Assignments

Reading for Thursday Class, 3 May

Essay Topic

Write an essay which follows the guidelines below:

• Select at least two works we have read which share common intellectual themes or social concerns, but which were written at least one hundred years apart. Note that if you choose a short poem, such as a sonnet, as one of your texts, you may need to couple it with another text on the same theme from the same time period in order to give yourself more material to work with.
• Discuss how each work addresses the theme or concern you have chosen from the point of view of the time period in which it was written. In other words, discuss how the work's treatment of the theme or concern reflects the historical context in which it was written.
• Analyse how and why the two texts treat the same theme in DIFFERENT ways: that is, how and why they have different attitudes towards the same issues.
• In order to show what these attitudes are, you must cite specific language in the texts.

Research

Although research is not an explicit component of this assignment, I expect that you will do any research necessary on the historical contexts of the literature in order to clarify the history in your own mind and prevent you from relying on overgeneralisations or stereotypes. You will be graded on how you relate the literature to the historical environment in which it was produced.

Format

Essays should be approximately four to five pages long. I will accept shorter or longer essays provided that the discussion is of quality and clarity appropriate to an essay of this length.

Your essay must be formatted and proofread as if it were for a professional presentation, and you will be graded on format and mechanics. You should make use of the following guidelines:

1. The essay should be free of spelling mistakes and typographical errors. I will mark grades down for these types of mistakes in proportion to how distracting I find them. (So, if your spelling mistakes are so distracting that I can’t read your discussion, 100% of your grade will be based on spelling.)
2. I apply the same principle to grammatical errors, so I recommend you read your essay aloud and run it through a grammar checker.
3. Poetry should be cited by line number, not page number, unless there are no line numbers given. Quotations of four or more lines should be separated from your discussion and indented. Quotations of poetry less than four lines should have line breaks indicated by a slash. See the examples below. These conventions are used by professional literary scholars. Even if you are not going on to be an English major, you should try to adopt is convention because it shows your ability to learn a professional discourse. If you are an English major, no excuses! For further discussion, see my essay writing advice pages.

Here are some examples:

Poetry Quotation (Less Than Four Lines)
Emily Dickinson concludes “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” by likening being somebody to being a frog: “How public, like a frog / To tell your name the livelong June / To an admiring bog!” (5-8). Her language is arguably over the top…

I have underlined the slashes to call them to your attention. Notice also that the final punctuation of a sentence goes after the parenthetic citation if the quote is not indented.

Poetry Quotation (Four Lines Or More)
Emily Dickinson concludes “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” with a bittersweet stanza:

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong June
To an admiring bog! (5-8)

Her language is arguably over the top…

Due Date:

Wednesday Class: 23 May.

Thursday Class: 24 May.

Please place your essays under my door in Sierra Tower 803 by 5 pm.