Essay Topics
For each essay, I will suggest topics for writing. You are always free, however, to choose a topic of your own, so long as it meets the objectives of the assignment. You may speak with me or the course tutor about topics at any time.
First Draft 1 (5 pages- due class #8) Close Reading
We have been studying the process poets undergo to produce their works. Using your journal entries as a resource, choose a word or short phrase from one of the poems you read and explain why or for what effect the poet chose it (if you have manuscript evidence of a revision, explain the poet's choice). Make use of what you find out about the word's history in the OED and elsewhere. Think about where the word or phrase appears in the poem. And ask yourself, how does this bit of the poem contribute to its overall meaning or show what the author was trying to do? Use quotations from throughout the poem as needed to support your point.
Essay 1 (6 pages- due class #13)
For this, as for any final draft, you will be attending to the problems of the first draft: ideas and argument, organization, and style and mechanics. But you should also consider ways of developing your idea to take in other parts of the poem, ideas you had not considered earlier, or other poems you read during this period.
Note: Each essay should be accompanied by a brief (one-page) summary of what you did and intended to do with the revision. This revision narrative is important and required.
First Draft 2 (5 pages- due class #21) Narrative Structure
In the stories you've read recently the way they're told (especially the author's decisions about structure, such as the ordering, pacing, and arrangement of events) grows out of or has something to do with what they're about (theme). Choose one story and show how the author's use of plot structure allows him or her to develop an idea. Focus on a particular place in the story, such as the beginning or end, a significant turning point, or a climax (Your journal entries should be helpful here). How does the author use structural elements to heighten a particular effect or idea at that moment in the story?
Essay 2 (7 pages- due class #27) Comparison Essay
In your essay select another story to compare with your first (unless you decide on two new stories, in which case you should consult with me or the tutor). You may follow through on the idea of the way the stories use certain structural features. You can also develop your ideas about theme. In doing so, you will need to reshape your original essay so that even if you use some of the older material, you are making a more refined argument. You will also need to develop that argument, to make the case for why the comparison is significant. Think about what is more intriguing in your comparison, the similarities or the differences between the stories, and set up your argument accordingly. Try to develop your thesis, to go beyond your original observations to make a more challenging and complex point.
Include a revision narrative.
Essay 3 (5 pages- due class #34) Allusion/Image Study
In class, we will be studying a number of literary, religious, classical, nautical, and historical allusions in Melville's Billy Budd. Choose one to give a close reading. You will need to be able to identify the allusion, its source, and its meaning. You will also have to look at its context in the narrative, speculating on how Melville uses the allusion and to what effect. And finally, you will be thinking about how this particular allusion connects with other similar ones in the text, and with Melville's larger themes.
Revision (7 pages- due class #39) Literary Argument
By this point in your study of the novel, you will be aware of the deeply problematic nature of Melville's text- its uncertain status as unpublished and probably unfinished manuscript, its ambiguities in diction, tone, characterization, and resolution of the plot, its social and philosophical ironies. Your revision will develop your study of a single allusion in one passage into a reading of Melville's literary practices in Billy Budd. How does your passage relate to the larger problems of the text? What are the implications of your reading for one's understanding of Melville's aims or achievements in writing the book?
For this essay, you will be not only revising the first, but also expanding it into a literary argument. That is, you will, as you have done in earlier essays, present an arguable thesis, support and develop it through a close reading of textual details, and arrive at a conclusion that shows the signficance of your reading for the reader's sense of the meaning of the novel. Beyond that, your essay will display your voice and methods as a critical reader, thinker, and writer.
One final revision narrative, please.