Use formatting instructions given on previous assignment sheets.
Follow the MLA Bibliography style in formatting your Works Cited page, which should contain at
least 5 bibliography items.Specific instructions for this documentation can be found in
*Discovering*, p. 387.
One of your sources cited ought to be a book that provides the history of terms important to your project, such as "theory", "metaphor", "myth", "hero", "character", etc.
Good reference works to use:
* Transformations. Do poetry, fiction, and drama all transform the imagination in the same way?
* Transformations. Consider the terms Metaphor or Trope. Either term has some image of transformation built into the very structure of the word. What kinds of change in our imaginations come about through metaphor? Write a paper that comes to your own insight about Metaphor or Trope. Do you agree with the statement "All language is metaphoric"? There has been a great deal of literary debate over how to explain these concepts. Metaphor has even been attacked as immoral because it falsifies. You could research how various critics have defined the words, such as Bloom, de Man, Jakobson, Lewis, Scholes, etc., or you could study how metaphor has changed over the course of centuries, by comparing metaphors from writers and poets across a long tradition.
* Research the cultural and historical backgrounds to Gabriel Garcia Marquez' story "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World." Who was Marquez? How does this story make use of the traditional beliefs and customs surrounding death that were part of Marquez' surroundings? How might this story be understood and interpreted differently in Latin America and in the United States? What are this story's relations to *reality*? That is, what are the hard realities that Marquez is reacting to, and how does this story respond to them?
* The uses of magic: Consider how a text such as Midsummer Night's Dream, or several short
stories such as the Atwood, Marquez, or some works of children's literature, either make use of
supernatural powers or create a literary magic of their own. What symbolic meanings does the
magic represent? Does magic provide any "easy" solutions? What problems does it explain away?
Does the author
believe in this magic or, as in the case of Kafka, is it a cynical view of magic?
How do some kinds of poetry make magic?
*Look up the Voice of the Shuttle web page, http://vos.ucsb.edu/shuttle/english.html
There is a link to it on my web page.
Here are some questions to pursue by studying materials on the Voice of the Shuttle:
* Poetry and visual media: Our anthology includes a section containing examples of poems related to paintings. Write a paper discussing what happens when a poet writes about a painting. What significance is there in the process? How are the two arts related? Different?
* Write a thoughtful paper that explains what the structural differences are between any of the following media: music (instrumental? vocal?), painting, film, drama, novel, poetry.
* Select a poet to study in depth, and get to know her or his poetry thoroughly. Write a paper explaining this poet's work--as establishing a poetics, as positioning itself in literary tradition, as establishing the poet as a poet, as having social or political implications, etc. You will need to develop your own vision of this poet's work.
* Define poetry.
* Poetic swordsmanship: Study a case in which one writer appears to make use of or refer to the works of earlier writers. Explain how. Do they *compete with* their earlier influences? Do they tap into the earlier writers' metaphoric power? For example, how do Romantics (early 19th century) make use of Shakespeare? How does Hardy allude to other writers?
* Look up the history of one or more of the following terms and explain why critics have fought over the meaning and application of it, referring to examples from literature.
* Write a paper that studies Hardy's imagery. Is he "too descriptive," or can you now find some meaning in his long descriptions? How does he use symbolism to show how we should interpret the novel and its story?
* Write a paper studying a single character in the novel. What role does this character play in the novel's overall arguments? How does Hardy create this character out of images? What ideas does the character represent?
* Compare Angel and Alec, and their relations to Tess. What main idea do you draw from Hardy's comparison of these 2 men? What were the customs, gender roles, and principles of sexuality influencing marriage in the 1890s? What ideas about male and female sexuality were contemporary with this book? Does Hardy have anything to say about them?
* Is this plot influenced by Charles Darwin? By Karl Marx? By ideas about psychology?
* Check out or rent the Polansky film *Tess*, and explain what differences there are between the effects of film and text on an audience. Do you prefer the book or the film? Why? Does the book or film version appeal to different feelings in you? Is the book more cognitive/mental, for example? Is the film less critical? More visceral/emotional?
* How do you interpret "the ache of modernism"? As experienced by Tess? Clare? Hardy?
* In the course of this novel, Hardy makes his story fall into a number of genre patterns such as pastoral, romance, tragedy, history, and irony. Does he do that at random, or what meanings does he want to convey to us by orchestrating genres in that way?
* To what extent is this play ABOUT change, transformation?
* To what extent is this play about the relationship between eros and language? Or should we say, about the politics of the relationship between eros and language?
* The hierarchy of royalty, "middle class," and laboring class, is very noticeable in the human world of the play. Are these class distinctions critiqued by the play? Are they shown to be natural? What arguments does the play seem to be making about each class? What characteristics belong to each?
* How many worlds does this play stage? What do we learn from the relations between those worlds? Note that the same actors who play Oberon and the Queen of the Fairies, usually also play Theseus and the Queen of the Amazons in the other scenes.
* Do some research into what Shakespeare's contemporaries, including perhaps Edmund Spenser, thought faeries or faery were. What does that teach you about this play? What is the significance of faery, of magic, in the argument of this play?
* Consider this play as a response to the literary tradition offered by Chaucer.
* Study a major character such as Bottom, Puck, or the Queen. How have critics interpreted this character? What symbolic meanings does the character take on over the course of the play? Is Bottom purely funny, for example? With what kinds of laughter do we respond to him?
* Do Shakespeare's sonnets help us understand this play?