Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (comp. 1797; publ. 1798)
 The "Rime" was the opening poem of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Initially it contained a lot of archaic language, but in later versions, Coleridge edited it, added the prose glosses in the margins, and the Latin epigraph. You'll see that the version we work from gives us at least four layers of interpretive perspective to work through before we then add our own (the mariner who recounts his tale; the lyric speaker who sets up the mariner's narrative; the editing voice who stands outside the actual tale and its telling and gives us the marginal glosses, and then the poet who has put all these voices together and invited us to add ours).
 Working in tension with these layers are the innumerable questions the poem raises. Here are five that every year, when I teach 210, I puzzle over. See if you can offer me some answers to these, and then raise another five of your own:

1. Why does the Ancient Mariner pick on the Wedding Guest as the recipient of his story? Why doesn't he, for instance, go to the local pub and tell it to another old sea dog?

2. What kind of journey does the Mariner's ship initially set out on?

3. What does the Albatross represent or symbolize?

4. Why does the Ancient Mariner kill the Albatross?

5. What is the significance of the phantom ship in Part 3, and the two figures in it?

WHAT DOES "THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER" MEAN?
This is the million-dollar question that has bothered readers for decades and the fun of it is figuring out which you think the most persuasive interpretation is, and why. 

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

1. From what you've read of it, would you say that A Vindication is an argument against women's inferiority and for the equality of the sexes?

2. Who is Wollstonecraft's audience in this text? Sometimes she seems to address a fairly specific group (p. 167 and 168), but then at other times (169 and 175) she appears to have a wider audience in mind. Gather together all the references she makes to her audience and based on this evidence write a brief description of the reading public you think she wants to reach.

3. Who, precisely, benefits from keeping women the way they are at the end of the eighteenth century?

4. According to Wollstonecraft, women seem to co-operate with the powers that keep them in subjection. Why is it that they do this?

5. On pages 173-174, Wollstonecraft compares women to soldiers. Does her comparison work well?

6. Do you find Wollstonecraft's argument persuasive on the whole? If your answer is yes, try to find three (or more) moments in the extract that you find especially strong. If the answer is no, articulate clearly what the weaknesses are that prevent it from being persuasive.