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First Essay Assignment

The first essay will be due at the beginning of class on Thursday, October 14.

(Class will not meet on Monday, October 10, due to Columbus Day.)

The essay should be approximately five pages in length. In the essay, you should carefully compare and contrast any two of the poems that have been assigned for class. The poems may both be by the same author (Petrarch, Chaucer, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare) or they may be poems by different authors on similar themes. (But please do not choose two poems by Shakespeare.)

You are free to choose the poems and the topic that you want to address, but here are some suggested topics:

Compare and contrast a Petrarch sonnet to its translation by Surrey, Wyatt, or Sidney.

Compare and contrast Wyatt's "Mine Own John Poins" and Surrey's "So cruel prison how could betide" in terms of their depictions of court life or in terms of their relative representations of the genuine interior life of the individual and the expression of sincere sentiment.

Compare and contrast two English sonnets that translate the same Petrarchan sonnet, like Wyatt's "The long love that in my thought doth harbor" and Surrey's "Love, that doth reign and live within my thought," or Wyatt's "My galley" and Spenser's Amoretti 34.

Compare and contrast two of Sidney's sonnets on the issues of imitation, originality, eloquence, and sincerity.

Compare and contrast the depictions of ideal love in any two sonnets.

Compare and contrast the conception and representation of ideal beauty in any two sonnets.

Compare and contrast the use of the technique of blazon in sonnets by Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare.

Format: All submitted papers should follow the Modern Language Association (MLA) guidelines for formatting a paper. These guidelines can be found in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed., which is available in the Reference Section of the library and in the Writing Center, but they are also summarized on pp. 148-150 of Diana Hacker’s Pocket Style Manual, with sample pages on pp. 151-154. When commenting on your essays, I will refer to Hacker on matters of format and style.

Following the MLA style, all papers should cite their sources on every occasion that they are used, and all paper should include a complete list of works cited.

Thesis workshops: On the morning of Thursday, October 7, class time in EN251A will be devoted to a thesis workshop. Students are required to bring to class a prospective thesis sentence for their essays. (It is understood that the thesis and even the topic may change or evolve before the essay is completed.) The thesis should be typed and should be in the form of a single, complete sentence. In class, we will go over individual theses as examples and we will discuss our theses in small groups.

EN251B will not meet on Thursday the 7th due to the Inauguration of the new University President. An optional thesis workshop has therefore been scheduled for the evening of the 7th, 7:30-8:45 PM, in Canisius 1. Are all welcome to attend.

The thesis is the single, central idea that the essay means to convey to the reader. A good thesis is one that can be proven (that is, it can be demonstrated with evidence from the texts) and that needs to be proven (that is, it is not self-evident). Avoid vagueness! Make your thesis as precise and as specific as possible.