Ode on a Grecian URL

As next semester begins tomorrow, I suppose it is time that I wrap up this blog. Here are some notes, as promised, from my readings of essays from last semester:

• One goal of 100-level literature courses is to introduce students to the language of literary criticism. It is not an obvious language, and it is a picky one. In your final essays I observed that several writers misused a few fairly specific literary-technical words:
  • Although your thesaurus is likely to suggest otherwise, grotesque doesn't just mean ugly: it is often used to characterize physical as well as behavioral difference that defines otherness. Obviously grotesque is thus an even more appropriate characterization of Frankenstein's monster; however, your essays rarely treated it as a specifically differentiating ugliness.
  • Irony is a loaded word in most academic contexts and particularly in literature. As we discussed earlier this semester, there is at least one extremely specific meaning of irony (the permanent parabasis of tropes, according to Paul de Man) that characterizes much of the sorts of irony we see operating in Romantic literature. The specificity of this meaning, weighed against the variety of other meanings available, renders irony a dangerously vague term. When you discuss it, you might be careful to define in exactly what sense you mean the word.


• On a related score, you might try to avoid relying too extensively on a thesaurus. It's not actually a serious problem for you to repeat a word ("ugly," for example), and in fact your writing is likely to become less clear if you begin using words with which you are not familiar.


• Your best thesaurus is yourself, really. Consider the word aspect: as a word, aspect isn't particularly useful--it comes from the Latin ad + specere: to look at; in its historical, literal sense an aspect is an outlook, a prospect, a view. We might refer to the aspect of a building, meaning the direction that it faces: my apartment has a southern aspect, for example. We have troped the aspectual idea into a word meaning, neutrally, "part of a thing." How unspecific! How meaningless!
  
  But if we look up aspect in a thesaurus, we get "facet, side, characteristic, slant," etc.: not especially useful analogs. Instead, let us look at the exact context of our use of the word and seek out a more specific word to use. Here is some context:

  By taking aspects that are vital for the continuation of human life away from himself, he becomes increasingly less human by ignoring his basic needs.

  (This sentence is about Victor Frankenstein.) Here, the writer is referring to Frankenstein's increasing estrangement from social behaviors, which phrase ("behaviors" or "social behaviors") ends up most effectively replacing "aspects" in the sentence: By taking away from himself social behaviors that are vital for the continuation of human life... reads far clearer.


• A less obvious manifestation of vaguery: the cliche. Cliches, pithy nuggets of "common wisdom," are often meaningless. Here is the cliche I see at least five times per batch of essays: a picture is worth 1,000 words. What exactly is the nature of this equivalence? Is it a sort of gold standard between the visual and literary arts--could you take Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting of The Lady of Shallot and transform it into a 1,000-word poem? Can you turn your poem in to a bank somewhere and exchange it for an exact photograph?
  
  Cliches are typically useless nonsense, and don't belong in your essays unless you are raising them up for critique.


• Rather than give you an overly graphic explanation, here is a simple instruction: avoid including dictionary definitions in your essays; avoid them particularly in your introduction. As readers, we are quite adept at looking up terms. If you are defining a word, it should be because you are using that word in a way that is not obvious but which is somehow essential to your argument. (Cf. Prof. Ortiz-Robles and his definitions of "Rime.") In this case, you are inevitably better off casting the definition in your own words.

A last note: theses are not easy to write, and they are specifically hard to write concisely. Just by way of a last example to close out our semester, here is the excellent, pithy, specific, interesting thesis of Kevin (301)'s essay:

Mary Shelley’s thoughts suggest that an ideal society should strive for knowledge at a healthy level, that is, not in excess.

I realize it's not necessarily useful to you, as individual writers, to hear where you are as a class, but I do feel confident after this semester that you are as a bloc in about the right position to move into literature courses in the future. You'll find that writing in, say, 200-level literature courses will take some of the writerly behaviors I discussed last semester as a given and will focus instead on new problems; the nature of writing and of analysis is that it is a constant trek upwards.

Remember, if you are making this trek, that I am always here to help you. Please, please feel free to email me whenever if there is anything I can do to help you work through writing essays in lit classes.