Ode on a Grecian URL

Two fun topics for you to consider this week!

Topic 1: Style transplant

Now that we are moving into a study of the Victorians, we need to begin thinking about the different decisions prose writers make as regards style. Middlemarch and Frankenstein are so different not just because of their plots (or because Frankenstein at least has a plot, as some of you have suggested) but because George Eliot and Mary Shelley just write in entirely different ways.

But what are these different ways of writing? In this hebdomadal, I would like you to explore ways of defining a single author's style, and of writing in that style yourself.

Choose Mary Shelley or George Eliot or John Stuart Mill. Write a paragraph describing the style of the author you've chosen. Think about the sense the writing style gives you: is it clear and open or think and chaotic or tight and claustrophobic? How long are the sentences s/he writes? how long the paragraphs? How present is the author or speaker in the text--does the word "I" appear a lot or are the sentences mostly passive? ("I disagree with John" or "Commonly, John was disagreed with"?) What words, or types of words, come up the most frequently?

In a second paragraph, pick a paragraph from another author's work and rewrite that paragraph in the style of the author you've chosen. Thus, if you've chosen to study Mary Shelley's prose, write a paragraph from Middlemarch the way Mary Shelley would have written it. Or you can write a paragraph from the newspaper or, really, anywhere else in the style of the author you've chosen: it might be particularly fun to ape how Mill would write a Letter to the Editor if he were alive today and complaining about the police presence on State Street this weekend.

Topic 2: Free hebdomadal

Write, with maturity and eloquence, 300 to 500 words on any topic at all, literary or otherwise. I am particularly excited to read anything you can write about yourself and your perception of the world. If you can bring Middlemarch in at all then you are absolutely welcome to, but there really is no literary obligation here. If you’re not sure exactly what topics to write about, consider these:

• If this is your first semester at college, how has it so far met and differed from what you expected? How are things going for you? (If you non-first-years want to step back and evaluate your college years, you are most welcome to do so as well.)
• Explain Halloween to me--actually, explain the whole drinking culture here to me. What motivates college students to party as they do? In what ways does this atmosphere disrupt or facilitate the nominally academic-pedagogical purpose of the University? (In other words, is it possible to learn just as much by drinking as by studying?)