Jane Austen’s table and chair
Your essay is due by Saturday, March 7th at 11:00pm, please send it as a word doc to roxanne.eberle@gmail.com OR upload it to Google Drive and send me a link.
All of the following questions require that you first generate a thesis specific to the essay at hand. Once you have stated your position, you will need to prove your argument by carefully looking at the chosen material and mustering textual evidence to support that position.
Avoid biographical readings of the texts. Your assignment here is to support literary analysis through close reading of the literature itself.
Please do not use any outside criticism for this assignment. If you do look at outside material, you must cite it in a properly formatted Works Cited. See the MLA for guidelines. Links below
Other Guidelines:
You must discuss at least 2 pieces of literature but no more than 3
Paper Length etc.: 5 pages, Times New Roman 12-point font, double-spaced
Use MLA format when writing your essay. See the Purdue Owl website for assistance if you don’t have an MLA Handbook.
< https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01>
Writing Guidelines for 2320, Spring 2020
Writing a Literary Essay 2020, Powerpoint
Choose one of the following writing prompts to develop into an essay:
Many of the texts that we’ve read this semester position authority in the figure of a first-person speaker and/or observer. Discuss the significance of the individual in eighteenth-century and/or Romantic literature.
In several of the works we have read this semester we have seen representations of England and its role in global networks, inclusive of trade and emigration. Some of those representations have been critical of the directions taken by a growing nation while others have been very positive. In every case, however, such representations indicate the author’s hopes and fears for the nation, as well as his or her love for the people, landscape, and an often idealized English past, present, and future. In your essay compare and contrast at least two works that take for their subject matter the “state of the Nation.”
In An Essay on Man, written at the very beginning of the century, Alexander Pope’s speaker insists that “Whatever is, is right.” Does such certainty persist across the century? Indeed, did it ever really exist? In your essay, support one of two positions drawing upon at least two but no more than three texts: the eighteenth century is an era of certainty OR the eighteenth century is an era of questioning.
In several works we have read this semester, authors have either explicitly or implicitly expressed hopes for the ways in which the writer – as a social figure – can materially impact society. In your essay, discuss the ways in which writers characterize and/or inhabit the social role of literature. Make sure that you discuss the works’ literary strategies specifically; you must go beyond the “big ideas” to discuss specifics (i.e. choice of literary form, the cultivation of a voice in the text, the use of sound devices, rhetorical devices etc.).
Romantic authors had a very different concept of the writer/poet than their immediate predecessors in the eighteenth century. Compare and contrast the ways in which writers in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period characterize the artistic mind: its powers, the work it produces, and its potential effect upon society. In your essay you may want to consider different attitudes toward reason and the imagination; different uses of poetic form (i.e. the choice between heroic couplets and the lyric, for example); and/or different attitudes about the role of the poet in society. Restrict yourself to a discussion of one work by an eighteenth-century author and one work by a Romantic writer.