Ode on a Grecian URL

I may post a Great Expectations topic after lecture on Wednesday.

Topic 1: Beginning your essay

Because your essay will be built on ideas that come out of a close reading of the text, it makes the most sense to begin your work on this first essay by working through a nuanced, interesting close reading and analysis of an interesting passage.

Remember that a close reading is the connection of formal and rhetorical features from a short passage to one or more textual themes. In particular, you will probably want to engage with

• The form of the passage -- is it an epigram? a confession? a letter? witty dialogue? a monologue? is it neutral narration, or perhaps narration in a character's voice?
• The sorts of words used is the passage: what words repeat? what words seem like unusual choices? If you put all the principle words in this passage into a list, what would that list describe?
• Any tropes or unusual rhetorical figures in the passage -- metaphor, simile, rhyme, poetic rhythm, etc.
• The tone -- ironic? moralizing? sentimental? detached?

At the top of your hebdomadal let me know what essay topic you are tackling and roughly how you are approaching it. Then type out the passage you will be closely reading for this hebdomadal. You might notice new things in typing it out, plus this way I don't have to go flipping through my books =) Be as risky as possible in your close reading: push your ideas as far as they will go, and look particularly to offer interesting, creative readings that might not be entirely correct. (Try to replicate the sort of insight and inventiveness of Prof. Ortiz-Robles's reading of the tombstones.) Don't be afraid to be wrong! Better to be wrong in a hebdomadal than in a four-page essay.