English 210.03, Assignment: Essay 1
Writing Assignment: Essay 1--Critical Theory and Practice in Analyzing Poetry, approximately 1100 words (4-5 pp. double-spaced)
Due: 2-7-97
Peer-editing: Bring substantial (two-thirds or more) word-processed draft to share, two copies, on 2-3-97.
In preparing to write this essay, be sure that you have kept up with the assigned reading (up through Feb. 3 and better yet, through Feb. 5). Chapter 12 of Approaching Poetry (222-47) and the section on "Writing Short Papers About Poetry" (454-68) are particularly helpful, but you should also keep in view the major premises and problems posed by chapters 1-3 of Critical Theory & Practice. Although not required, note that I have placed additional resources on reserve that offer advice on writing about poetry (Poger) and writing critical essays (Warhol)--see Reading, Writing, and the Study of Literature. In choosing and developing a topic, the advice on journal entries may also serve as a useful guide.
I expect that the most interesting and thoughtful essays will tend to combine descriptive and interpretive approaches by linking how a poem and its reader(s) produce its meaning(s), why it does so, and to what purposes and effects. Our class discussion should also provide you with examples of various ways to address and to identify problems of interpretation and reception, and the importance of considering the work's historical context and genre. The poem in question should come from our class (see suggestions below) unless I grant permission for analysis of other works. I also want to note that you should not submit an essay for this class that you have submitted ( or intend to submit) for a grade in another course.
Especially for this first essay, be careful of addressing too broad a topic, and generally you will probably be more successful in focusing a hypothesis if you do not attempt to compare two different literary texts (unless they are short poems). You need not refer to secondary sources of criticism, but if you have, for example, useful historical information on your topic you may incorporate this into your argument, and you should also make an effort to "theorize" your analysis with some reference to our texts' comments on critical theory and practice. You should consider your audience to be familiar with the literary work you write about (avoid mere summary), using quotes, paraphrase, and summary primarily to support your analysis; however, when focusing or introducing your analysis of a critical approach (theory), you will probably rely more heavily on such explanatory (expository) techniques as quotes, paraphrase, and summary.
Whether explicitly foregrounded or clearly implied, "theoretical" concerns should help shape your essay in significant ways: you should focus your explanations (arguments, analyses, interpretations) on the literary text, though you may devote some significant attention to theoretical concepts, questions, and problems. I encourage you to confer with me, Anna Rose, and your peers in developing your ideas and your writing.
CRITICAL APPROACHES TO CONSIDER AND PERHAPS COMPARE
New Criticism
For this "approach" attend to the ways that tension or conflict--in dramatic action, character traits, tone, images and figurative language, tone, sounds, rhythms--cohere or become juxtaposed to produce the poem's whole effect and thematic unity, where irony and paradox may work to convey ideas "experientially" and to resolve tension through aesthetic form.
Structuralism
Instead of focusing solely on how a specific poem works by relating its form to its meaning in new critical fashion, structuralism inquires into the larger system--the linguistic and discursive structure--that shapes literature itself by determining the "grammar" or semiotic codes that govern the production of and possibilities for meaning. What rules or conventions enable particular texts to be "coded" and "decoded?"
Deconstruction (form of poststructuralism)
Rather than striving to show that a text's ambiguities can be resolved and be seen to cohere in a unified whole (New Criticism), or to presume that all discursive action is primarily predetermined (structuralism), deconstruction attends to contradictions that threaten to undermine such unity or structural stability. A deconstructive analysis exposes figures and oppositions that privilege particular positions and meanings. For example, deconstruction notes how binary oppositions (nature/culture, literal/figurative) demonstrate a particular logic or philosophy of meaning (constituting a rhetorical argument, a culturally positioned and arbitrary arrangement that serves a particular order of things--see Steven Lynn, Texts and Contexts) and then proceeds to question the priority of one term over another, both to show their interdependence and to suggest how "such privileging imposes an interpretive template on the subject being examined" (AP 242, see summary of method on p.244). Once the hierarchy is questioned and even reversed, the opposition may be displaced into a different context to challenge the function of the opposition itself (e.g., reading/writing may not only be opposed and inverted, but considered from another view (context) as radically destabilized in even determining what is written or read--the illusion of a transcendental signified is created by the opposition itself.
New Historicism
Here are some key assumptions of new historicist theory and practice as summarized by H. Aram Veeser (qtd. in CTP 115) and Steven Lynn (Texts and Contexts 131):
1. that every expressive act is embedded n a network of material practices;
2. that every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
3. that literary and non-literary texts circulate inseparably;
4. that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature;
5. that a critical method and language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe;
6. that history is knowable only in the sense that all texts are knowable--that is by interpretation, argument, speculation;
7. literature is not simply a mirror of historical reality; history in fact isn't a mirror of historical reality. Literature is shaped by history, and even shapes history; it is also distorted by history, and is even discontinuous with history.
8. Historians and critics must view "the facts" of history subjectively; in fact, the "facts" must be viewed as their creation.
Such premises invite you to explore how a specific literary text represents a particular cultural (social, political, economic, class, religion, gender--ideology) perspective that may be peculiar to its historical context. In his essay "Culture," Stephen Greenblatt suggests that we ask these questions:
a. What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?
b. Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?
c. Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading?
d. Upon what social understandings does the work depend?
e. Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work?
f. What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected?
Finally, in your analysis you could draw upon (or respond to) Greenblatt by explaining, distinguishing, and illustrating the concepts of "mobility," "constraint," and "exchange [circulation]" in relation to a particular poem.
Ideology Revisited
In addition to the discussion on ideologies in Critical Theory & Practice (124-34), you might find James H. Kavanagh's comments on ideology helpful:
Ideology is less tenacious as a "set of ideas" than as a system of representations, perceptions, and images that precisely encourages men and women to "see" their specific place in a historically peculiar social formation as inevitable, natural, a necessary function of the "real" itself. . . . there is no such thing as social discourse that is nonideological. . . . Ideology is a social process that works on and through every social subject, that, like any other social process, everyone is "in," whether or not they "know" or understand it. It has the function of producing an obvious "reality" that social subjects can assume and accept, precisely as if it had not beenb socially produced and did not need to be "known" at all. The "nonideological" insistence does not mark one's freedom from ideology, but one's involvement in a specific, quite narrow ideology which has the exact social function of obscuring--even to the individual who inhabits it--the specificity and peculiarlity of one's social and political position, and of preventing any knowledge of the real processes that found one's social life. ("Ideology" 310-12 Critical Terms for Literary Study)
Poems you might consider for this essay (in Approaching Poetry)
"The Victims" (30)
Your Poem, Man . . . " (46)
"Language Lesson, 1976" (49)
"Ballad of Birmingham" (73)
"In Westminster Abbey" (75)
"My Last Duchess" (76)
"The Poem You Asked For" (99)
"The Ball Poem" (105)
"Journey of the Magi" (112)
"The Pomegranate" (115)
"Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God" (147)
"Daddy" (187)
"To His Coy Mistress" (231)
"Facing It" (260)
"Tiara" (262)
"Dover Beach" (267)
"Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races" (271)
"Because I Could Not Stop for Death" (316)
"Do Not Go Gentle" (350)
"Dulce et Decorum Est" (341)
"Home Burial" (handout)
"Bitch" (287)
"I Cannot Remember All the Times . . . " (287)
"Theme for English B" (342)
"Naming of Parts" (351)
"The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle" (436)
Go to Stephan Flores' Home Page.