Due Friday, September 17 in
box to left of my office door, Tompkins 270, by or before NOON (12pm).
Length: 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 or prose passage
you have chosen.
The lines or paragraphs 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 choose lines
or sentences we've disussed directly in class you will need to offer
some original contribution to interpreting them.
If you have any other format questions, ask me:
Poetry option
Choose any of the poems from the start of the
syllabus through Sept. 15.
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.
Prose option:
Choose a brief passage, no longer
than one paragraph, that best captures any most interesting idea or
problem you see in the work of prose (through Sept. 15).
Consider the language of your chosen passage in as much detail
as
possible, and then write a brief essay explaining what problem or issue
is at stake, and how the particular details of language in the passage
work to make the passage significant and noteworthy. This will help you
to learn to read prose with the close-reading care (and slow
pace) sometimes relegated to studies of lyric poetry. Pay particular
attention to the sentence-level details of image, tone, syntax, diction
etc.as well as point of view. Focus on what is actually in the passage
itself, especially what
is most interesting in it and what most benefits from being explained
and interpreted..
Feel free to discuss your developing ideas with me.