Ode on a Grecian URL

Because I just finished replying to the last hebdomadal a few minutes ago, I'm thinking I will need to cut back a little on the depth of my comments just so I can get them back to you more quickly.

This doesn't mean that I find your work unimportant or uninteresting - please, if you have even a single question about or reaction to my comments write me back as much as you like. I love hearing from you! This class should feel extremely interactive: you should never feel that you are shooting your readings and interpretations and ideas off into the void, never to hear back about them again.

Topic 1

Craft a sophisticated, interesting thesis that responds in depth to the surface and subsurface issues raised by one of the essay questions you received last week. Accompany this thesis with remarks about its consequence: what does your answer to this question reveal about one of the larger topics in this course - the invention of the self, the growth of Romantic aesthetics, the differences between the poets, the reading practice Middlemarch identifies for itself, etc.

Your hebdomadal should go on to

• identify the nuances of the question and text you're considering,
• the ways this text and question intersect with other texts and other questions,
• and what sorts of close readings you will deploy to support your argument

I can't give you a foolproof formula for writing this one, but I can give you some ideas about how I craft my theses, and about how I have seen students do the same in the past:

1. As you've probably observed, there is a certain flexibility about essay topics: if you can tweak one of these essay topics in such a way that it will interest you more, go ahead and do it for now. However, be sure to be explicit about this change and its value: "While it is valuable to compare Keats's sense of 'imagination' to Wordsworth's, our understanding of the difference of their aesthetic systems might be better advanced by looking at how these two poets incorporate metaphor differently into their descriptions of the natural world." And don't get huffy if I ask you to tweak your alternate topic a little more... =)

2. You don't have to think of a thesis as a thesis sentence: often, a good thesis will take you two or three sentences - or a lot of semicolons - to explain well. Many of the greatest theses are actually questions: "If we can meaningfully understand the Romantic 'imagination' in contrast to Aristotelian 'imitation,' how do we cope with both aesthetics' interest in portraying an idealized future?"

3. There is no obvious answer; there is no right answer. Throw out the idea that there is a correct solution to the essay topic. Often a good thesis recognizes that an important literary context is just an irresolvable mess: "While the Romantics clear prefer the pre-industrial country to the increasingly dehumanizing and mechanized city, they also recognize the inevitability of urban development and are ambiguous about its value." But that doesn't mean a thesis can just throw up its arms in defeat - it should still suggest an interesting conclusion: "...but this Romantic ambiguity about the city suggests that the power of the Romantic imagination wouldn't have been possible in a pre-industrialized state. Only with the city in the background can the poet appreciate the country."

4. If you see an obvious answer, or an uninteresting answer, or a superficial answer - avoid it. For example, while you could easily argue "Coleridge functionally subscribes to the same aesthetic system as Wordsworth but he happens to write different kinds of poetry," that's not a terribly interesting answer, and it misses a lot of subtleties. Better: "Wordsworth believed Coleridge was writing poetry less effective than his own because of X; however, this is merely a superficial difference - in fact, both Coleridge and Wordsworth aimed to do Y with poetry, as we can see by looking closely at Z."

Topic 2

Practice the close reading technique we saw Prof. Ortiz-Robles model in class today:

1. identify an image in a paragraph from Book II of Middlemarch;
2. explain how that image constructs meaning beyond the surface meaning of the words Eliot uses (that is, how the image turns into a metaphor);
3. explain what comparison or relationship that metaphor illuminates;
4. identify how the method of the metaphor is imitated within the organization or text of the paragraph itself (as Lydgate's "threads of investigation" repeat the threads of origin that carry organs back to the "primitive tissue");
5. and look into how the metaphor is problematized within the text.
6. Finally, briefly identify how this metaphor is important to our understanding of the broader themes and methods of Middlemarch.