ENGLISH 210
FALL 2010
ESSAY ONE
(DUE FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24,
IN SECTION: i.e. at 11:00 or 12:00 noon)
* Write an essay about 5 pages in length (roughly 1,500 words) on one of the topics set, an altered version of one of these topics, or your own topic. If you choose to alter a topic, or to present your own topic, you must get the approval and advice of your TA to make sure your idea is suitable for this assignment. The essay requires no research, only careful reading and interpretation of the texts under discussion. Avoid consulting critical studies, handbooks, Cliff's notes, or other sources, but if you do use any of these, then provide a list of "Works Consulted" and give credit for the ideas or statements you have borrowed. Let me remind you one more time about PLAGIARISM. According to the University's Student Code, “Plagiarism” is “Representing the words or ideas of another as one's own in any academic endeavor. This includes copying another student's paper or working with another person when both submit similar papers without authorization to satisfy an individual assignment.” For more details, go to this web address http://www.admin.uiuc.edu/policy/code/article_1/al_1-402.html and under Article 1 (Student Rights and Responsibilities), Part 4 (Academic Integrity), Paragraph 1-402 (Infractions) you will find under point (d) more explanations of what constitutes Plagiarism. If after reading through the examples and descriptions provided there, you are at all unsure about what this deception means, please come and discuss this with me or with your TA. Remember: ignorance about this rule will not serve as an excuse for Plagiarism.
* Remember to put the course name, your name, your TA's name, and the section time on the essay.
For instance:
English 210
Student: Janet Davis
TA:
Georgina Milnes
Section: 12:00noon
* Give your essay a title that reflects the particular focus of its content, and remember to number your pages.
* Make sure that your essay has a clear thesis statement and a good argumentative edge. By this I mean that you should be presenting your readers with an interpretation of literary material that seeks to make a persuasive, convincing argument. By the end of the essay they should feel freshly informed about the text(s) you have discussed. If your essay has no "argumentative edge," your readers will get to the end, turn to you and ask "So what? What was the point of all that?"
* Your argument should be carefully substantiated by references to, and evidence from, the text. Keep your references short and to the point. Cite the Norton Anthology as NA and/or Persuasion as P followed by page number (e.g. NA 235 or P 93). If you cite lines of poetry do so as follows: ("Tintern Abbey" ll. 21-24, NA 235) After your first citation of that poem, abbreviate further citations by using only the title initials and line number: (e.g. TA 31).
Avoid:
i. beginning your essay with safe, but bland generalizations (for example, "The Romantic Period was a time of great change" or "Women were oppressed in the Romantic Period"). If your opening statement could be used for almost any literary essay ("The Victorian Age was a time of great change" or "Women were oppressed in the Victorian Age" etc.), you know it is too broad for this one.
ii. lengthy introductory throat clearing. Instead, remember that you have only a short space in which to make your argument. Get to the point as briskly as possible. Keep your focus very clear. Make a conscious effort to develop a critical vocabulary at the level of form (e.g. "lyric speaker," "omniscient narrator," "ode," "ballad" etc.), content and cultural context (e.g. "This is a treatise that addresses matters of concern to a middle-class rather than an aristocratic audience").
Suggested Paper Topics
1. In all the poems of William Wordsworth discussed in the opening lectures of this course, childhood is represented not simply as different from adulthood, but different in unexpected, intriguing ways. Focusing on the Immortality Ode (“Ode: Intimations of Immortality”) and drawing on one of Wordsworth's other lyrics by way of contrast, explain why the child is such a suggestive figure for expressing the ideals of Wordsworth's particular brand of British Romanticism.
2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ballad "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was the opening poem of the first edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. One might therefore assume that it exemplifies the goals of Lyrical Ballads as spelled out by Wordsworth in his "Preface" of 1802; yet, this seems anything but the case. Discuss.
3. In his landmark essay "What is Poetry?" (1833), John Stuart Mill (a lover of Wordsworth's verse) defines this literary genre thus: "Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and bodying itself forth in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind." Yet several of the Romantic poems we have read include dialogues or auditors (for instance, "We Are Seven," Dorothy Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey," or the Wedding Guest in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"). Write an essay discussing how we might reconcile this seeming contradiction between poetic theory and practice.
4. Discuss the ways in which Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, could be considered representative of literary trends in the Romantic period. What would be at stake in considering her a Romantic rather than an Enlightenment writer? You may, if you wish, compare her work to aspects of the poetry you have studied by male Romantics.
5. In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft demonstrates a relation between the economic and class system prevailing in provincial England and the sexual conventions associated with it. We also see a relation between that system and sexual conventions in Jane Austen's Persuasion. Write a paper on one of these Romantic women writers showing how she seeks to revise attitudes about proper and desirable behavior in genteel men and women. Support your discussion with carefully selected evidence from your chosen text.
6. Persuasion could be described as a novel about reading and the effects of this practice in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Not only does it represent the reading habits and preferences of a number of characters, but it reflects on the activity of its own readers and the effects it might itself produce on them. Discuss.
7. In a letter of 12 April, 1850 to an acquaintance, W. S. Williams, Charlotte Brontë wrote of Jane Austen as follows:
Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death--this Miss Austen ignores.
Present a carefully substantiated argument in response to this suggestion that Persuasion is a novel that promotes the disinterested rationalism associated with Enlightenment reason, and resists the strong passions associated with Romanticism. [Tip: must reason and passion necessarily be pitted against each other?]
Good luck! Let's see some deeply thoughtful, beautifully crafted essays.