English 510

First Paper Assignment

Date Due: October 22 at the beginning of class

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. If you have to choose a text consider 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. 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.

Paper Topics

Essays written in response to the topics below should be at least 6 and no more than 10 pages in length and formatted according to standard MLA conventions (see the syllabus for more on formatting written work for this class). The use of secondary materials is not expected.

  1. In Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge explains the genesis of the Lyrical Ballads:

    In this idea originated the plan of the "Lyrical Ballads;" in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. (BL, chapter 14)

    Using Coleridge’s explanation as your starting point, examine one poem by either Wordsworth or Coleridge and explain how the poem (or passage) fits into the Lyrical Ballads and how the poem (or passage) makes the case for the importance of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s objectives. (If you choose a short Wordsworth lyric, you can discuss more than one poem.)
  2. Read the introduction to the background section “The Byronic Hero” in the Longman Anthology, then write an essay in which you examine how well Manfred exemplifies the Byronic hero. As part of your argument you are welcome, of course, to discuss the ways Manfred does not exemplify the Byronic hero.
  3. One of the sources of the name we give to this historical period and this course is the literary form “romance.” However, to many of the writers of the Romantic era, romance is less a literary genre than a desire to imagine a world outside of or opposed to the everyday world of what Wordsworth calls “getting and spending.” Focusing on a single literary text, examine how these worlds outside of or opposed to the everyday world are represented in the text and what those representations suggest about the writer’s attitude towards romance.
  4. Many writers of the Romantic era struggle with the idea of individual autonomy, specifically in the form of the larger-than-life figure who is independent of the rules governing the conduct of common people. These celebrations of individuality, though, frequently contain as well their own critique of the dangers of it. Write an essay examining the problematic nature of individuality as explored in one of the texts read during the first three weeks of the term.
  5. Both the poetry that is obviously realistic (i.e. “Michael,” The Waggoner, and others) and the poetry that seems otherworldly (i.e. Manfred, “The Thorn,” or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) employ realistic detail to achieve specific thematic and literary ends. Write an essay in which you examine how one text we have studied during the first three weeks of the term uses realistic detail. What exactly is the “real” as defined by the text? What purpose(s) does the “real” serve in the text? How does the attitude towards the “real” in this text relate to the attitudes expressed by Wordsworth and Coleridge in their critical statements surrounding Lyrical Ballads?