Assignment for Paper #1. Due Wednesday January 23. Approximately 1000 words
Please study the documents on writing papers linked to the bottom of the
syllabus page.
Include several short quotations from the texts you discuss, precisely citing
the source
If you use any secondary sources, including sources on the web, be sure
to cite them appropriately
Select one of the following topics. Feel free to discuss your ideas or a
first draft of your paper with me during office hours or by email.
Select an emblem or picture and relate both its content and its form of
expression to passages in one of the works we have read.
e.g. http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/withe022.htm in relation to the treatment
of youth in Utopia and to the games they play setting vices against virtues
Relate one or more incidents in Shakespeare in Love to aspects of
the texts we have read
e.g. The wager about whether or not a play can tell the truth of love
and other debates about the value of the arts and the debate about poetry
engaged in by Sidney or the relation between romance and frustration in
the poets and the film
Compare and contrast definitions of pleasure and attitudes toward it among
the Utopians and the poets.
Compare and contrast the functions and values of the arts in Sidney and
the Utopians
Analyze the wordplay in one of the poems we've read with extensive citation
of 16th century meanings and etymology from the OED
In close imitation of Utopia or one of the travel narratives, write a description
of an ideal community you discover on a voyage and how it surpasses the your
own society
Poem exercise
Pick a poem and copy it in longhand word for word--learning the rhythn
and meter
Write an imitation of that poem in your own language about your own experience.
Write an explication of your own poem, discussing the intertextual references
to the poem you imitated.
Find and explain humorous passages in the works we've read so far.
Discuss the construction of beginnings or endings in four or five short
poems.