Essay #2
Due date: April 19, 2010 Choose one of the following quotations (all of which may be interpreted as considerations of modernism or the modern period) and respond to it with an essay of 10 - 12 pages. It is up to you whether you wish to include the quotation in your essay –if you do, you may want to examine its context– but your argument must stand as a clear response to some significant idea(s) or question(s) presented in the quotation you have selected. Your essay should include focused discussion of three works studied this term, each by a different writer. These three works must include at least one from each of the two columns of titles given below. All papers must be double-spaced, have an original title, and be accompanied by a works cited list (those without such a list automatically forfeit 5% of their mark). Secondary sources are welcome and encouraged, but not required.
  1. The thrust of the age was to affirm the reality of private time against that of a single public time and to define its nature as heterogenous, fluid, and reversible.                 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. 34.
  2. The pragmatic value of modernism lies in its tremendous recognition of the compensation due to the spirit of democracy. Modernism is a prophet crying in the wilderness of stabilized culture that humanity is wasting its aesthetic time.                 Mina Loy, “Gertrude Stein” (1924). Modernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 432-37.
  3. By the brokenness of his composition the poet makes himself master of a certain weapon which he could possess himself of in no other way. The speed of the emotions is sometimes such that thrashing about in a thin exhalation or despair many matters are touched but not held, more often broken by the contact. . . . It is seldom that anything but the most elementary communications can be exchanged with one another.                 William Carlos Williams, Prologue to Kora in Hell (1918). Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. 244-51.
  4. Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.                 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (Third version). Trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott. Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 251-83.
      Works List I
     The Way by Swann’s Tender Buttons Spring and All
      Works List II The Waste Land Mrs. Dalloway The Sound and the Fury Endgame

ENGL 3P38 - Assignments

Note: students who have not, at the time of this essay’s deadline, picked up their first essay forfeit the right to receive any commentary (apart from a grade) on their second essay.
Essay #1

Due date: February 3, 2010

Choose one of the following topics and write an essay of 5 - 6 pages with an original thesis on that topic. All papers must be double-spaced and accompanied by a works cited list (those without such a list automatically forfeit 5% of their mark). Secondary sources are welcome, but not required.
  1. Stark social divisions are in evidence in The Secret Agent: between the police and the anarchists, the domestic and the foreign, those with money and those without. Another, perhaps subtler division we might add to this list is the one between men and women. What significance do sex and gender have in Conrad's novel?

  2. The Secret Agent includes conspicuous -- perhaps, in a sense, too conspicuous -- symbols in its so-called "Simple Tale" (Conrad's intriguing subtitle). For example, the Greenwich observatory is chosen as a target because of its symbolism, and then there are those circles that Stevie is forever drawing. In both of these examples, however, there is no small measure of irony, and the importance assigned to them is dubious. It could be argued, then, that this is a book that relies on symbols, or, perhaps on the contrary, that this is a book that ridicules or critiques symbolism. Discuss the use and value of symbolism in The Secret Agent.

  3. Are we Futurists yet? A century after Marinetti's first manifesto, the worldwide web, Facebook, Twitter, and Warcraft have reshaped our cognitive space. With careful attention to Marinetti's writings, consider what resemblance(s) and connection(s) our brave new e-world has to the Futurists' vision. Secondary sources are recommended for this topic.

  4. In his book Orientalism, Edward Said argues that the "Orient" is an invention of Western minds, a projection of fantasies. To what extent are poems like Pound's "The River-Merchant's Wife" and Yeats's "The Gift of Harun al-Rashid" perpetuating such fantasies and stereotypes? What picture of the "East" do they give us? (You need not focus on the two poems mentioned here, but you must consider/compare both Pound and Yeats.)

  5. "Now shall I make my soul," writes Yeats in "The Tower." His verb may cause surprise, though we may recall that the origins of the word poetry are Greek, poesis, "to make." With a focus on one or two poems from The Tower, suggest what importance (and perhaps what limits) Yeats attributes to that which we make, or to the act of making.

  6. Discuss the relationship between the ancient and the modern in two of the poems by Yeats that we have studied this term.

  7. Devise an essay topic of your own on one or two of the authors we have studied so far (Conrad, Marinetti, Pound, Yeats) ? but you must have the approval of the instructor beforehand for the paper to be accepted.
Click here to see an essay submitted for the first assignment which earned an 80-range grade. This essay is presented here not for you to slavishly copy (for one thing, it appears here just as it was submitted, without subsequent corrections), but for you to study and consider. (Note: this student devised his/her own essay topic with the instructor beforehand.)

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