In the wider academic world, review essays are commissioned by journals to “take the temperature” of a discipline. A scholar is invited to review a handful of recent works and to discuss emerging trends, theoretical debates, and new approaches that are changing the field.
Your task in this assignment is analogous, but slightly different. You can’t fall back on a deep understanding of the discipline, so you won’t be able to assess the contribution of the review pieces to a wider scholarship. Instead, you will focus on isolating core arguments from each piece and making connections between them. Your analysis will integrate answers to the following questions:
1) “What is the major argument, or thesis, of each assigned text?”; and
2) “Taken together, what do these texts contribute to a reader’s understanding of the topics and themes they address?”
Sample Solution
