In this essay you should formulate an argument about The Sweet Hereafter emphasizing one of the critical approaches we have studied in class. By now you should know the kinds of questions and issues someone looking through this critical lens would have, but you should also recognize that an individual reader uses other lenses, too. So the feminist critic must also look closely at the text’s mixed messages and ambiguities of language to make a case that what is said is more complicated than what appears to be the case at first – using an approach associated with deconstruction. And the cultural critic will connect historical, social, and economic knowledge surrounding the topic she/he is interested in, as a way to read a text, thus privileging issues like class (as a Marxist critic would) or the author’s individual experiences (as a Psychoanalytic critic would). Even though you choose one lens, you will have to employ others. Certainly you will have to privilege the text itself – as the formalists said (although without their assumptions). But maybe picking an approach first puts the cart before the horse (to use that old cliché). Maybe what matters most are the questions you set out to answer (or deal with, at least). Your essay can start with a theme in the work, a comparison, a complex character, a textual puzzle, a problem, an issue beyond the text (What different versions of a fairy tale tell us about the respective cultures and their values; The Sweet Hereafter as an indictment/examination/defense of the American legal system, the problem of “truth” or the role of memory in The Sweet Hereafter, the complicated character of Dolores or Billy or Nichole or Mitchell Ansel in TSH, relations between fathers/sons or fathers/daughters or mothers/sons or mothers/daughters in the text/s, gender issues in either text, what’s missing or ambiguous in either text, how the text compares with the movie version, etc.). The best essays start with questions and end up positing answers (or a few answers or tentative answers or new questions). So start with some (related) questions; then plan how to go about answering them. Sources? For the fairy tales, you have a good start in your Norton Critical Edition. For The Sweet Hereafter, reviews, critical articles, historical or sociological or psychological essays or books, interviews, cultural artifacts, things said elsewhere (in or out of class), newspaper articles – all of the sources writers we have read this semester use and more (movies, even). What I require is that you use TWO sources outside the text, but you may need more, depending on what question you set up for yourself.