ENGLISH 210
Professor: Julia F. Saville
FALL 2010
ESSAY TWO
(DUE FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, IN SECTION:
i.e. at 11:00 am or 12:00 noon)
* Before you begin this assignment, read through your first essay making notes on specific areas in which you plan to improve your performance. The general instructions for this second essay are the same as for the first, but in case you've forgotten or lost the instructions of the first essay, I'm going to repeat them below.
* Once again, 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 your own topic, or an altered topic, you must get the approval and advice of your TA to make sure your idea is suitable for this assignment. Once again, 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. A last reminder 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 TA's name, and the section time on the essay: e.g.
Student: Percy Hopkins
TA: Elizabeth Swinburne
Section: 12:00pm
Give your essay a title that reflects the particular focus of its content, and remember to number your pages. Some of the essays I read from the first batch overlooked these details: if you’re shrewd, you’ll know that a reader faced with no title or pagination does not receive the impression of a motivated, organized writer!
* 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 reader will get to the end, turn to you and ask "So what? What was the point of all that? Was there any big idea?"
* Your argument should be carefully substantiated by references to, and evidence from, the text. Keep your references short and pertinent. Once again, cite the Norton Anthology as NA followed by page number (e.g. NA, 1835). If you cite lines of poetry, do so as follows: ("The Darkling Thrush," ll. 21-24, NA, 1938) and after that, give only line numbers.
* Avoid:
i. beginning your essay with obvious statements or safe, but bland generalizations (for example, "Thomas Hardy is one of the best known poets in the English Language" or "Women in the late-Victorian age were oppressed "). If your opening statement could be used for almost any literary essay ("William Shakespeare is one of the best known authors in the English Language" or "Women in the Early Modern period were oppressed"), 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 sonnet that addresses matters of concern to a middle-class rather than aristocratic readership ").
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paper Topics
1. Under the guise of a frothy comedy, Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest uses the figure of the upper-class dandy to critique the narrow-mindedness and lack of imagination of the morally earnest middle classes of 1890s England. Discuss, paying close attention to Wilde's verbal play (his puns, inversions, witty aphorisms etc.).
2. “Mrs. Warren’s Profession is more than an unfolding of moral character through dialogue. It is a dramatic debate about the ethical effects produced in a society where hypocrisy masks social exploitation and financial greed." Discuss this statement bearing in mind the play's allusions to such debates as the Woman Question and a utilitarian education neglectful of aesthetics that we have been thinking about during our survey of the Victorian Age.
3. In "The Darkling Thrush," Thomas Hardy, following the tradition of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" uses the image of a bird to center his discussion of the challenges that face him as a poet at a particular time and place in history. Discuss with close attention to the text.
4. Choosing three texts from the selection set, discuss some of the different effects produced by the literary voices of World War I.
SPECIAL TIPS:
--Make sure you present a persuasive argument or convincing idea. Do not simply take us on a "tour" of your chosen poems (e.g. "And now, turning to 'The Cherry Trees,' we see ...").
--Remember that your role in this context is that of a literary interpreter and your task is to study the way language is used to represent very particular aspects of war which your reader might otherwise not experience.
--Just because a poem appears short and simple, this does not mean that it will yield all its subtleties in one casual reading or prose paraphrase.
5. T. S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is not quite what one might expect of love poetry. Discuss how Eliot elicits Western poetic conventions of courtship and love combined with the dramatic monologue form used by Victorian poets like Robert Browning to represent a certain kind of cultural consciousness prevalent in Europe just prior to the First World War.
6. In her prose work A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf argues that "fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners." She explains that "these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in." Woolf herself identifies some of these material things in A Room of One's Own, but as she does so, she simultaneously creates a colorful fictional web of anecdotes that illustrate her experience as a female creative writer negotiating London in the first decades of the twentieth century. Write an essay interrogating the effectiveness of anecdote as a means of animating the kinds of problems, both material and intellectual, women writers face at this time.