English 370B -- Paper Assignment Handout

In this course we have surveyed a range of texts that represent a small sample of English and American Literature: 1660-1865.  This paper is your opportunity to synthesize everything we have read about literature as it developed trans-nationally – and to examine the intertextual relationships between the texts, the texts in the context of colonialism, how women are positioned in these texts, and the literary/artistic devices used to create all these meanings.

This paper can be your opportunity to develop many skills that will prove invaluable for the rest of your English major coursework, as well as your other intellectual and professional pursuits:

• Ability to “close read” the texts and identify significant themes, metaphors and textual devices.
• Ability to “interpret” the texts according to the kinds of details and approaches that seem most significant to you as a reader and critical thinker.
• Ability to work on your writing skills, including working with essay structure (thesis statement, topic sentences, and innovation).
• Ability to do selective outside research and reading, and to bring these outside sources to bear on the text. A selection of critical essays will be available on e-reserve for everyone to use; I strongly encourage you to do your own research provided you discuss your choice of secondary materials with me before the draft is due (see schedule below).

Your criteria for success on this assignment:
Show it off:  demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the texts at hand.
Argumentative, not merely informational:  make an argument about the text, or offer an interpretation of some kind.
Structure:  use a clear essay structure, including thesis statement, topic sentences, well-structured paragraphs, meaningful conclusion
Stay on topic:  don’t verge off-topic in weird tangents, or take two pages to get started.
Scope:  your topic is not too narrow, or too broad.  You have already discussed its viability with me.
Mechanics: word choice, correct grammar, proper citation format (MLA format is required; see link under “Writing resources” on the WebCT site for guidance). Remember to use your spell-checker!
Format: 7-10 pages, double-spaced, 1" margins, NY Times or equivalent sized font. Click here for an example of how your paper should be formatted. You will lose points if you paper is not formatted exactly as shown in the example.

DUE DATES:

• Tentative thesis statement and outline due on Monday, April 12 via email.
• Full draft due in class on Friday, April 23; deadline to propose alternative secondary resources; no paper will be accepted unless I have first seen a draft of it.
  
• Final essay due in class on Wednesday, May 5

Here are some ideas on prospective paper topics. These paper topics are just designed to get you thinking on what to write about.  Feel free to adapt these topics or extend them according to your unique interests and insights.

Literary technique
How do any of the texts we have read work with a specific literary technique, such as irony and/or allegory, unreliable narrative perspective, classical allusion, metaphor and visual imagery, or other literary techniques?

• Be sure to research the literary technique enough, using academic sources like handbooks on literary technique, so that you will be able to offer your reader an in-depth knowledge of the literary device at hand. For instance, a paper on irony would want to be sure to demonstrate a solid understanding of the types of irony and how they manifest in your materials.
• This option offers you the option of doing a “close reading” and in-depth analysis of texts in relation to each other. Be sure to demonstrate that you have read the text(s) carefully and have taken good notes.
• You should be able to explain to your reader the significance of your author’s(s’) choices in terms of literary technique. For instance, why is it important to note the intricacies of the narrative artifice employed by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels and by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe?

This paper option offers you the possibility of exploring different pieces as they relate to each other in their usage of literary devices. Papers written to this option will look critically at the way that various literary texts are structured by authors with various purposes in mind.

The Woman Question
Up to now, we have read one text written by female authors, including Mary Astell’s Some Reflections Upon Marriage. Later in the course, we will also read Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. To discuss “the woman question” in any of these texts, consider the following questions:

• How is woman represented by different texts in this period?  What key images, symbols, and discourse are used to represent woman in the male-authored texts that we have read so far?
• How do women fare within the social institutions of the day?  What rights do women on both sides of the Atlantic have within the institution of marriage?  What is the historical context surrounding the texts we have read that position women as coquettes, wives, lovers, and settlers?
• There is a special section in the Longman Anthology entitled, “Women and Men, Manners and Marriage" (2422). What are the main debates that these pieces raise?  How are these essays and writings speaking to one another about the most important issues surrounding the lives of women in the 17th and 18th centuries?  Do you see any parallels between these pieces and the more “canonical” texts that we have read already?

Postcolonial Perspective
The settlement of the “new world” – complete with rifts between Whig and Tory, merchant and aristocrat, colonizer and native, “master” and slave, European and Indian—serve as the backdrop to texts written in both countries between 1760-1865.  

• Do a reading of any of the texts we have read that shows how thinking through the dynamics of colonialism, the slave trade, and the genocide of the American Indians, adds another dimension to a text like The Rape of the Lock, Gulliver’s Travels, Letters from an American Farmer, or anything else we have read.  
• Be sure to narrow down your topic so that you are dealing with a manageable number of texts and contexts.
• You need to zoom in enough so that you can show how the language chosen by the author reflects the context of colonialism—perhaps even multiple types of colonialism.
• One interesting possibility would be to show how texts written at nearly the same time on different sides of the Atlantic reflect this history of colonialism in contrasting and yet complimentary ways.

The Body
From the very first authors we read in this course, the body has emerged as a major emphasis, even in authors who ostensibly are not writing about the body.  
Consider the following types of questions:

• How do authors as diverse as Winthrop, Edwards, De Crevecoeur, Pope, Swift, and Wordsworth construct metaphors of the body?
• How do different authors use these metaphors to different ends?  
• How can metaphors of the body be used to express social, religious, and political commentary?
• What literary techniques are used by various authors we have read, to present bodies as marked by race, gender and class?
• For instance, how does Winthrop’s usage of body metaphors to represent an idea of the community contrast with Swift’s terrifying suggestion that the English eat Irish babies – or, for that matter, the distortion of scale that marks Gulliver’s perspective?

Design a paper which takes on a manageable number of authors (anywhere from 1 – 3?) and examines metaphors of the body and what this rhetoric of the body is designed to signify.