be Black, but must be perceived as part of a “diabolic” or “sable” race. Looking back at my own analysis of this poem, it seems Wheatley is limited by these dual conceptions of her identity. However, I think the poem ultimately represents an act of liberation: by self-consciously examining the limitations placed on her by the transatlantic slave trade and Christianity’s role in perpetuating the ideologies of slavery, she is able to express a fundamental tenet of Black oppression—the inability to exist outside of socially constructed categories of being.

Works Cited

Boren, Mark Edelman. “A Fiery Furnace and a Sugar Train: Metaphors That Challenge the

Legacy of Phillis Wheatley’s ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America.’” CEA Critic,

vol. 67, no. 1, 2004, pp. 38–56.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “Strivings of the Negro People.” The Atlantic, Aug. 1987,

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/. Accessed 12 Aug. 2023.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis. “Phillis Wheatley on Trial.” The New Yorker, 20 Jan. 2003, pp. 82-87.

Levernier, James A. “Style as Protest in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley.” Style, vol. 27, no. 2,

1993, pp. 172–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42946037. Accessed 12 Aug. 2023.

“Refine, V.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1053806037.

Wheatley, Phillis. “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” Penguin Book of Migration 

Literature, edited by Dohra Ahmad, Penguin, 2019.

—. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. London, A. Bell, 1773.

Wright, Michelle. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Duke UP, 2004.