BIBLIOGRAPHY EXERCISE

Purpose

Instructions

1. Select an essay topic from the list below.
2. Using the MLA CD-ROM Bibliography, launch a bibliographic search based on the text and subject you have selected.
3. Select texts, both primary and secondary, that you think will be useful for your research paper.
4. Convert this selective list of sources into proper MLA bibliographic format.
5. Choose either a relevant article or a chapter from a book and write a summary of this source. Simply distil the critic's argument into your own words and then counter the critic's position with your own argument. This paper should be no less than a page (250 words) and no more than two pages. Please include a copy of the critical source along with your short paper.

Essay Topics

1. What role do women play in More's Utopia? Taking into account formal features (ie. the dialogue, the narrators, or rhetoric), provide a feminist reading of the text.
2. How does More integrate the past (classical writers and/or history) into his ideal model of society? Does his utopia repress or remember history?
3. Compare Utopia with Plato's The Republic. How does More rewrite Plato's ideal society? Which society in your opinion is more totalitarian?
4. How does Bacon use Machiavellian rhetoric in his essays? Please consider both Bacon's discussion of rhetoric and his deployment of rhetoric.
5. Sidney's Defence of Poetry, a theoretical statement on the power of poetry, was written two years before Astrophil and Stella. Does Sidney's sonnet sequence successfully put into practice his earlier poetic principles? Compare the apology and the sonnet sequence and make an argument as to which text should hold interpretive priority.
6. Approach Lady Mary Wroth's sonnets from a psychoanalytic perspective. In your analysis, you may want to consider why Amphilanthus plays such a negligible role in the sequence.
7. Up until the advent of gender theory, literary criticism has either avoided or downplayed the homoerotic in Hero and Leander? Explain how this poem disrupts the heterosexual desire of male critics.
8. Poet's in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drew extensively on classical mythology to develop, enrich, and complicate their art. But the effects they achieved through these classical allusions were as varied as the range of actual myths. Compare the rhetorical effect of mythological discourse in Hero and Leander and Epithalamion.
9. Consider the discourse of exploration in Donne's poetry. You may want to look at his elegies. Does Donne write poetry to engage with his culture or does he write poetry to escape culture altogether?
10. E. M. W. Tillyard's classic scholarly text The Elizabethan World Picture has been attacked by new historicists since the 1980's. What does new historicism's critique of Tillyard's text tell us about new historicism's Elizabethan World?
11. After careful consultation with me, pursue a topic of your own choosing.

Grading Information

• Due Date: Dec. 3
• Mark Breakdown: this assignment has two components: a bibliography worth 5% and a short paper worth 5%
• Criteria: the bibliography will be marked according to how carefully you follow MLA format and how judiciously you select your sources; ie. sources must relate to your essay topic. The short paper will be marked according to the difficulty of the critical source, the critical source's relevance to your topic, and the success of your own counter argument.