You must discuss at least three different writers and at least two different movements (e.g. Romanticism and Modernism).
In your essay, you will analyze works of literature that you have become interested in enough to spend several days with it, reading and thinking deeply, and transforming that reading and thinking into a form of written communication with a reader--in this case a teacher and fellow students.
In a sense, this is a comparison/contrast paper. However, the purpose is not merely to show that you can compare and contrast, but that you understand some of the basic ideas of literary history and how disparate works embody their zeitgeist (spirit of the age.) Ultimately, your paper is an argument. You will argue that each separate literary work belongs to its period and does not belong in another period, even though there are obvious comparisons.
(An obvious, but more difficult counterpoint would be to argue that a literary work does not belong in its assigned category.)
Parts of the course have been devoted to a discussion of the transition from the European Enlightenment to Romanticism, or from Romanticism and Symbolism to Modernism. Irrespective of their nationality, period or movement, all of our writers themselves make an argument. Sometimes they contradict one another; other times they agree; but at all times they express concerns that are distinct from those of other writers. Starting with one writer,
1)summarize his or her argument. (That is, what are these people saying?) Use transitional statements such as "Unlike Baudelaire" or "Like Nietzsche, Eliot thought that ..."
and 2)make sure that I know that YOU know why one writer is a Romantic and another a Modernist, or whether he or she deserves a special category. For example, our Chinese and Japanese writers do not fit into any European framework. However, they must have something in common with the European writers; what is that similarity and what are the differences?
Make sure that you quote from every author, using MLA format. You may also employ (via quotation or paraphrase) the book's sections on the different movements/periods, but you must credit them when you do.
SOME POINTS TO REMEMBER
1)Don't tell me anything about authors themselves. Their biographies are public record, so I can look it up myself. What I cannot look up is what YOU think--how your brain works. This is what interests me and any other reader.
2)Make sure also that this is your OWN WORK. The paper that emanates from the assignment is is not group work. This does NOT mean that you cannot discuss your work with others. In fact, I encourage you to ask others to read and critique your work. However, I will be on high alert to excessive similarity in diction, syntax, organization, etc. I also employ the plagiarism database turnitin.com.
The readings and authors are in this book please contact me ONLY if you have the 3 volumes of the book. It is called: The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Third Edition, Vol D, E, and F.
Here I will post a list of the mayority of readings and the authors names you can use for the essay.
Volume E
The Age of Revolutions in Europe and the Americas, including the maps
Revolutionary Contexts
The U.S. Declaration of Independence
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizens
De Gouges, The Rights of Women
Dessalines, Liberty or Death
Rousseau, Confessions, Part One, Book One
Equiano, from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oloudah Equiano...
Blake, "Little Black Boy," "The Sick Rose," "London," "Mock On...," "And Did Those Feet"
Wordsworth, "Ode on Intimations of Immortality"
Coleridge, "Kublai Khan"
Keats, "On First Reading Chapman's Homer," "Ode on Melancholy"
Whitman, from Song of Myself
Baudelaire, "To the Reader," Correspondences," and the three "Spleen" poems
Rimbaud, "The Drunken Boat"
Darío, "To Roosevelt"
Tagore, "I Won't Let You Go" (Note: you'll have to get this from the second edition, or online.)
Ghalib poems 591-598
Dotoyevsky, Notes From Underground, Part 1 (Not "Apropos of Wet Snow")
Volume F
Modernity and Modernism, 1900-1945
Heart of Darkness
Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians"
Yeats, "The Second Coming"
Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Hollow Men" (available from the second edition or online)
Wallace Stevens, "Domination of Black" and "Of Mere Being" (find online)
Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant" (available maybe in the second edition but easily findable online in such sites as https://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/
Mahfouz, "Zaabalawi"
Amichai, "Of Three or Four in a Room," "Jerusalem"
Walcott, "As John to Patmos"
Heany, "The Guttural Muse" and "The Haw Lantern"
Head, "The Deep River"
Kincaid, "Girl"
Bei Dao, Thirteen Poems https://jacketmagazine.com/14/bei-dao.html
Other Readings but do not know what volume they are:
Samuel Johnson
Immanuel Kant
Rene Descartes
Benjamin Franklin
David Hume
Mary Wollstonecraft
Johnathan Swift ("A Modest Proposal")
Alexander Pope ("An Essay on Man, Epistle 1")
Matsuo Basho
Unnamed authors of Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen
Keats poems "Ode on Melancholy" and "Upon First Reading Chapman's Homer."
Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground Part 1, Romantic Poets and Their Successors 322
Wordsworth, Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 354
Coleridge, Kublai Khan 379
Whitman, Song of Myself, 448
Baudelaire, To the Reader, 468
Correspondences 469
Spleen 474
Selections from Nietzsche and Marx Below
Rimbaud 523
Arnold, "Dover Beach"