Laura T. Smith: Teaching

First version due: Tuesday, October 23
Second version due: Tuesday, November 6

Option #1
Choose any two pieces we’ve discussed in this class. You might choose a sonnet and an Emily Dickinson poem. You might choose two poems by the same author, a poem and an essay by one author, or two pieces by authors from historically distant periods. Your job is to place these pieces in a critical conversation around an issue that interests you. This issue may be one that was raised in a position paper (yours or someone else’s). This issue may be formal, historical, or thematic in nature.

Your restrictions are these: you must write about pieces we’ve read together in class. You must engage the text closely, using quotations and proper citation methods (MLA is preferable, see Policy Statement). You must display your ability to close-read a text, including, at some point in your paper, an extended passage of explication.

(What’s explication? Explication is the line-by-line explanation of a poem, how a poem makes meaning, what strategies the poem uses. Sometimes it requires writing a whole paragraph about a single line. Often, it requires linking images, words, or other features of a poem together to show how a pattern is created and how that, in turn, creates meaning.)

The course Policy Statement indicates that your papers must be four to six pages. I’d suggest that you aim for a well-crafted, stylish, thoughtful, efficient four-page paper on October 23 and then expand that to six (well-crafted, stylish, thoughtful) pages by November 6.

Here is a list of issues and themes we’ve discussed repeatedly to get you thinking:
• Rhyme, meter, or other sound patterning techniques
• Enjambment/lineation
• Tone
• Poetic devices (conceit, metaphor, sound: how do they help to make meaning?)
• Attitudes/philosophies of the divine (Whitman, Dickinson, Wordsworth, Keats, Hopkins, Donne)
• Attitude toward nature (Whitman, Dickinson, Wordworth, Keats)
• “American” values in poetry (Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Howe, Brathwaite, Williams, Moore, Hughes, Toomer)
• Love (romantic, erotic, divine) (sonnets, Dickinson, Whitman)
• Issues of historical representation (Howe, Toomer, Hughes, Brathwaite)

You are welcome to use a Position Paper to seed your essay. (If it is not your own Position Paper, quote and cite the author accordingly!) You may even want to use your discussion of “kitchenette building” or “Ozymandias” from the test.

Option #2: Single Poem Explication

This is the option for people who work best when they take things one at a time.

Assignment: Choose one poem and explicate it.

(What’s explication? Explication is the line-by-line explanation of a poem, how a poem makes meaning, what strategies the poem uses. Sometimes it requires writing a whole paragraph about a single line. Often, it requires linking images, words, or other features of a poem together to show how a pattern is created and how that, in turn, creates meaning.)

Your explication will proceed through the whole poem, unpacking it from start to finish. (It may not cover every single line, especially if the poem is extremely long. It won’t skip over any important lines, however.) In addition, your explication must have a THESIS. This thesis will probably be either 1) a statement about the major meaning of the poem, what it all adds up to, OR 2) a statement about how the poem works, how it all adds up. Remember that a SURPRISING thesis always makes a more interesting paper. It would be very boring to argue that Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” is about the divinity in nature. It would be far more interesting to argue that despite Wordsworth’s attention to nature in “Intimations of Immortality,” the poem actually conveys considerable cynicism about nature’s capacity to save or restore comfort to humans. The second thesis actually requires proving. Make you’re your thesis similarly requires proving.

The “how” option will probably emphasize a pattern of devices that together, can be shown to build the poem’s meaning and construct its tonal effect. You may very well not know what this thesis is until AFTER you’ve explicated the poem. In fact, this would be a very good way to draft this paper and DISCOVER your thesis (via explication), as long as you go back and revise heavily, re-shaping your paper in light of your newly discovered thesis.

Your second version of this paper (due on November 6) might either 1) continue the explication, or 2) add another piece, ending up with a product very much like Option 1.