Final Paper Promts

Ok, so obviously no discussion questions for tomorrow. Just do the very best you can to digest Sterne’s novel and think about the problems of communication and love.

The final paper prompts are below and also can be downloaded Here. As always try to have some fun with this assignment. You’ve learned ton of new vocabulary and together we’ve tackled some very difficult reading and intellectual material, so let your critical imagination go to work on a text that you really enjoyed, or found somehow strange and interesting. Good luck.

For this final assignment, please write a 5 to 7 page essay on one of the following questions. Be sure your paper contains a fully developed thesis statement-that is, one that conforms implicitly to the formula “Because x, y follows,” where x = an argumentative and interpretive position and y = a set of critical reflections on the implications of that position. This is not necessarily a research paper; rather the idea is to thoroughly, investigate, explicate and interpret a text through a strategy of close reading and using the critical vocabulary of literary studies. Ask yourself not only what the text says, but how it says what it says.
To that end, select a text (poem, play, or novel) that has particularly moved you in some way or another. You need to make note of how the author has put the work together-form, content, rhetorical devices, figurative language poetic diction, etc.-so that it will mean in the way that it does. For this paper, make sure that you employ the necessary terms of art in your reading of the poem (think of the final question on the midterm as a model). Superficial readings will not work in this arena because I expect you to take the poem apart and find out not simply what the poem says, but how and why the poet makes meaning the way that he does.

So the prompts:
1) In the final scene of act V of Congreve’s The Way of the World, Fainall presents his notion of the “way of the world” to Mrs. Marwood, and Mirabell counters that perception of the world with his own version of the “way of the world”. Compare and contrast Fainall and Mirabell’s beliefs about of “the way of the world” and how those views take shape over the course of the play. What, for instance, are the implications of each perception of the how the world works with respect to love? language? law?

2) Rochester’s poem seems to break into two parts corresponding to the two heads he plans to satirize: Reason and Mankind. To line 111 or so the object of satire is reason. Do you buy his argument for “right reason” against man’s metaphysics-the tendency to “take a flight beyond material sense, / Dive into Mysteries, then soaring pierce / The flaming limits of the Universe” or rationality’s ability to “frame deep Mysteries, then finds ‘em out”? Illustrate your position argument with examples from Rochester’s poem. Or on another head, if “right reason” can save reason from the metaphysical dustbin, then can it save mankind from himself? What are mankind’s faults that the satyr exposes and is he fair in his exposé? Why or why not? Finally, how does your position with respect to “right reason” and the satyr (a complicated and perhaps unreliable poetic voice) shape how you read the poem’s final line “Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast”?

3) From the arming scene, to the jeweled cross, to the transformation of gold from necklace to bodkin pin, the poem is rife with ornaments. There are commodities of empire, commodified world religions, reified faces for the faces you meet as T.S. Eliot might have put it. Is this poem a celebration or a critique of ornamentation? What exactly is an ornament here and what purposes can and does it serve? What about the poem itself–a highly wrought thing and possibly an ornament itself-how does the poem both enact and complicate its own thesis about the ornament-think about the final paragraphs of Canto V.

4) Impress me with your critical acumen and create a topic of your own invention. The basic guidelines are: it has to be a work we read this quarter and you need to engage the text using the critical vocabulary we developed and used over the course of this quarter. Other than that, select a text that tickled your fancy or otherwise provoked you.

 

Discussion Questions for 5-12

In getting at these poems ask yourself, what, if anything, happens in the poem? Are there definable plots? What difference does it make if there is or isn’t? So, to the questions:

(1) What do poems like Gray’s Elegy or Akenside’s Pleasures ask of readers? That is, what is the point of the poem? What does it do? What kind of “work” do these poems suggest is the proper “work” of poetry? How is this different from the “work” of satire in Swift, or Pope’s Rape?

(2) Do you like a Pope poem better that Collins poem? Why? What does this imply about your assumptions about what a poem can or should be?

(3) If the universe is a “mystic tablet,” how does Barbauld read that text and what is its message? What kind of strange spatial dynamics characterize Barbauld’s “meditation”? How do those dynamics relate to the meditation form as opposed to say an ode (as song of praise or celebration)?

 

Discussion Questions for 4/21

Again, just answer one of the following questions in approx. 200 words.

1) From the arming scene, to the jeweled cross, to the transformation of gold from necklace to bodkin pin, the poem is rife with ornaments.  There are commodities of empire, commodified world religions, reified faces for the faces you meet as T.S. Eliot might have put it. Is this poem a celebration or a critique of ornamentation?  What exactly is an ornament here and what purposes can and does it serve?  What about the poem itself–-a highly wrought thing and possibly an ornament itself–how does the poem both enact and complicate its own thesis about the ornament.

2) Chose from one of the following three ways of reading Rape of the Lock that you think most correctly fits what Pope is doing with this poem.  The explain your selection by using arguments supported by examples from the poem.

• Rape is a very funny joke on how silly some of the beautiful people spend their time and waste their lives in trivialities.
• Pope is a misogynist who derogates women to the status of the objects they supposedly worship.  In this reading Rape acts as a  trivialization of the “feminine world”–the tea-table, card room, toilet, love-letters, etc.
• Pope’s poem redoubles the violence done to Arabella Fermor–the poem’s Belinda.  First it repeats the “rape” and then it exploits that event to vaunt his own “lock” to the heavens.  This question is geared more toward those adventurous or bored souls that have the time, energy and inclination to forge ahead to the end of the poem by Monday.

 

Discussion Questions for 4-14

1. In reading and interpreting Rochester’s poem, consider point of view. What difference does it make that the poetic voice is called a “Satyr”–that mythic half man/half beast? What interpretive advantage is gained when considering man from outside mankind? What is obscured by this same outsiders view? Consider too that the satyr is man in head and torso, while he is beast from the waist down. How does this partitioning bear on the satyr’s point of view in the poem? Are we supposed to identify with the satyr, that is, aren’t we all just a little bit, or maybe very much like the satyr’s body? If so, what is this poem addressing in its satirical attack, that is, what does it want to change?

2. Rochester’s poem seems to break into two parts corresponding to the two heads he plans to satirize: Reason and Mankind. To line 111 or so the object of satire is reason. Do you buy his argument for “right reason” against man’s metaphysics–the tendency to “take a flight beyond material sense, / DIve into Mysteries, then soaring pierce / The flaming limits of the Universe” or rationality’s ability to “frame deep Mysteries, then finds ‘em out”? Or on another head, if “right reason” can save reason from the metaphysical dustbin, then what about mankind? What are mankind’s faults that the satyr exposes and is he fair in his exposé? How do you read the final line “Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast”?

3. Swift’s “Description of the Morning” is formally an eclogue: “a short pastoral poem ususally quasi-dramatic” set in a :”Arcadian (later Edenic)–rural, idyllic, serene” location and marked by its “highly finished verse smooth and melodious” (from The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics). The pastoral eclogue was designed to express “the sentiment inspired by the beauty of external nature in her tranquil moods and the kindred charm inspired by ideal human relationships” (ibid). But something terrible seems to have happened to Arcadia/Eden when it became eighteenth-century London. How does Swift convert the eclogue to the “town eclogue”? What are the consequences: (1) formally (i.e. what does he change formally to the conventions of pastoral eclogue); (2) in terms of content (i.e. where’s the idlic space and ideal love?); and finally (3) for the reader who is aware of Swift’s mischief?

4. Finally, last question. Do you think that Swift is sympathetic to the plight of women in his “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed”, or is he in fact hammering on women for vanity, deception, artifice, etc.? How do you decide, and how is the difficulty in making that decision part of the problem, benefit and intent of satire–saying by not saying?

 

Discussion Questions: 4/7

Remember, the task here is to predigest the material and begin thinking through various topics raised in the work. Write 150-200 words (but don’t hold back, if your feeling the material go with it) that address at least one of the topics/questions below. If you’d like to engage the other posters go ahead, but remember that unlike other cyberspace, you’ll be coming face to face with the contributer you engage–so be polite and rigorous.

1.) Near the end of Act II there is an exchange between Mirabel and Millamant on the topic of love. How would you characterize each of their opinions? How are they different and on what grounds is that difference predicated?

2.) Perhaps one of the single most defining features of this play is its language. To what end is the language of the play, and the play of language in general, indicative of larger themes of surface and depth, reality and artifice that are discharged over the course of the first three acts?

3.) How is language used as a weapon/tool in this play? Compare the opening scene of Act I and the opening scene of Act II: what similarities and differences do you see at work?

4.) Compare Millamant as a woman of power and substance with Lady Wishfort as a woman of surface—a painted face and a cracked mask (cf Act III). What does this difference suggest in terms of the larger questions of the play (i.e. gender relations, social power structures, sources identity, locations of power)?