S.D. Blau English 10 -- Interpretive Project: Poetry
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S.D. Blau -- The Interpretive Project: Poetry
English 10/ Fall 2001
For this project you are to take on an interpretively difficult or problematic poem (or passage in a poem) and write a brief paper presenting the interpretive problem and exploring possible solutions. Ideally, in the course of working on this paper you will resolve the problem in a way that is satisfying for you and convincing to your reader. However, it is possible -- even likely -- that your work on the problem will advance your understanding of the problem and clarify its dimensions for your reader, but that your paper will still not reach any conclusion that might be called a solution or resolution for the problem you have examined.
This project and the study it entails will be completed in 2 stages, with each stage yielding a paper or a draft of a paper. The two stages of the project are described below.
Stage 1. The first stage of the project requires you to write an interpretive paper as described above on one of the seven poems listed below (all in our anthology). Your choice of a poem will be complicated, however, by the need to join a group of four to six students all of whom are required to agree on the one poem from the list that all the members of your small group will write about (or form your group with class members who come to class already interested in the same poem you want to write about from the list below). However you form your group with members who will be writing about the same poem, your job will be to write your paper and bring it with you to class on the specified date (see below) with copies for every member of your group (and one for your instructor). At that point you and the members of your group will read and respond to each other's papers and discuss the poem at length within your group during the class period.
In completing the paper for stage 1 you will not be expected to engage in any library research or use web-based resources (though there is no prohibition against them), but it would be wise to read the biographical sketch of your author at the back of our anthology and some additional poems by the same author. Stage 1 paper due Mon Oct. 29.
Read all 7 of the eligible poems for this assignment as carefully as possible, so you'll know what poems you'd prefer to write about at the class meeting on Mon. Oct 22, where groups will be formed. The eligible poems (all in our anthology and on our syllabus) are the following:
John Donne, "The Flea"
Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"
Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess"
Robinson Jeffers, "Carmel Point"
Robert Frost, "Birches"
Langston Hughes, "Theme for English B"
Stanley Kunitz, "Touch Me"
Stage 2. This stage asks you to revise your paper in any way that you think will strengthen it, but with the one additional requirement that you now draw upon one or more of the papers written by your colleagues to support or clarify or stand in contrast to your own ideas about the poem. In other words, you are obliged to acknowledge in your paper the existence of a body of writing by your colleagues about the same poem you are explicating and to incorporate the ideas of your colleagues (at least one of them and preferably more) into your paper, either to illuminate or support some point you wish to make or to show a contrasting or opposing point of view. You may quote from your colleague's paper or paraphrase or summarize what he or she has written, acknowledging your sources by using parenthetical abbreviated citations within your text and list of references at the end. (Conventions and forms for citation will be discussed in class, well before the due date). Stage 2 paper due Mon. Nov. 5.
