Starting Point Papers
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A "starting point" paper is just that: a paper that starts from a particular critical observation, and attempts to make sense of it in light of the text(s) you've read for that week's seminar. There will be seven due dates for these this semester, and you must submit a minimum of five to pass the course. (You can do one or two extra and I'll drop the lowest grades.) For the first two papers I will give you a starting point; after that, I expect you to find your own starting point--either in criticism, related works, or in the text itself--and develop it into a two- to three-page double-spaced paper (exclusive of Works Cited).
The purpose of these papers is to give you practice in establishing a critical thesis and defending it with concrete evidence, so that when you come to develop your seminar paper you've had a fair bit of practice articulating your critical point of view. Thus, the papers must have a point (a/k/a a thesis) to make, must support your point with specific, concrete details from the text, and must show that you have read the entire assignment. You need not submit a paper of any kind in the weeks when you are discussion leader (see below) but this does not excuse you from turning in the minimum of five papers.
Starting Point Paper #1
Due at the beginning of class, January 23
In the introduction to Doubled Plots: Romance and History (2003), editors Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden write that
The popularity of romance narratives derives from readers' fascination with the definition of self in the choice of a particular other to love, as well as the complex ways in which human love relations express and play out forms of desire, identity, and difference. These complexities often bubble just below the surface of a form that must negotiate the immense and multifaceted register of human desire within the limits of a few fairly rigid structures for its expression (xv-xvi).
Discuss with regard to An Ethiopian Romance.
Starting Point Paper #2
Due at the beginning of class, February 6
In her monograph The Romance (1970), Gillian Beers argues that
Medieval romance as a genre was separate from epic or allegory, though it had elements of both. It allowed a casual interplay between history and miracle. Love and adventure in the romance were both presented through a ritualized code of conduct, but although this code with preoccupied with niceties of behaviour it recognized and accepted irrational impulses and unforeseeable actions. The writers could encompass the marvellous [sic] and the everyday without any change of key. The romances often included complex psychological analysis--particularly in the work of writers like Chrétien de Troyes and Hartmann von Aue in his refashioning of Chrétien's romances--yet its insights were not primarily analytical; instead its significance evolved out of the interpenetrating levels of event (17).
Discuss with regard to Chrétien's Yvain and/or Lancelot.
Remaining paper due dates:
Feb. 20
Mar. 5
Mar. 26
Apr. 9
Apr. 23