English 375 —British Romanticism 1770-1830

Professor
J. Jennifer Jones

The Assignment

The final paper is the culmination of your critical work in this course. As such, and in accord with the political ideals of many writers you have studied this term, the assignment for this paper gives you a great deal of freedom in choosing a topic on which to write. With freedom, of course, comes responsibility: You must develop a cogent thesis on a topic that you have devised yourself. The requirements of this paper are as follows:

1. You must choose one text on the course syllabus.

2. You must choose a second(ary) text that is NOT part of our class reading this semester. This text might be critical, historical, theoretical, or fictional (novel, poem, film, painting, etc.), giving you a wide range of possibilities in terms of what type of essay you will ultimately produce. The essay may consider a Romantic text in relation to a critical essay you find especially problematic or provocative (you might research Romantic critics such as M. H. Abrams, Geoffrey Hartman, Julie Carlson, Karen Swann, David Simpson, Jeffrey N. Cox, Alan Liu, or Timothy Morton, among many others). As another example, you might apply a philosophical or theoretical piece (Plato, Hume, Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Deleuze, etc.) to a Romantic text. Or, as a final example, this might be an essay focused on the comparison of your chosen text to another poem of your choice (for example, Paradise Lost) or a painting (J. M. W. Turner’s Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps c. 1812). Be as creative as you like; just remember that part of that creativity must be outputted in the form of a carefully delineated thesis supported throughout the paper by critical claims, which are in turn supported by textual evidence and analysis.

3. The paper must be in MLA format, which includes the form of the paper itself as well as in-text citations, block quotes, and the Works Cited page.

4. The paper must be at least 6 pages; there is no page maximum.

5. On Tuesday, November 29, you are free to submit a paper Prospectus, which includes an abstract of what you intend to write about (1 double-spaced page is sufficient) and a Works Cited page that documents the texts on which you will write. I will look over your Prospectus, make sure you are on the right track, and give you any feedback that might prove useful to you. I will also carefully look over your work to see that you are writing grammatically and gracefully and that you are employing MLA format correctly -- one more opportunity for such dialogue.

6. You must submit both an electronic and a paper version of your paper to me by December 6– no exceptions. With regard to the former, this means you will need to send the paper to me as an attachment in either Word (.doc) or Word Perfect (.wpd) format. Note: If you do not know how to send an attachment via email, then I encourage you to practice before the due date of this assignment. (The obvious way to practice, of course, is to try sending paper 1 to me as a trial run.)

7. Two decisions to make: One, if you wish your name NOT to be posted on the internet, should you win the essay contest (noted below), please make me aware of that wish when you submit the paper. Two, if you would like your paper back with marginalia and written commentary, provide me with a self-addressed stamped envelope on December 6, and I will send it to you. Otherwise, you may make arrangements to receive your essay back with commentary next semester.

The Contest

I will be mounting the top two papers from our class onto our course website at the conclusion of the semester. If your paper is chosen as one of these top three, you will receive a high A. You will also, of course, be celebrated as a highly engaged, intellectually sophisticated, and rhetorically talented student of literature, which is its own reward (and one you may certainly reference in job or graduate-school applications).