Please compose a two-three page paper in which you respond to one or more — preferably no more than two! — of the three theoretical approaches we have studied thus far (New Criticism, Reader Response Theory a la Fish, and Structuralism). What I want you do in this brief assignment is to reflect upon the theory or theories you select: you might, for example, have a sense of dimension undiscussed in class, and you could articulate this and reflect upon its implications; else, you might want to contrast the way in which two theories treat a certain key notion (such as authorial intention); else, you might just be struck by some feature or opposition you had not thought of before encountering the theory, and your response would specify this dimension and develop briefly its implications for your reading practice. This is a small set of different approaches you can take to this assignment. This is not a demand for a full-fledged essay. Rather, I want to see how you are engaging the reading thus far, to get a sense of how it stimulates your thinking. Its informality in this sense does not however mean that you just cobble it together, for I do expect cohesion, conciseness and grammaticality!
Above all, have fun speculating.
Example Papers
"Sit Back and Enjoy the Ride" by Jyoti Tibrewala
"A Reader's Response to New Criticism and Structuralism" by Shankar Mukherji