Uploading the rest of my junior + senior year writing samples soon.
Jun. Year, Sem 2: Romance (ENGL 4203/5003)
I wrote this close reading sample towards the beginning of my second semester of junior year. The course I wrote it for was cross-listed as a graduate-level course, and the professor for whom I wrote it would become one of the professors who most challenged me in my study of literature, always pushing me to go deeper into the texts and be more specific with my analyses. During this semester I made a conscious effort to be more precise with my language than I ever had been before. This paper marks the very start of my goal to achieve hyper-precision in my language (a goal I am still working towards and will always be working towards, as there is always room for improvement when it comes to writing) and the papers written after this one reflect the progress I have made as a result of challenging myself in this way.
Jun. Year, Sem 1: Women and Gender in Antiquity (HON 3993)
I have always been fascinated by the literature of classical antiquity (~800 BCE – 16 BCE), so I was especially excited when this Honors Colloquium course entitled “Women and Gender in Antiquity” let me get my hands on texts I had never read before. These included the poetry of Sappho and Catullus, as well as lesser-known poems by Archaic Greek poets like Phocylides, Hipponax, Anakreon, and Semonides of Amorgos.
As we read, we focused on a common thread that ran through all of the texts: ancient attitudes towards gender and sexuality. More specifically, ancient attitudes towards women. (Spoiler alert, they’re not great).
I wrote the following (short) essay on the text we devoted the bulk of our class time to discussing: Aeschylus’s Oresteia. In it, I discuss the trilogy’s three interconnected blood crimes that pit man against woman: Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, and Orestes’ matricide. Through an analysis of the language that Aeschylus employs to discuss the ethical weight of each crime as well as the blame its perpetrator deserves, I build towards the following conclusion: According to Aeschylus, and, by extension, the dominant worldview of ancient Greek civilization, rational governance is directly linked with the subordination of women.
Jun. Year, Sem 1: Reading & Writing Oklahoma (ENGL 3223)
“How did a 22-seat tasting-menu spot from three chefs whom no one has ever heard of, in a city that no national critic has ever paid attention to, become America’s best new restaurant?” — Andrew Knowlton, Bon Appétit Magazine
I read the above headline in the September 2018 edition of Bon Appétit, which had just named Nonesuch — a humble little building situated on North Hudson Avenue in Oklahoma City — “America’s Best New Restaurant.” As a lover of all things food and local culture related, I knew I had to try their eleven-course menu for myself. I waited until the reservation window opened back up again (in the wake of the Bon Appétit feature, you had to reserve your spot two months in advance) and managed to snag two seats for the second week of November.
Nonesuch was phenomenal. In fact, it was so phenomenal that I ended up incorporating it into my final project in an English course entitled “Reading and Writing Oklahoma.” Our assignment was to choose any topic related to Oklahoma’s cultural history, and then to write a paper + give a presentation on that topic. We were encouraged to choose a topic that extended our knowledge of Oklahoma in significant ways, covering ground that we had not already covered in class.
Q: But what does this one restaurant have to do with the history and culture of the state of Oklahoma? A: A lot. Nonesuch offers a hyper-local and hyper-seasonal menu, which means the chefs only use locally-sourced ingredients (the availability of which changes as frequently as does Oklahoma’s weather forecasts) to create their dishes. But this style of cooking is nothing new. For most of human history, our only option was to rely upon that which our immediate surroundings provided for food.
The first people in Oklahoma to master the art of preparing meals that depended utterly upon the changing seasons and the migration patterns of various animals were, of course, the Native Americans. Like the chefs at Nonesuch, the Native Americans had an intimate relationship with their land and treated food preparation as an art. They used what was available when it was available; they made do with what they had.
In my final project I connect what happens in the kitchen of that little building on North Hudson Avenue to the rich history of Oklahoma’s food culture, which is steeped in the simplicity and resourcefulness first exhibited by our Native American brothers and sisters. It was they who first came to know and love this land, they who first learned to cook with what the seasons yielded forth, they who mastered the art of foraging for local ingredients. In sum, Nonesuch’s culinary philosophy is the same culinary philosophy that the tribes of Oklahoma have been practicing for centuries, and we ought to acknowledge the extent to which Native American cooking practices have influenced our cooking practices today.
Soph. Year, Sem 2: Magazine Production (ENGL 4950)
To break up the academic writing samples, I’m uploading two interviews I conducted with professional artists regarding their respective artistic fields: hyperrealistic painting and poetry. For each artist, the process of getting the interview was more or less the same: I spent time researching their work, composed a short biography, came up with open-ended questions that I knew would both pique their personal interests and allow for liberal responses, and weaved together their responses to form a coherent, conversational whole.
These interviews were “gifted” to me as solo assignments in a Digital Magazine Production course that I took my sophomore year; no other student conducted interviews. In both cases, I was the sole correspondent with the artist.
Below is the first of the two interviews.
Soph. Year, Sem 2: Magazine Production (ENGL 4950)
To break up the academic writing samples, I’m uploading two interviews I conducted with professional artists regarding their respective artistic fields: hyperrealistic painting and poetry. For each artist, the process of getting the interview was more or less the same: I spent time researching their work, composed a short biography, came up with open-ended questions that I knew would both pique their personal interests and allow for liberal responses, and weaved together their responses to form a coherent, conversational whole.
These interviews were “gifted” to me as solo assignments in a Digital Magazine Production course that I took my sophomore year; no other student conducted interviews. In both cases, I was the sole correspondent with the artist.
Below is the second of the two interviews.
Soph. Year, Sem 2: Origins of Christianity (C LC 3053)
In Christian Scriptures, and particularly in the New Testament, believers are frequently reminded that they are, to use an oft-repeated phrase, in this world but not of it. Jesus himself urges his disciples to give up everything they own to follow him, and preaches on the importance of orienting oneself away from this world and towards the kingdom of heaven. Echoes of Christ’s sentiments reverberate in the Pauline epistles: “Do not be conformed to this world” (Rom. 12.2), “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col. 3.2), “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3.20), and so on and so on.
Such heavy-handed scriptural emphases on worldly abandonment have led many people — believers and non-believers alike — to regard Christianity as a religion that ultimately rejects the material world in favor of a world that is to come. But this understanding of Christianity is incomplete. At its core, Christianity is a religion that celebrates sex and physical embodiment and the fruits of this earth, albeit in moderation and with the knowledge that there exists something greater. Yes, the believer’s true citizenship is not in this world but in heaven, as the Apostle Paul reminds us. But while Christians are called to anticipate the kingdom of heaven and await the coming of God, they are not forbidden to rejoice in the profound beauty of this world, fallen as it may be, in the meantime. And nowhere is the scriptural celebration of this world more evident than in John’s gospel…
In this paper I use John’s gospel (which was written as a direct response to the heresy of Gnosticism) to argue that orthodox Christianity is steeped in physicality, or ‘this–worldliness’. I wrote this sophomore year for a course called “Origins of Christianity” (C LC 3053), which examined the ways in which the history of the world’s largest religion was shaped by the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans alike. I enjoyed the course so much that I returned the next two years as a TA.
Soph. Year, Sem 2: Auden Course (LTRS 3803)
A rudimentary literary analysis I wrote during my sophomore year for “Fate and the Individual in European Literature,” or, as it was more fondly referred to, “The Auden Course” — an intensive two-semester class team-taught by three professors and based on a syllabus created by W.H. Auden himself. The syllabus called for over 3,000 pages of reading per semester, which meant I got to wrestle with the greats over the course of the year. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Melville, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Eliot… need I go on?
I can’t help but cringe a little when I read the opening line — “For as long as mankind has existed, it has been his plight to endure the destructive forces of nature that work against him, the forces of Time and Death” — but alas, I’m choosing to upload this paper in spite of its clichés. Just a reminder of how much progression I’ve made in my writing. Hopefully one day I will look back on my up-to-date writing samples and cringe then, too…
This paper presents Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay as opposing forces in Woolf’s novel, and argues that the marriage of the opposite world views which this husband and wife represent is brought about through the character of Lily Briscoe.
Soph. Year, Sem 2: Auden Course (LTRS 3803)
(Another) rudimentary literary analysis I wrote during my sophomore year for “Fate and the Individual in European Literature,” or, as it was more fondly referred to, “The Auden Course” — an intensive two-semester class team-taught by three professors and based on a syllabus created by W.H. Auden himself. The syllabus called for over 3,000 pages of reading per semester, which meant I got to wrestle with the greats over the course of the year. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Melville, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Eliot… need I go on?
This paper is my take on Moby Dick, which I understand to be a deeply religious novel in spite of its seeming nihilism.
Fresh. Year, Sem 2: Literature of Love (HON 2963)
This close reading of a sonnet from Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella was one of the first papers I submitted for an English literature course in college, as well as one of the first papers I took real pride in submitting. I wrote it for an Honors course called “The Literature of Love,” which let me get my hands on texts like Plato’s Symposium, the poetry of John Donne, and classic novels by authors like Jane Austen and C.S. Lewis.
My writing and analytical skills have improved immensely since freshman year, but this short paper remains special to me because it marks the semester when I fell wholeheartedly in love with reading and dissecting literary texts. This paper also launched me into a working relationship with my favorite professor at OU, who, after reading the first few pages of writing I ever turned in for him, sent me the syllabi for all of the courses he was teaching in the fall and encouraged me to continue studying literature. In short, I trace my decision to declare my English major back to my Literature of Love Class, and to this paper in particular.
The sonnet and my close reading of it are below.
Ashley M. Roy 