First Paper Topics
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Your assignment is to do a close reading of an assigned text. Focus on a passage or a scene and discuss it in detail. That passage or scene is your paper topic. Cite the text or film to make your points. Develop your thesis. The text is your evidence. If you don't know what a close reading is and have never done one before, be sure to go to http://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/how-do-close-reading. You may also ask me for clarification. You must also know how to write a research paper, or analytical essay. You will need a title for your paper and a thesis, an argument that you can state in one sentence. Your thesis should go at the end of your first paragraph. To make sure we share the same understanding of the assigned paper, please read http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/paper.html before you begin writing. You may figure out your title before you write your paper, but usually, you only figure out your title after you figure out your thesis. And you figure out your thesis by writing your paper. What you think is your conclusion often needs to be moved up from the end of the essay to the front. Then you are ready to make your final revisions and add a new concluding paragraph. You may also have come up with a new title in the course of writing the paper. And then you are ready to proofread your paper. And then you will have finished writing your paper. Congratulations! :) Also, please insert image captures as needed.
Email your paper (as an attachment) to me at [email protected]. Put your name in the subject title or header of your title. Put your name in your paper.
Grading: I will meet with you in person to discuss your paper with you. PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you didn't do the asignment, a close reading, your grade is an automatic E. If didn't put your name on your paper, it's an automatic E. If you didn't have a proper title, it's an automatic E. If you didn't have a thesis, it's an automatic E. One third of your grade will be based on your title; one third on your thesis; and one third on the rest of your paper.
Plagiarize a paper and see if I can tell.
Is Kenneth Goldsmith a modern day, real-life counterpart to Juan Luis Borges’ fictional author, Pierre Menard? Consider what Goldsmith does and does not repeat. He may not plagiarize in the usual sense of copying a published work attributed to an author word for word without quotation marks and citations of the source, but neither does the author of the Harper’s article Goldsmith describes. (Take a look. Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" 2007). Goldsmith does repeat and follow the norms of academic publishing. Is Uncreative Writing all the more fraudulent for not appearing to be so? Goldsmith would be participating in a kind of conceptual plagiarism that hides itself, the point being that nothing he says has any value whatsoever, not even aesthetic or educational value.
Goldsmith strongly implies that one can have the same thoughts as someone else without stating those thoughts in the same words. He gives the Harper’s article as an example. Is he right? Has the author plagiarized? Is Goldsmith right to say that thoughts can be the same regardless of the way the thinker thinks his thoughts language used? What counts as a thought? As thinking?
Goldsmith says that some of the uncreative writing he has students do is not worth reading? Is that true of his book? Is the best response to it not to read it?
Is the narrator correct in differentiating Menard’s version of Cervantes from Cervantes’? Why or not?
Copy a sentence from one of literary works we have read. Then write an essay on it in which you read that sentence critically while giving an intellectual biography explaining why you did so the way you did (creatively).
Unnamed narrators (and nicknames) in Pierre Menard and Bartleby.
How critical, or how negative (or nihilistic) are the Borges and Melville stories? Do they the reader with anything to say? One could say the narrators are to be read critically and one would certainly be correct. But do the stories negate entire categories (biography in Bartleby, literature in Borges)? Is there anything to say? Conversely, is anything to be gained by copying the Quixote? Does doing nothing (copy word for word) paradoxically amount to something, affirm literature? Is there difference in the Menard’s repetition? If so, how do you establish the difference?
Pierre Menard and posthumous publication. The story begins with an account of Menard’s funeral. Why? Why does the author have to be dead in order for the story to work?
Bartleby and death. Why does Bartleby have to die in order for the story to work? Why does it matter that he was rumored to have worked at the Dead Letter Office?
Follow out one or more of your annotations to “Pierre Menard” and show how your newly acquired knowledge changed your understanding of it.
Review your discussions and formulate a paper topic of your own. Remember to focus closely on the text.
Christianity in Menard and Bartleby.
The subtitle “A Story of Wall street.” John Jacob Astor.
Old age in Bartleby. “I am a rather elderly man.”
Bartley, “the silent man.”
Bartleby and “gentleman forgers”: “I think he is a little deranged,” said I, sadly.
“Deranged? deranged is it? Well now, upon my word, I thought that friend of yourn was a gentleman forger; they are always pale and genteel-like, them forgers. I can’t pity’em—can’t help it, sir. Did you know Monroe Edwards?” he added touchingly, and paused. Then, laying his hand pityingly on my shoulder, sighed, “he died of consumption at Sing-Sing. So you weren’t acquainted with Monroe?”
“No, I was never socially acquainted with any forgers.
Bartleby and (in)digestion.
Bartleby and copying.
“Dead-wall reveries” and other “walls” in Bartleby.
Stillness in Bartleby.
“I would prefer not to”: Passive resistance in Bartleby.