02 Thursday Jan 27

The first thing we did today in class was discuss Paper 1: Poetry Rubric. The first draft of the paper is due Tuesday February 8th and we will be peer editing. The second and final draft is due on Thursday February 10th. We began our introduction to Romanticism. We went over the poems we read for homework and took both a deconstructuralism and structuralism approach to analyzing them. We learned about how to get started writing a paper and how to do it properly. At the end of class we were divided into groups and we had to develop a thesis for one of the poems we read by the Romanticism poets.

Romanticism was used to describe a popular style of poetry in the 12th and 13th centuries. It began with the root word “roman” which is a reference to any language that is not in Latin. In the 16th century there was a romanticism movement of natural works. Poets were seen as geniuses working through the power of imagination. Most of these poems were lyrical ballads.

We analyzed the Wordsworth poem “Compound upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” which is a personal meditation on the city of London. The poem is an Italian sonnet and written in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is abba abba (the octave) and cdcdcd (the sestet). In line 5 there is a pause with a semicolon called caesura. The poem is about the city in the first octave in the poem and describes it as fair, compares it to wearing clothing (personification), majestic, silent, bright, glittering, smokeless air, and as having ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples. The country is described in the sestet with the images of valley, rock, and hill. A structuralist could create binaries to describe the poem such as city/country, majesty/plainness, asleep/awake, and silence/loudness, favoring the left side of the binaries or the city. A deconstructuralist would say that the city and country may be merging together with complementing ideas. Worthwords seems to favor the city but with qualities that are also in the country such as the “smokeless air”.

We learned about generating a thesis statement. A thesis statement is typically the last sentence of your first paragraph and tells the reader what you are going to argue in your essay and how you are going to do it. It should not be an obvious statement or a summary about the work, but an argument. You should make a claim or hypothesis that needs further evidence. An example of the structuralism approach to a thesis statement is: “To his Coy Mistress”, Marvell presents his argument through a series of oppositions which can be organized into the binary life/death. A deconstructuralism approach would be to say that death acts as a supplement or replaces life in the poem. The body paragraphs need to provide evidence necessary to support the claim in the thesis. Each body paragraphs should offer one distinct point of evidence.

A way to help you get started on your paper is to create a working outline. Begin with a working title and then move on to the introductory paragraph where you will put your thesis statement. Next plan your transition followed by reasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. which consist of an example and an explication of how it supports the thesis. Follow with a transition and a concluding paragraph which sums up the reasons illustrated regarding your thesis.

At the end of class we were split up into groups to analyze one of the poems we read for homework using a structuralism approach and a deconstructuralism approach and then creating a thesis based on one of these approaches. The poem my group analyzed was Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” which consists of five stanzas and a random rhyme scheme that is supposed to resemble the alphabet. We began by creating binaries such as: demon/holy, turmoil/tranquility, pain/pleasure, war/peace, and sunless/sunny. We then deconstructed the poem by pointing out that Coleridge begins talking about Kubla Khan the prophet and by the end of the poem, Coleridge becomes him in a change to first person. Our thesis we created was as follows: In the poem “Kubla Khan”, Coleridge describes the prophet Kubla Khan as the master of the pleasure dome, but the poem goes on to blur the lines between the character and the author himself, morphing the two into one person. This thesis supports the deconstruction of the poem.

The PowerPoint for this lecture can be found on Blackboard under course documents.

Christine Grillot, Extra Credit Notes for 1/27/2011 In small groups today we covered Percy Shelly’s “Ozymandias.” It is a classical or Italian sonnet, though it does not follow the pattern of one perfectly and is also in iambic pentameter. For the structuralist view, we came up with the binaries of: traveler/king, new/decay, floating/sinking, life/lifeless, near/far, wear/mighty, happy/despair, whole/wreck, and immortality/destruction. For the deconstruction of this poem we discussed how the king being both mighty and lifeless goes against itself. There was a confused image of the king and how he was powerful while at the same time the pedestal that represented him immorality was broken. The thesis that we created was, “The King’s vast power is contradicted by the destruction of the pedestal that represented his immortality.”