Monthly Archives: March 2021

Due: Your paper must be submitted to me as a Google Doc by Friday, March 26th.*  Please share it with [email protected]. While your essay itself should have an engaging title, please give the file the generic title: Your Name. ENG2850 Essay 1.

 3-5 pages – 12pt. type, double-spaced

In a thoughtful, well-organized analytical essay, grounding your response in a close, detailed reading of the text at hand, please address one of the following topics.  These topics pose general, theme-based questions.  In formulating your essay topic, you will want to articulate your topic in the form of a more specific question about the text you’ve chosen to work with.  You may use any of the texts we’ve read beginning with “Du Tenth Sinks the Jewel Box in Anger” and continuing through the poems by William Wordsworth.

1.Concentrating on any one of the readings we’ve done so far, consider the relationship between appearances and reality. How are appearances used to deceive or to manipulate? What does this text seem to be saying about the difference between what we think we perceive and what is actually true? How do characters use masks (real or figurative) to deceive those around them?

2.Discuss the theme of passion as it relates to any one of the texts we’ve read thus far. Here you can focus either on passion in the context of romantic love or on passion in the sense of any strong feeling or emotion. What does your text seem to be saying about passion, particularly when passion is in conflict with other more rational values?

3.Choose any one of the texts we’ve read thus far, and identify what you consider to be its central message with respect to human destiny. In several of the texts we’ve read, characters or authors appear to be struggling to determine their purpose in life or to chart their own course.   What does freedom look like in your text?  How does your text balance human agency with the idea of a pre-ordained fate.

4. Wild Card:  If none of these prompts is calling to you, you may create your own topic.  To to this, please submit a focussed question to me for approval by Monday, March 15th.

* I have listed the paper’s due date as Friday, 3/26.  However, I will be accepting papers as “on-time” through Sunday, 3/28.  I leave it to you to decide what works best for you given your workload and personal preferences.

General Guidelines

–All successful papers will illustrate their claims by quoting directly from the text. When you include a quotation, be sure to explain its significance.

–Quotations should include parenthetical citations, providing page or line number as necessary.

–Assume that your reader is familiar with the text and does not require any plot summary.

–Always use the present tense when writing about literature.

–Your essay should have a title. Use your title as an opportunity to let your reader know what your paper is about!

–As a general rule, the question that you find genuinely perplexing will yield a stronger paper than the question whose answer seems readily apparent to you, so resist the impulse to shy away from tough topics.

–My prompts are meant to be suggestive, not prescriptive. Use my questions as a guide to thinking about your subject, but don’t feel that you have to address every question I raise in an essay prompt.

–You should be able to articulate your paper topic in the form of a question. Be sure that the question will yield a thoughtful, complex response – rather than a yes or no answer.

–Test your main idea or central claim (a.k.a. your thesis) by asking the following: “Could a reasonable reader conceivably disagree?” If the answer is “No, no reasonable reader could conceivably disagree with what I’m saying in this paper,” then you need to do more work to refine your thesis. You want to be staking out an interpretive claim that someone else might disagree with; otherwise you’re simply articulating ideas that are readily available to any reader of the text.

–The opening paragraph of your paper should introduce your topic to the reader (i.e. what question are you asking?), and it should also tell the reader where you’re going to be going in order to answer your question. In that way, even without necessarily spelling out a thesis, your introduction acts as a road map for the rest of the paper. For this reason, you might find it useful to go back and rewrite your introduction after you’ve completed a first draft of the paper.

–Your introduction should lead the reader straight to your topic without resorting to any kind of sweeping generalizations or universal claims.

–Rather than simply restating your introduction, your conclusion should both summarize the important interpretive claim you’ve made in the paper and indicate how your analysis might help readers to understand the text in question.

1.Our readings this week come from the Romantic poet William Blake.  In preparation for Wednesday’s class, please read the following poems (found in Vol. E of the Norton Anthology): Introductory Poem (untitled), “The Lamb”, “The Chimney Sweeper” (There are two poems with this title; read them both), “The Tyger”, and “London.”

2.Choose one of the poems listed above to explore more deeply.  For your chosen poem, please share a post on our blog in which you: a)explain what drew you to select this poem b) identify a line, pair of lines, or stanza that seems to you to be particularly meaningful or perplexing c) offer some analysis or explanation of your selected passage and d) connect it to the overall theme of the poem.  Please post your work before our Zoom call on Wednesday, March 10th.

3. In addition to being a poet, William Blake was a fine artist and published illustrated editions of his own work, using a special engraving technique to create amazing prints that accompanied the two volumes of poetry that we are reading selections from: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Choose an image that accompanies one of the poems we are reading, and provide a brief comment that explains how the image and the poem work together. What do you see in the image you’ve selected that helps you understand the poem more fully? Be sure to include details from both the poem and the image in your discussion.  Please post your response to the blog by Friday, March 12th.

4.  Please read carefully the assignment (posted separately) for your first formal essay of the semester, together with the more general guidelines for essay writing I also shared.  Please use our Slack channel to ask any questions you have about the assignment.  Send me a short email by Sunday, March 14th, letting me know what text you are thinking about writing about and which topic you have chosen to pursue.  Please combine the two into a single question you are asking.  For example, if I am writing about masking or deceit in the short story “Bewitched,” perhaps my question might be, “What does “Bewitched” tell us about the linking of femininity and deceit?”  Don’t worry if you have difficulty formulating a question; just do your best!

5.  I have recorded a few words about Romanticism, particularly hoping to connect the dots between Rousseau’s early Romanticism and the Romantic poetry we will be reading over the next few weeks.   You can access the video HERE,  using Passcode: ^eo0.!gk   Please watch this short video and share in the form of a comment on this post one thing that you see in either Blake or Rousseau that could be characterized as “Romantic.”  Please do this by Wednesday, March 10th.

5.  Stay tuned for your Group Project assignments.  I am just waiting for a few stragglers to submit their Group Preference forms, and I will post the groups as soon as I can.