ENGL 602 Short Paper Assignment

Due: Feb. 22nd through turnitin.com (and hardcopy, if you'd rather have comments on the hardcopy)

Length:3-5 pages, double spaced, 12 point font

Choose a contemporary critical trend from among Formalism, reader response, psychoanalytic, or feminist theories.  Synthesize this trend with 2-3 commentators' critical points of view from early in the semester (Plato through James).  These commentators should represent diverse time periods and points of view, e.g., Aristotle, Sidney, and Arnold.

Your goal is to trace strands of critical thought from early commentators within the contemporary trends in literary criticism.  View these early commentators as foundations upon which later ones built.  Don't spend time/space summarizing the views you work with.  Instead, choose relevant excerpts that will show the process of your synthesis.  To synthesize means to mesh.  Synthesis differs from analysis and from comparing and contrasting.  While you might find minor contrasts between the two groups, you should in the main point out significant echoes of the early work in the later work.  Remember that not all early commentators were strictly literary critics.  Carefully assess before you begin the goals of all the writers with whom you choose to work.  A simple but thought provoking question to ask yourself as you write is, how did we get here?