Feel free to respond to this post with your thoughts about any of the following:
(1) In what specific ways do you find that the text you're writing about complicates, affirms, completes, or otherwise speaks to the picture of Enlightenment-era culture that you've been acquiring in this course?
(2) What particular rhetorical challenges does this paper assignment present?
(3) What are you finding particularly interesting, frustrating, confusing, or difficult about grappling with your chosen text?
Deadline: Monday (4/11), start of class. Posts before midnight Saturday (4/9) count towards Week 11; posts after that count towards Week 12.
14 comments:
My piece was about a woman who tried to scam the Church out of money by pretending to be pregnant and unable to support herself in her pregnancy. This story is part of the picture of the Enlightenment-era culture because it is about a woman stepping out, going against social norms, and the Church. I had to read my story several times before I understood it. I was thrown off by the 's' being changed to 'f' as well. I found the whole story to be interesting and filled with irony.
So I'm writing on the topic of humility and pride, more or less, and I feel like going over the material that we normally write on in class is very helpful in synthesizing ideas and creating approaches to arguing them. For this paper however, I feel kind of unguided and unconfident in my ideas. Those are my main thoughts on having to write a paper that is so independent.
In class we have easy access to any sort of background or biographical information we need through the use of our anthology or teacher. However, since this project focuses on texts not well-known I am having a hard time finding biographical information to my author which I think is essential to understanding if my text is written with irony or sincerity. It's much harder finding information on my own, so I think I just need to make my own observations on the text itself, without any influence about its author.
My essay is about how a woman writing about the abolition of slavery may actually be more focused on how slavery negatively affect religion rather then the negative effects of slavery on the human being. I also feel a bit unsure as to whether I'm on the right track, sometimes I feel as if my argument is a bit weak because of this
My text is a brief biography about a female pirate who made her way through the world by disguising herself as a male. There are so many interesting things about this text, but I'm finding it extremely difficult to find a particular argument to discuss. I know that as a female, she fits in with the Enlightenment era because she emerges as a strong female character unlike most women during this time period. Hmmm...perhaps I should focus on that aspect...
My piece pertains to the famous Mutiny on the Bounty. It's an essay written as a sort of recounting of the entire thing, from mutiny to the return of Lieutenant Bligh and his men to a friendly shore. There were two things that I had a fun time dealing with.
1) Although I didn't choose to write about this portion of the text (the entire document is 72 pages long), the portion about Bligh's trip home seemed like a modernized version of Homer's Odyssey. The dork in me was giggling the whole time I read, but at the same time it called the authenticity of the account of the travels home into question.
2) The essay is outright sexist in favor of males. I was really miffed by this, because especially in light of the last discussions about Lady Montagu, I thought there was a greater degree of egalité percolating in mainstream society. It was problematic, to say that least.
I found it interesting how my poem was written in the 17th century yet it is still so popular today. I thought the hardest part of this assignment was finding a text that met the length requirement that I could analyze in an effective manner.
To clarify, do I need to have a work cited page if I only consulted my primary text on the ECC since I will turn in a hard copy of it anyways in class?
I feel a greater understanding of religious and family views of the the enlightenment era now that I have gone through and analyzed a story concerning said subjects. Religious belief can be a dangerous thing when believed so strictly that family come second to the holy book or rules of the holy leaders.
My paper was about a man who is accused of a crime that he did not commit, unfortunately he is unable to prove his innocence and eventually ends up with pirates, at the end he returns as an old man
known as the begger. One difficulty I had with this paper is the fact that even though there were so many ways that I could have gone with this paper, it was hard to choose something to focus on. Usually papers are suppose to argue a point and prove it through well developed paragraphs. Though without really knowing much of what the paper was writing for or really a counter claim about what it meant, it seem to be more analysis and interpretation. The goal to me did not seem to be to argue, but to explain our interpretation of the stories and how that reveals something about the Eighteenth Century. Without any knowledge of the author or when they wrote it, it seem a little difficult to be sure if my interpretations were even accurate. I felt like in the end all this assignment was about was more of a summary, my conclusion also seemed to be completely different than what I may have argued. With so much liberty to create a paper about any topic, it made the paper a little difficult to get started.
The piece I focused on dealt with the scientific phenomenon "Airquakes". While the focus of the article was very interesting, I originally found myself focusing more on how the text corresponds to geological knowledge at the time. I had to step back and take a literary approach the text, one that focuses more on how it reflects enlightenment thought.
I feel that my work is less than typical as it is a piece of poetry devoted to the glories of gin. Because of the non-traditional topic, I feel that my analysis was complicated slightly simply on the basis that I don't know in what context this poem was written or how the topic was handled at the time. One thing that this poem clearly shows, though, is that the small joys that are celebrated by the humble college student seem to be timeless.
My piece is about how women should refuse to go to plays that have "immodest" messages or scenes within them. This definitely affirms the picture of the Enlightenment-era culture we have discussed, because it focuses solely on women not going so they do not get influenced by the shows. Nothing about men is ever mentioned, which I found interesting and definitely in line with what we've been learning in class so far, so I actually chose to focus on that as part of my thesis.
For my essay I chose to focus on a piece by Maurice Morgann concerning the dramatic character of Sir John Falstaff, created in Henry IV, Part One by William Shakespeare. It was interesting to me to discover how my writing path changed from the time I began my research till the moment I began to write. That was one of the challenges of the assignment: being able to develop thoughtful, intelligent questions for a piece of less well-known literature sans any sort of prompt. After the practice we had in class, the various sessions where we critically analyzed shorter texts without any real background information, I found that the direction my paper headed in was much simpler to access. Eventually the topic my paper developed into a questioning of Morgann's initial intent upon writing the essay as well as a comment on exactly how Shakespeare's works as a whole were viewed differently in the 18th century as compared to now.
I'm finding it most difficult to come up with something academic to say about my text. On the surface the excerpts are merely the ramblings of a naive woman obsessed with love and romance writing in the form of an early "pre-novel". As I've looked more specifically at word choice and the way in which characters are represented; however, I've found that there does seem to be an interesting commentary on social norms both as regards gender and as regards the social outcast, in this case, a pirate captain. Unfortunately, so far this has been more of an intuition than a firmly supported thesis, and I'm having a difficult time finding firm textual evidence to support this claim.
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