Due Friday, September 11 in folder on my office door, Tompkins 270, by or before NOON (12pm). .. 4 full pages, double-spaced typed/printed text. Standard margins (top & bottom 1" margins; right and left 1.25" margins).
After your name, date, and class info, please make the first page of your paper an accurate copy of the of lines from the poem you have chosen. The lines may be either retyped by you or copied/cut/pasted or xeroxed from any valid version of the poem. This is not counted as part of the 4-page required length of your esssay about the lines.
If you have any other format questions, ask me:
Choose any of the poems from the start of the syllabus through Sept. 9. Select no more than one stanza or verse paragraph whose lines you judge most essential to understanding and appreciating the whole poem, and do a close reading of those selected lines. Consider the nuances of language, prosody, allusions, metaphors, metre, rhyme, anything that you feel is most relevant to discuss and necessary to interpret to read your chosen lines in relation to the whole poem well.
This assignment calls upon you to practice your
skills
in close-reading, .You do not need to consult any text beyond your
chosen paragraph or part
of a poem. You will no doubt make sense of the selection you choose in
relation to the whole work from which it comes, but stay as focused as
possible on the details of language within,
not beyond, your chosen
selection. Even though close-reading
skills are sometimes associated with New Critical attitudes, you are
not
obliged to find some ideal of harmony or unity between your passage as
microcosm and the whole text, or author’s oeuvre, as macrocosm. You may
wish to work out a passage that instead reveals some interesting
disruption
of structure, complication of apparent theme or moral, or contradiction
between apparent authorial intent and textual meaning as you understand
it. Pay particular attention to the
sentence-level details and verbal nuance whether you are analyzing
poetry or prose.
Choice of passage and issue is completely up to you, but it needs to be small enough and significant enough to warrant 4 pages of discussion. If you pick a passage or poem that we have discussed in some detail in class you are obliged to try to bring out something personal and original in your reading.
Feel free to discuss your developing ideas with me.