English 492

Second Paper Assignment

Getting Started

  1. Read through all of the paper topics and spend some time planning a response to more than one. In other words, “try the topic on” to see how it fits. What texts would you focus on? How do these texts fit the topic? What are some of the complications that might arise from the use of this text, bearing in mind that complications can often be a source of the greatest interest for writer and reader?
  2. Once you have selected a topic and the text or texts that will be your focus, spend some time with those texts. Reread them with the new perspective of the paper you plan to write. Be careful, though, not to simply reread them to find evidence to support your position. Instead be open to the possibility that you might find both confirming and contradictory evidence. Don’t dismiss the contradictory evidence. Keep track of it.
  3. Look through your notes on the topic and the text(s) and develop a preliminary thesis.
  4. Write a draft (or drafts) of your paper. Find someone in class willing to look at your essay (offer to look at his or her in return). Be careful about relying on friends—you want good feedback that will help you revise your paper and make it better; you don’t want friendly comments like “It looks pretty good to me.” You can also visit the Writing Center at any stage of the process—when you are trying to find a topic, when you are developing possible responses to the topic, when you are developing a preliminary thesis, when you are drafting.
  5. If you don’t wait until the last minute, you can even give me a draft to review. (See deadline above.) I won’t proofread the paper for you, restricting my comments to larger rhetorical issues like focus, development, argument and so on.
  6. Be sure to proofread your essays carefully, and consider giving your paper to a friend or classmate for proofreading.  Also read your paper out loud to yourself before completing a final draft—make sure it sounds like spoken English and not like paper-ese.  Try for an easy, graceful, but not overly casual writing style; assume a reader who knows the text, but has not memorized every detail.

Note:   If you are a graduate student taking this course as part of your graduate program, you can choose to write on one of the topics below or you can see me about working on a topic of your own. Graduate students are expected to produce longer papers (7-10 pages) that incorporate some secondary materials (criticism, biography, history, theory, etc.).

Paper Topics

  1. Write an essay in which you compare Keats’ “Lamia” with his source found in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (reprinted in our Keats volume, 311-312). What changes does Keats’ introduce and what effect do these changes have on our reading of the poem?
  2. Write an essay in which you compare Keats’ “Isabela; or, The Pot of Basil” with his source found in Boccacio’s Decameron (reprinted in our Keats volume, 333-337). What changes does Keats’ introduce and what effect do these changes have on our reading of the poem?
  3. Write an essay in which you compare an early Keats poem from Poems, 1817 to a later one from Lamia, Isabela, the Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems (1820). Use your comparison to argue for a change (or for no change) in one of the following: a key theoretical idea (see question 4); a key theme or idea; a common Keatsian poetic strategy or technique (ask me if you’re not sure about this last one).
  4. Use one of the key theoretical ideas found in the letters to examine one or two poems by Keats. (Only choose two if wish to show a change in thinking, a contrast, or a contradiction.) The key theoretical ideas are: negative capability (78), human life as a large mansion of many apartments (129-130), the “camelion poet” (214), and the vale of soul-making (250). If you have another key theoretical idea that you would like to discuss, see me.
  5. Keats makes the following observation about the relationship between beauty and living (or as some critics might say, between romance and human suffering):

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.                                                               (Endymion, lines 1-13)

Use this observation to examine a Keats poem (other than Endymion, the source of the above quote).

  1. As a final alternative, you may write an essay on a topic of your choice, provided that you submit to me a proposal for your paper (see below). The proposal is a short (less than one page) description of your term paper. It provides a preliminary thesis, the texts you plan to discuss, and any questions or concerns that you have at present about your project. Please submit your prospectus by email to jgarret@calstatela.edu. I will respond by email.