Due: First version in class on Monday February 18; Final version on Monday February 25
Instructions: Three to four pages long. See Paper Standards on syllabus for details about the formatting of your paper.
For this essay, explore carefully and fully a word or phrase in Titus Andronicus. Your goal is to understand and demonstrate how rich and well chosen even a single word of a great literary work can be. To achieve these goals and write the paper, follow these four steps.
1. Find an interesting word or phrase in the play that you want to work with. This step is crucial. If you do not find a good word/phrase to work with, your paper will be very hard to write and will not be successful. What makes a word or phrase interesting?
a. It has a range of meanings neither too broad (love, hate, sky) nor too specific (five, pillow). In general, however, going too broad causes many more problems than going too specific, so err on the side of the latter.
b. It seems even on a first look to have more than one meaning or to create more than one feeling in the reader<./p>
c. It or versions of it (headless, heads, head) are repeated through the text.
d. It is spoken at what seems like a key point in the text.
e. You find the word puzzling or unexpected.
Your word does not have to meet every one of these criteria, but it’s good if it meets most of them.
2. Learn more about the word by researching it from the following sources.
a. The Oxford English Dictionary Use to find historical meanings of a word
b. Literature On Line (LION) Use to see in what situations and with what connotations other writers of the period were using the word.
c. Open Source Shakespeare Use to see where else in the play Shakespeare uses either the word or other versions of it. Consider how these versions echo, reinforce or challenge one another.
3. Brainstorm through note taking or free writing what you’ve learned in step 2. How does what you’ve learned help you understand why Shakespeare might have chosen that word or phrase as particularly powerful, meaningful and/or resonant?
4. Begin writing your formal essay. Make sure it includes the following:
a. An introductory paragraph that provides the paper’s specific thesis and overview of its whole argument. This paragraph will probably be short. It will definitely avoid cliches, warm-ups, fillers or narrations of your thinking/writing process such as “People have long read and discussed Shakespeare’s plays”; “It is important to read Shakespeare very carefully”; “Since the beginning of time man has tried to understand the universe”; “Webster’s Dictionary [or the OED] defines word x to mean definition y”; “In writing this assignment, I first looked at….”
b. A first section of the body of the paper that details what you learned about your word from the sources specified in step 2.
c. A second section of the body paper that details the larger significance of the range of meanings and values of the word to our appreciation of the play.
View or download by clicking here a sample essay that fulfills this assignment.