ENG H202:  Topics for Paper I

Due Tuesday, January 22, your first essay should be 1,250 words +/- 10% (from 1,125 to 1,375 words) and adhere to the formatting guidelines that can be linked to here:

http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/herman145/papertemplate.html

Please note that your essays for this class represent opportunities for you to explore your own ideas, so you should do your best to avoid repeating specific points that have come up during our class-discussions.

Option A: For one of the poems included in Blake's Songs of Innocence or Songs of Experience that we DO NOT discuss in detail in our class-discussions focusing on Blake, develop an interpretation of how words and images work together in the poem. (Note: you can find reproductions of Blake's illustrated poems at the following site: http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/indexworks.htm and clicking on the link for Songs of Innocence and of Experience) Some brainstorming questions: How do words and images work together in the poem you've chosen? Do the visual components of the poem harmonize with, reinforce, undercut, or relate in some other way to the verbal components?

For this option, you can also compare and contrast how words and images relate to one another in two different Blake poems: for example in one of the poems included in Songs of Innocence and then re-presented in a different manner or "key" in Songs of Experience (like the chimney sweeper poems, the two "Nurse's Songs," the two poems titled "Holy Thursday," "The Lamb" and "The Tyger," etc.)

Option B: Compare and contrast representations of children or childhood in TWO of the following items: Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality"; no more than 2-3 individual poems in Blake's Songs of Innocence and/or Songs of Experience (you can focus on a single Blake poem, if you'd like); Barbauld's "Washing-Day." Some brainstorming questions: What specific qualities do the poems associate with childhood vs. adulthood, and how? More generally, what do children (or what does childhood) seem to symbolize or connote for the two poets on whom you focus? To put the same question still another way, in what ways are the poems you examine invested in childhood/children, and how does this investment relate to the larger concerns of the poems in question?

Option C: Drawing on Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women and its account of the differences (or asymmetries) between gender roles for men and women, discuss how her ideas can be brought into dialogue with any TWO of the following: no more than 2-3 individual poems in Blake's Songs of Innocence and/or Songs of Experience (you can focus on a single Blake poem, if you'd like); Barbauld's "Washing-Day"; Wordsworth's "The Female Vagrant" (or another Wordsworth poem of your choosing); Byron's Don Juan or Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. To what extent does Wollstonecraft's account illuminate the texts' representations of gender roles, and to what extent do the texts suggest problems or limitations in Wollstonecraft's account, if at all? Does one of the texts seems to adhere more closely to Wollstonecraft's account than the other, and if so, how?

Option D: Both Wordsworth's "The Female Vagrant" and Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" are extended narrative poems, as are Byron's Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Choose either Wordsword's or Coleridge's poem, on the one hand, and compare and contrast that text with either of Byron's two poems, on the other hand. What commonalities and contrasts can you find when you look at how the two texts convey the stories that they tell? What is the quality or tone of the narrating voice in each case? Is the voice ironic? And what about other narrative techniques, such as the manipulation of chronology (are there lots of flashbacks, for example?), the handling of perspective, the use of setting, etc.? How would you compare and contrast, overall, the storytelling styles used in the two texts?