Tuesday, April 13th will be the last day to turn in a written preparation.
First of all, I'd like to say before posting your last assignment that I have enjoyed discussing these texts with you over the past eleven weeks. Your comments have frequently showed me new aspects of the texts that I hadn't considered before our classes. I often leave on Tuesdays saying to myself "Oh, wow I wouldn't have thought that about Auden/Yeats/Whitman..." Thank you for sharing your ideas. As you continue with your literary studies, I encourage you to have confidence and to speak up and share your thoughts frequently with your classmates.
I also wanted to add a brief word about the value of the analytic techniques we have practiced over the semester. We have focused closely on the language of the text, but for me the final aim of this type of analysis is never limited strictly to an understanding of the text itself. We're talking, thinking, and writing about the way Pinter deals with time, the way Shakespeare deals with love, or the way Yeats deals with political upheaval because things like time, love, and political upheaval are often very difficult to understand all on our own. My main goal in approaching these texts with you is that our discussions will allow us to better grasp things like love, political upheaval, or time. I hope your reading and thinking this semester has taught you things about these subjects that you didn't know when the semester started. For those of you who are interested in the relationship between textual analysis and literature teaching us about the world we live in, I highly recommend this article that talks specifically about the French education system.
Todorov, Tzvetan. "What Is Literature For?". New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation: 38.1 ( 2007 Winter), pp. 13-32.
If you'd like to write on a more general topic for this coming week, you can read the article and write a 250 to 500 word response to Todorov's ideas about the value of literature and structural analysis. I can send you a PDF file of the article if you contact me at njs2g@virginia.edu.
I'd like as well to comment on my choice of poems for the semester. When selecting the titles we studied, I realized quickly that it would be impossible to study all the poems I had in mind in only 6 weeks. I wanted to give you the titles of several other poems that I considered including in the course. All the poems I chose and the ones I had to leave out are poems that I personally enjoy reading and rereading.
T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock
Edgar Allan Poe The Raven
Eavan Bolan What Language Did
W.B Yeats The Circus Animals' Desertion
Emily Dickinson
Beck The Golden Age
And for the poetry/prose day
The last page of Ulysses by James Joyce
The "Addie" chapter in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
If you did not turn in a preparation on poetry, you have a last chance this week to make up that grade. You can write a 250-500 word analysis of one of these poems to avoid having a 0 averaged into your grade.
Finally, if you would like to write on The Great Gatsby, analyze in 250 to 500 words one of the following topics: Success, money, the role of women, Fitzgerald's style, war, excess, or conversation.
