Applied Practice

Master Classes Writing Lessons from Great Authors

MASTER LEVEL

Robert Cremins, M.A.

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APPLIED PRACTICE

Master Classes: Writing Lessons from Great Authors Master Level

Teacher Notes

A Note for Teachers .............................................................. 5

Student Practices

Lesson One: Purpose*........................................................... 9

Lesson Two: Thesis*........................................................... 18

Lesson Three: Balance* ...................................................... 31

Lesson Four: Argument Development*.............................. 37

Lesson Five: Attitude .......................................................... 45

Lesson Six: Parenthetical Elements* .................................. 51

Lesson Seven: The Argument Clincher* ............................ 58

Lesson Eight: Pattern* ........................................................ 63

Lesson Nine: Making Connections* ................................... 71

Lesson Ten: Defamiliarization............................................ 77

Lesson Eleven: Imagery...................................................... 82

Lesson Twelve: Judging Character ..................................... 88

Suggested Responses and Additional Activities

Suggested Responses .......................................................... 97

Additional Activities ......................................................... 107

Teacher Resources

Index of Authors and Titles ............................................... 125

Objectives and Correlations............................................... 126

*Suggested responses are included for the practices in these lessons.

Teacher Notes

for

Master Classes

A NOTE FOR TEACHERS

We have created the Master Classes series based on the premise that teachers and students can find no better examples of excellence in writing than those provided by the literature they are studying. The “master-examples” in each lesson are therefore drawn from the masterpieces commonly read on the relevant grade-level. As a particular text may or not be on an individual class’s reading list, we have provided a brief context for each quotation. This avoids confusion and allows students to concentrate on the quality of the writing.

To enable students to learn the most about the particular writing skill highlighted, each of the twelve lessons has the following format:

• A definition, which succinctly explains the meaning of the writing skill under discussion • At least three “master-examples” of the writing skill, with not only a context for each

example but also an explanation of how it exemplifies that skill • A short but illuminating discussion of the skill • A practice that enables the student, in a stimulating way, to begin to incorporate the skill

into his or her own prose style; where appropriate, the exercise is followed, at the back of the book, by suggested responses

• An essay, with a prompt question adaptable to an individual class’s reading assignments, which further develops the student’s use of the writing skill; where appropriate, the essay is preceded by a pre-writing exercise

At the back of the book, in addition to the “Suggested Responses,” you will find “Further Activities,” which build on the skills demonstrated in the lessons.

Each book in the Master Classes series has been written to complement the curriculum of an approximate grade-level. Likewise, the writing skills discussion becomes progressively more sophisticated as the series advances.

• The Apprentice Level focuses on titles commonly read by high school freshmen. • The Journeyman Level focuses on titles commonly read by high school sophomores. • The Craftsman Level focuses on American Literature titles commonly read by high

school juniors. • The Master Level focuses on British Literature titles commonly read by high seniors.

The names of the levels, which stress that writing is a craft, were inspired by the “guild” system of medieval times. A young person wishing to become proficient in a craft would first have to serve an apprenticeship under a master. After grasping the rudiments of the craft, the apprentice would then spend time “on the road” as a journeyman further improving his proficiency. After establishing himself as a craftsman, the practitioner still faced the challenge of producing a “masterpiece” before the guild recognized him as an official master of the craft. The new master could them take on an apprentice of his own, ensuring that excellence in the craft would live on.

The great authors featured in these books, established masters of their craft, are now ready to “take on” new apprentices.

The term “master class” itself refers to a teaching tradition in the arts, most notably in classical music. A school will bring in a “maestro” to work with up-and-coming instrumentalists, sometimes on a one-to-one basis. These master classes focus on technique, as no one has more to teach aspiring artists about proficiency than expert practitioners. In the art of writing, the expert practitioners are the very authors whose work students read. A master like Charles Dickens or Jane Austen can “visit” the classroom at any time.

Enjoy hosting your own Master Classes.

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Student Practices

Master Classes

Lesson One—Purpose Definition: A writer’s sure sense of what he or she is trying to achieve in an essay or other literary form. Example 1: In the history of British literature, few—if any—writers have had such an ironclad sense of purpose as 17th–century poet John Milton. Working in a time of great political and religious upheaval, Milton was a man of convictions who saw himself as “God’s English poet.” Intellectually precocious, he developed a profound knowledge of Greek and Latin, learning he would draw upon to create his masterpiece, Paradise Lost, which gave the English language an epic poem in the mold of ancient writers such as Homer and Virgil. Though deeply Christian in terms of its content and vision, Paradise Lost follows the conventions of the classical epic, no more so than at the very beginning; there Milton announces the poem’s grand subject matter and invokes the aid of a higher power to help him create this monumental work: Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, Heavenly Muse … what in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That, to the height of this great argument, I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men. Milton certainly is a man with a mission: to explain, by means of an epic story (“Man’s first disobedience” and its consequences), God’s overarching plan for mankind (“Eternal Providence”); an ambitious task, even for a genius; no wonder Milton calls upon the “Heavenly Muse” for inspiration. Hopefully, Milton can be a source of inspiration for you. While not even the most demanding high school writing assignment is likely to be as daunting as writing an epic poem, as a writer you have more in common with Milton than you might imagine. Like Milton, you have to clarify—in your own mind, at least—your writing purpose in a given writing situation, though that purpose might not be as lofty as “justify[ing] the ways of God to men.” Often, your writing task will involve the creation of an “argument.” In the context of these arguments, you will have to “justify” thesis statements and other assertions.

The opening of Paradise Lost shows us that focusing on one’s writing purpose is a serious business—indeed, it should be the first order of business at the beginning of any writing process. Example 2: At the beginning of Henry V, one of his most famous history plays, William Shakespeare—or at least his mouthpiece, the Chorus—also prays for divine inspiration: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels, Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that have dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object: can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great account, On your imaginary forces work. Like Milton, Shakespeare has an arduous task ahead of him: to represent upon the small stage (“this unworthy scaffold”) of his Globe Theatre (“this wooden O”) a significant chapter in English history (“this great account”): King Henry’s 1415 invasion of France, one of the key events in the medieval Hundred Years’ War between the two kingdoms, which culminated in the battle of Agincourt, a major English victory. Crucial to the success of the playwright’s aim is his awareness that he has an audience, the “gentles” watching the drama unfold. Just as “the warlike Harry” commands military forces, the audience members have their “imaginary forces”—in other words, the power of their imaginations. Through a collaborative effort between the acting company (which Shakespeare modestly calls “flat unraised spirits”) and the audience, an imaginary France can be created. (Shakespeare’s scintillating language, of course, is a huge help.) Speaking through the Chorus, Shakespeare reminds us that you cannot have a fully developed writing purpose without an awareness of your audience; to know what you should write you must know for whom you are writing.

It is not sufficient, for example, to consider that your purpose is to write a persuasive essay arguing that upcoming student council elections should be postponed; you also need to consider whom you are trying to persuade. Knowing that your audience is not the school administration but the student body will influence the tone and, quite probably, the content of your essay. Example 3: Charles Dickens had many great novels to be proud of, but, as he once admitted in print, he did have a “favourite child”: David Copperfield. What Dickens did not admit to in print (though he did write a revealing letter to his friend and future biographer John Forster on the matter) was the source of this affection: David Copperfield was his most personal book; David’s story reflects some of his own early struggles and his burning youthful ambition to be a person of consequence. This theme of self-development features in the novel’s famous opening sentence: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” Note both the drive and clarity of Dickens’s writing purpose: “these pages must show.” Those words could act as a motto for virtually every writing assignment: every writer must know what, in any given writing situation, his or her pages “must show.” That is not to say that assertions like “the following pages must show that Shakespeare’s sonnets are superior to Milton’s” or “in this essay I will demonstrate that our school’s art program deserves greater funding” should appear in your essays—at least, not in the final drafts. Such statements of intent can be useful in early drafts, as they can help you fully articulate your writing purpose. However, such expressions of purpose will be redundant in your later drafts; they will be—or should be—replaced by a fully-developed thesis, the assertion of your essay’s guiding idea, of which we will talk much more in Lesson Two. In a final draft, the clarity of your writing purpose will be apparent not only in your thesis but also in the entire direction and content of the essay. All of the above commentary may cause you to ask, Yes, but how do I determine my writing purpose? Good question. The thing to realize is that writing never happens in a vacuum; all writing has a context, a situation, from which you can derive signals and clues that can help you resolve your writing purpose.

Think of it this way: all writing projects—from a grocery list to an epic poem—are assignments, and the nature of the assignment gives you your writing purpose. Sometimes these assignments are implicit. When we sit down to write out a grocery list we understand, without really having to think about it, that our assignment is to determine the things we need to buy at the store and that our writing purpose, therefore, is to make a complete list of those items. Likewise, when we sit down and write a diary entry, we know intuitively that our writing purpose is to record and reflect upon the events of the day. These types of writing tasks one could call self-assignments. In class, writing assignments are explicit: you receive instructions from your instructor or you read an essay question or prompt. In theory, this should make determining your writing purpose straightforward, but in practice students frequently fail to convert the assignment information into the proper writing purpose. How does this happen? There are two major reasons: either … a) students do not read instructions carefully enough. For example, a student is excited to see an essay question on a test about imagery in Milton. Having done an in-depth study of the imagery in Milton’s sonnets, the student starts to scribble away about that topic, ignoring the instruction in the essay prompt to focus on Paradise Lost; or … b) students write not the essay they have been asked to write but the essay they want to write. Modifying the example above just a little, we can well imagine that student reading the essay prompt about Milton on the test and determining that he will write about the sonnets anyway, hoping to impress his instructor so much that she will forgive the inconvenient fact that this splendid essay is the answer to a different question. Most instructors will not be so forgiving, for they have reasons for asking the questions they do in the first place. An essay that is meant to be about Milton’s use of imagery in Paradise Lost but says nothing about Paradise Lost is not deserving of much credit, if any. Determining your writing purpose in response to an assignment is like determining the right direction to travel. Imagine a car race between Paris and Berlin. A racing car that speeds off in the direction of Madrid (because the driver prefers the weather there) is not going to win a prize, even if the sun-loving driver goes twice as fast as the Berlin-bound cars. Nor are you going to win any prizes for an essay based on the wrong writing purpose.

Practice: In determining your writing purpose in response to a particular assignment, you must pay particularly close attention to the verb or verbs used in the instructions. A change of verb can change the nature of the whole assignment. For example, consider the difference between the following two prompts: a) Analyze America’s “War on Drugs” over the last thirty-five years. b) Reflect on America’s “War on Drugs” over the last thirty-five years. Though the subject of both assignments is the same—America’s “War on Drugs”— the writing purpose of each essay will be quite different: the purpose of the first essay will be to offer an impersonal, critical understanding of the subject; the purpose of the second will be to offer a personal response to the subject. Likewise, a single verb can make the difference between a persuasive or expository approach to the same topic.

In the following exercise, match each writing assignment with a quotation from a paper by a student who has correctly understood the writing purpose entailed by that assignment. Remember that small differences in wording can have a dramatic impact on writing purpose. As an example, the first match has been made for you. Use each letter once and once only. Be prepared to defend your choices in class. Assignment Match Quotation 1. Trace the development of Charles Dickens’s capabilities as a novelist.

B A. “Pip, the flawed hero of Great Expectations, is one of the most psychologically subtle characters in British fiction.”

2. Select your own favorite Dickens novel, enthusiastically explaining your preference.

B. “From David Copperfield onward, Dickens pays a lot more attention to the construction of his plots.”

3. “Dickens excels at describing the surfaces of human beings, but has little talent in plumbing their depths.” Defend, challenge, or qualify this opinion.

C. “David Copperfield is not only Dickens’s “favourite child” but, from among his “brood,” my own.”

4. Explain how, in Great Expectations, Pip comes to a more mature understanding of what it means to be a “gentleman.”

D. “Reading Bleak House, I sometimes imagine that Dickens is not so much describing the weather of London but the ‘weather’ of his soul.”

5. Account for the increasingly dark mood of the novels Dickens wrote in the 1850s.

E. “Faced with such pervasive social ills, Dickens had little inclination to take nostalgic trips back to the ‘good old days.’”

6. Give your personal reaction to Dickens’s “gloomy” novels of the 1850s.

F. “Pip comes to realize that Joe Gargery, despite his lack of manners and education, is as fine a human being as he could hope to meet.”

Essay: Perhaps the most traumatic event in Charles Dickens’s life was when, at a time of financial crisis for his father, his parents arranged, with the help of a relative, for the twelve-year boy to leave the family’s relatively genteel home and go to work at Warren’s blacking (shoe-polish) warehouse and factory. As an adult, Dickens told very few people about this nightmarish episode in his young life, though he did write about it in a letter to his friend and eventual biographer John Forster. Dickens also gave this experience, in a fictionalized form, to his “favourite child” David Copperfield, in Chapter Eleven of the novel named for him. In the previous chapter, David’s evil stepfather, Mr. Murdstone, informs David that his education is over, and that he has been “provided for”: he will be sent to London to work in the bottling factory of which Murdstone is co-owner. First, read the following excerpts from the letter and the novel. Then, write an essay in which you compare and contrast the two texts. Explain what these similarities and differences tell us about Dickens’s writing purpose in each excerpt. From the Letter to John Forster:

“It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.

“The blacking warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford-stairs. It was a crazy, tumbledown old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label; and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty downstairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.

“Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the dinner-hour; from twelve to one, I think it was; every day. But an arrangement so incompatible with counting-house business soon died away, from no fault of his or mine; and for the same reason, my small work-table, and my grosses of pots, my papers, string, scissors, paste-pot, and labels, by little and little, vanished out of the recess in the counting-house, and kept company with the other small work-tables, grosses of pots, papers, string, scissors, and paste-pots, downstairs. It was not long, before Bob Fagin and I, and another boy whose name was Paul Green, but who was currently believed to have been christened Poll (a belief which I transferred, long afterwards again, to Mr. Sweedlepipe, in Martin Chuzzlewit), worked generally, side by side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in-law, a waterman. Poll Green’s father had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was employed at Drury-lane theatre; where another relation of Poll’s, I think his little sister, did imps in the pantomimes.

“No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these every day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.

From David Copperfield, Chapter Eleven:

“I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.

“Murdstone and Grinby’s warehouse was at the waterside. It was down in Blackfriars. Modern improvements have altered the place; but it was the last house at the bottom of a narrow street, curving down hill to the river, with some stairs at the end, where people took boat. It was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun with rats. Its panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years, I dare say; its decaying floors and staircase; the squeaking and scuffling of the old grey rats down in the cellars; and the dirt and rottenness of the place; are things, not of many years ago, in my mind, but of the present instant. They are all before me, just as they were in the evil hour when I went among them for the first time, with my trembling hand in Mr. Quinion’s.

“Murdstone and Grinby’s trade was among a good many kinds of people, but an important branch of it was the supply of wines and spirits to certain packet ships. I forget now where they chiefly went, but I think there were some among them that made voyages both to the East and West Indies. I know that a great many empty bottles were one of the consequences of this traffic, and that certain men and boys were employed to examine them against the light, and reject those that were flawed, and to rinse and wash them. When the empty bottles ran short, there were labels to be pasted on full ones, or corks to be fitted to them, or seals to be put upon the corks, or finished bottles to be packed in casks. All this work was my work, and of the boys employed upon it I was one.

“There were three or four of us, counting me. My working place was established in a corner of the warehouse, where Mr. Quinion could see me, when he chose to stand up on the bottom rail of his stool in the counting-house, and look at me through a window above the desk. Hither, on the first morning of my so auspiciously beginning life on my own account, the oldest of the regular boys was summoned to show me my business. His name was Mick Walker, and he wore a ragged apron and a paper cap. He informed me that his father was a bargeman, and walked, in a black velvet head–dress, in the Lord Mayor’s Show. He also informed me that our principal associate would be another boy whom he introduced by the—to me—extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes. I discovered, however, that this youth had not been christened by that name, but that it had been bestowed upon him in the warehouse, on account of his complexion, which was pale or mealy. Mealy’s father was a waterman, who had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was engaged as such at one of the large theatres; where some young relation of Mealy’s—I think his little sister—did Imps in the Pantomimes.

“No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these henceforth everyday associates with those of my happier childhood— not to say with Steerforth, Traddles, and the rest of those boys; and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my bosom. The deep remembrance of the sense I had, of being utterly without hope now; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that day by day what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, would pass away from me, little by little, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. As often as Mick Walker went away in the course of that forenoon, I mingled my tears with the water in which I was washing the bottles; and sobbed as if there were a flaw in my own breast, and it were in danger of bursting.

Lesson Two—Thesis Definition: The idea that drives an essay forward and informs all of its content. Example 1: Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, about a sailor named Marlow’s journey up an African river in search of a mysterious trader named Kurtz, is one of the most critically acclaimed short novels in world literature. Its influence has extended to the world of cinema; director Francis Ford Coppola used the story as the basis of Apocalypse Now, his dark epic film about the Vietnam War. However, like many other works of “classic” literature, Heart of Darkness is not without its detractors. In the 1970s, around the time Coppola was filming his homage to Conrad, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe published “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” an essay highly critical of the novel. In the intervening years, the essay has been widely read and debated—not surprising, given its forceful argument and Achebe’s high profile in the literary world. Best known for his novel Things Fall Apart (1958), the tragic story of a proud man’s inability to change, Achebe was one of the first post-colonial African writers to achieve international fame. In “An Image of Africa,” Achebe does not dismiss Conrad as a writer; indeed, he is at pains to stress his talent (“undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the bargain”): if Conrad had been a mere hack, then the failings of Heart of Darkness would not be so consequential. A sentence early in the essay defines what Achebe sees as the novel’s fundamental flaw: “Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality.” Achebe has adopted a classic essay-writing strategy: he has expressed his central, controlling idea in the form of a thesis sentence; he has placed the thesis early in the essay, allowing both the reader and himself to judge what is at stake in the argument to follow; he has structured the thesis sentence carefully, crafting it so that it contains key components of that argument. Let us take a closer look at how Achebe has fashioned the sentence. Grammatically, it is a cumulative sentence: the two fundamental sentence elements, the subject (“Heart of Darkness”) and the verb (“projects”), occur early; after those fundamentals are laid down, everything else is an accumulation of information.

What is that accumulation comprised of? First, we get a direct object and associated phrases: “the image of Africa as ‘the other world’”—a crucial item, as it announces the essay’s essential subject (see the title). What follow on from the direct object are two appositives (“the antithesis,” “a place”) and their associated phrases. The job of appositives is to rename other nouns. They allow a writer like Achebe to add angles, nuances, to a basic assertion. This well-wrought thesis sentence signals to readers that they are on the verge of a thoughtful, developed argument. Example 2: In landmark novels such as Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Virginia Woolf helped create a new way of writing fiction, one in which consciousness is, as she noted in her diary, “made luminous.” As an artist, she made a commitment to capturing reality, that “semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” She was determined to render on the page an authentic record of human experience, especially women’s experience; her work has been read as an early expression of feminism. In 1929, the two women’s colleges of Cambridge University invited Woolf to lecture on the topic of “Women and Fiction.” The colleges may have expected Woolf to expound on female characters in fiction or individual female authors, but she responded with an essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” which tackled a much more elemental issue—the conditions necessary for a woman to write fiction in the first place. Like Achebe, Woolf announces the essay’s controlling idea, its thesis, early on: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Two features of this sentence make it an effective expression of the writer’s thesis: First, it is assertive. Look at Woolf’s choice of verb (in this case, a verb phrase): “must have”: it is simple, clear, urgent. The reader is left in no doubt that the writer has a genuine opinion, has something substantial to say, has a real argument to make. Think of the negative impact on the reader if Woolf had said something like, “It would be nice if a woman who wanted to write fiction had money and a room of her own” or “A woman could use money and a room of her own in the process of writing a novel.” Such tentative statements leave readers indifferent, for if you have little or nothing to prove, why does anybody need to pay attention to your argument? Second, the thesis sentence demonstrates that Woolf knows the “road” ahead—she knows where the essay is going; she is “signposting” the major stops along the way: the fundamental planks of her argument are that a woman writer most have a) “money” and b) “a room of her own.” Now readers have that argument “roadmap” in their own minds.

This thesis sentence is also notable for what it does not contain. If some student writers make the mistake of saying too little in their thesis sentences, others make the mistake of trying to say too much: they try to pack their entire argument into their expression of the thesis. If Woolf had tried to do this, her thesis sentence might read something like this: “A woman must have money—look at how much it cost to get these colleges started, and even when they did open they were frugal institutions indeed—and a room of her own (by which I mean not just a physical space but also a significant degree of personal autonomy; we are talking about a state of mind as much as anything else) if she is to write fiction.” Clearly not satisfactory—a sentence like that is in danger of being a “run-on” not just grammatically but also logically. Fortunately, there is no need for this kind of breathless mini-essay. That is not the purpose of a thesis sentence. All that is required of one is that it assert the essay’s controlling idea; if it can also provide a (brief) preview of the argument to follow, well and good—but it does not need to mention everything that will come up in the course of the essay’s development section. Leave some surprises for the core of the essay itself. For example, Woolf’s reader is more likely to read on attentively not knowing exactly what she means by “a room of one’s own”—it is an intriguing idea that she will flesh out in due course. Example 3: Certain types of essays, particularly of a personal or creative kind, do not necessarily need a clearly identifiable thesis sentence of the type we have seen above in the examples from Achebe and Woolf: asserting a clear, critical opinion; previewing the argument to come; “posted” in the introductory paragraphs. However, the absence of that standard type of thesis sentence does not lessen the obligation on the writer to have a thesis, a clear idea that underlies and controls the whole essay. A powerful example of this type of essay, where the thesis is implied rather than bluntly stated, is Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729). Like Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s most famous work, “A Modest Proposal,” is a satire: it is an attack on human folly and social evil, in this case, the cruelty and indifference shown toward the poor of his native Ireland, which at the time was in dire economic straits. Swift was indignant that the ruling class had responded to the crisis either selfishly or with savagely simplistic proposals likely to leave the poor worse off (his own more constructive proposals having been ignored). A direct expression of this frustration would probably have fallen on deaf ears. Instead, Swift caught the attention of contemporary readers (and generations of readers to come) by outdoing the attitudes and ideas that so angered him. His “modest” proposal is that the poor should be “provided for” by the sale and consumption of their children.

If ever there was a piece of literature that should not be taken at face value, it is Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”; some readers in every generation have done so and, scandalized, have entirely missed the point—for Swift does have a very clear point, a very clear thesis, though it is never directly expressed. Instead, Swift gives us glimpses into his real thinking, and these hints allow readers who are really paying attention to figure out what he really believes. For example, late in the essay, Swift (or, strictly speaking, his “projector”—an eighteenth-century term for a speaker) slyly lists all the patriotic projects he has previously suggested for the relief of the poor and the betterment of the nation. He notes, bitterly, that they were not championed by people in positions of influence. He goes on to say: “Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, till he hath at least some glimpse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.” This is one of the few times in the essay when we can take Swift at face value—he really is disillusioned with the apathy he sees around him; he sees no point in wasting any more ink or breath on sincere ideas until there is “some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.” Therefore, he might as well expend his energy and ingenuity on the insincere proposal that the rich should eat the poor. “A Modest Proposal” is fueled by moral indignation. What, at first glance, appears to be a hideous and demented argument is in fact an entirely cogent piece of writing. Swift knows exactly what he is doing and exactly what he thinks—but never expresses his thesis in so many words. Imagine your essay is a car. It might have a polished body, leather interior, and a fantastic sound system, but if it does not have a working engine, it is going nowhere. Your thesis is the “engine” of your essay—making it run, giving it power, allowing it to gain momentum. No matter how polished and detailed it is, an essay without a controlling, guiding idea is of little use, for it can not take the reader anywhere. In the practice that follows, you will be asked to judge whether or not various sentences are powerful enough to be the “engine” of a typical essay on British literature.

Practice: A student has just finished reading and discussing three lyric poems by Percy Shelley—“England in 1819,” “Ozymandias,” and “Ode to the West Wind”—in her British literature class. She has now been asked to write a short essay on the topic of “Shelley as political poet.” After reflecting on the poems, she has drafted a number of potential thesis sentences. Your task is to analyze the power and potential of each thesis sentence. Do you think it is likely to produce a poor, adequate, or superior argument? Continuing with our automotive analogy, predict whether the argument arising from each thesis sentence is likely to be a “lemon” (poor), a “sedan” (adequate), or a “Rolls-Royce” (superior). Briefly explain why. (Note: You do not need to have studied the poems in question to evaluate the thesis sentences, nor do you necessarily have to agree with the writer’s opinion.) Example: There seems to be some kind of political content lurking in all three poems. Evaluation: Lemon! The sentence is not assertive enough—by a long shot. It is both vague (“some kind,” “lurking”) and tentative (“seems to be”). This engine is held together by rubber bands. Potential Thesis Sentence #1: “England in 1819,” “Ozymandias,” and “Ode to the West Wind” are three of Shelley’s most memorable poems. Evaluation: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Potential Thesis Sentence #2: Shelley’s “England in 1819,” “Ozymandias,” and “Ode to the West Wind” are all, to varying degrees, quite political. Evaluation: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Potential Thesis Sentence #3: In “England in 1819,” “Ozymandias,” and “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley evinces a consistent political position: faith in the power of liberty to triumph over tyranny. Evaluation: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Potential Thesis Sentence #4: While Shelley’s revolutionary attitude is explicit in a protest poem like “England in 1819,” it also smolders just beneath the surface of more wide-ranging poems such as “Ozymandias” and “Ode to the West Wind.” Evaluation: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Essay: First, read the complete text of Jonathan Swift’s satire “A Modest Proposal” (see below). Work as a class or in small groups to identify passages (such as example #3 above) where we get glimpses of Swift’s real attitude. Either individually or in small groups, identify a social ill or evil that you think could—and should—be criticized by means of satire. Develop a clear and coherent opinion (thesis) of the issue. Then, come up your own “modest proposal” concerning the issue or problem. Share with the class and see if they can correctly identify your underlying opinion.

For example, you and your small group might decide that it is alarming how much fast food advertising is still aimed at children. Your “modest proposal” might be that all aspects of kids’ lives should be run on the fast food model (drive-through classrooms, toys in homework packages, etc.). (Note to teachers: It may be a good idea to preview these essays before students share them with the class in case there is any inappropriate or simply tasteless content.) _______________________________________________________________________

A Modest Proposal

For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public

It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants: who as they grow up either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes.

I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance; and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.

But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed beggars; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of infants at a certain age who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them as those who demand our charity in the streets.

As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and maturely weighed the several schemes of other projectors, I have always found them grossly mistaken in the computation. It is true, a child just dropped from its dam may be supported by her milk for a solar year, with little other nourishment; at most not above the value of 2s., which the mother may certainly get, or the value in scraps, by her lawful occupation of begging; and it is exactly at one year old that I propose to provide for them in such a manner as instead of being a charge upon their parents or the parish, or wanting food and raiment for the rest of their lives, they shall on the contrary contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing, of many thousands.

There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas! too frequent among us! sacrificing the poor innocent babes I doubt more to avoid the expense than the shame, which would move tears and pity in the most savage and inhuman breast.

The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders; from which number I subtract thirty thousand couples who are able to maintain their own children, although I apprehend there cannot be so many, under the present distresses of the kingdom; but this being granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy thousand breeders. I again subtract fifty thousand for those women who miscarry, or whose children die by accident or disease within the year. There only remains one hundred and twenty thousand children of poor parents annually born. The question therefore is, how this number shall be reared and provided for, which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can neither employ them in handicraft or agriculture; we neither build houses (I mean in the country) nor cultivate land: they can very seldom pick up a livelihood by stealing, till they arrive at six years old, except where they are of towardly parts, although I confess they learn the rudiments much earlier, during which time, they can however be properly looked upon only as probationers, as I have been informed by a principal gentleman in the county of Cavan, who protested to me that he never knew above one or two instances under the age of six, even in a part of the kingdom so renowned for the quickest proficiency in that art.

I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl before twelve years old is no salable commodity; and even when they come to this age they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half-a-crown at most on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriment and rags having been at least four times that value.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle or swine; and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the

mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

I have reckoned upon a medium that a child just born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, increaseth to 28 pounds.

I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.

Infant's flesh will be in season throughout the year, but more plentiful in March, and a little before and after; for we are told by a grave author, an eminent French physician, that fish being a prolific diet, there are more children born in Roman Catholic countries about nine months after Lent than at any other season; therefore, reckoning a year after Lent, the markets will be more glutted than usual, because the number of popish infants is at least three to one in this kingdom: and therefore it will have one other collateral advantage, by lessening the number of papists among us.

I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar's child (in which list I reckon all cottagers, laborers, and four-fifths of the farmers) to be about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat, when he hath only some particular friend or his own family to dine with him. Thus the squire will learn to be a good landlord, and grow popular among his tenants; the mother will have eight shillings net profit, and be fit for work till she produces another child.

Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay the carcass; the skin of which artificially dressed will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.

As to our city of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose in the most convenient parts of it, and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.

A very worthy person, a true lover of his country, and whose virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased in discoursing on this matter to offer a refinement upon my scheme. He said that many gentlemen of this kingdom, having of late destroyed their deer, he conceived that the want of venison might be well supplied by the bodies of young lads and maidens, not exceeding fourteen years of age nor under twelve; so great a number of both sexes in every country being now ready to starve for want of work and service; and these to be disposed of by their parents, if alive, or otherwise by their nearest relations. But with due deference to so excellent a friend and so deserving a patriot, I cannot be

altogether in his sentiments; for as to the males, my American acquaintance assured me, from frequent experience, that their flesh was generally tough and lean, like that of our schoolboys by continual exercise, and their taste disagreeable; and to fatten them would not answer the charge. Then as to the females, it would, I think, with humble submission be a loss to the public, because they soon would become breeders themselves; and besides, it is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice (although indeed very unjustly), as a little bordering upon cruelty; which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest objection against any project, however so well intended.

But in order to justify my friend, he confessed that this expedient was put into his head by the famous Psalmanazar, a native of the island Formosa, who came from thence to London above twenty years ago, and in conversation told my friend, that in his country when any young person happened to be put to death, the executioner sold the carcass to persons of quality as a prime dainty; and that in his time the body of a plump girl of fifteen, who was crucified for an attempt to poison the emperor, was sold to his imperial majesty's prime minister of state, and other great mandarins of the court, in joints from the gibbet, at four hundred crowns. Neither indeed can I deny, that if the same use were made of several plump young girls in this town, who without one single groat to their fortunes cannot stir abroad without a chair, and appear at playhouse and assemblies in foreign fineries which they never will pay for, the kingdom would not be the worse.

Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about that vast number of poor people, who are aged, diseased, or maimed, and I have been desired to employ my thoughts what course may be taken to ease the nation of so grievous an encumbrance. But I am not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is very well known that they are every day dying and rotting by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected. And as to the young laborers, they are now in as hopeful a condition; they cannot get work, and consequently pine away for want of nourishment, to a degree that if at any time they are accidentally hired to common labor, they have not strength to perform it; and thus the country and themselves are happily delivered from the evils to come.

I have too long digressed, and therefore shall return to my subject. I think the advantages by the proposal which I have made are obvious and many, as well as of the highest importance. For first, as I have already observed, it would greatly lessen the number of papists, with whom we are yearly overrun, being the principal breeders of the nation as well as our most dangerous enemies; and who stay at home on purpose with a design to deliver the kingdom to the Pretender, hoping to take their advantage by the absence of so many good protestants, who have chosen rather to leave their country than stay at home and pay tithes against their conscience to an episcopal curate.

Secondly, The poorer tenants will have something valuable of their own, which by law may be made liable to distress and help to pay their landlord's rent, their corn and cattle being already seized, and money a thing unknown.

Thirdly, Whereas the maintenance of an hundred thousand children, from two years old and upward, cannot be computed at less than ten shillings a-piece per annum, the nation's stock will be thereby increased fifty thousand pounds per annum, beside the profit of a new dish introduced to the tables of all gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom who have any refinement in taste. And the money will circulate among ourselves, the goods being entirely of our own growth and manufacture.

Fourthly, The constant breeders, beside the gain of eight shillings sterling per annum by the sale of their children, will be rid of the charge of maintaining them after the first year.

Fifthly, This food would likewise bring great custom to taverns; where the vintners will certainly be so prudent as to procure the best receipts for dressing it to perfection, and consequently have their houses frequented by all the fine gentlemen, who justly value themselves upon their knowledge in good eating: and a skilful cook, who understands how to oblige his guests, will contrive to make it as expensive as they please.

Sixthly, This would be a great inducement to marriage, which all wise nations have either encouraged by rewards or enforced by laws and penalties. It would increase the care and tenderness of mothers toward their children, when they were sure of a settlement for life to the poor babes, provided in some sort by the public, to their annual profit instead of expense. We should see an honest emulation among the married women, which of them could bring the fattest child to the market. Men would become as fond of their wives during the time of their pregnancy as they are now of their mares in foal, their cows in calf, their sows when they are ready to farrow; nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a miscarriage.

Many other advantages might be enumerated. For instance, the addition of some thousand carcasses in our exportation of barreled beef, the propagation of swine's flesh, and improvement in the art of making good bacon, so much wanted among us by the great destruction of pigs, too frequent at our tables; which are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well-grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a lord mayor's feast or any other public entertainment. But this and many others I omit, being studious of brevity.

Supposing that one thousand families in this city, would be constant customers for Infant's Flesh, besides others who might have it at merry meetings, particularly at weddings and christenings, I compute that Dublin would take off annually about twenty thousand carcasses, and the rest of the Kingdom (where probably they will be sold somewhat cheaper) the remaining eighty thousand.

I can think of no one objection, that will possibly be raised against this proposal, unless it should be urged, that the number of people will be thereby much lessened in the Kingdom. This I freely own, and 'twas indeed one principal design in offering it to the world. I desire the reader will observe, that I calculate my remedy for this one individual kingdom of Ireland, and for no other that ever was, is, or I think, ever can be upon Earth. Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients: of taxing our absentees at five

shillings a pound: of using neither clothes, nor household furniture, except what is of our own growth and manufacture: of utterly rejecting the materials and instruments that promote foreign luxury: of curing the expensiveness of pride, vanity, idleness, and gaming in our women: of introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence and temperance: of learning to love our country, wherein we differ even from Laplanders, and the inhabitants of Topinamboo: of quitting our animosities, and factions, nor act any longer like the Jews, who were murdering one another at the very moment their city was taken: of being a little cautious not to sell our country and consciences for nothing: of teaching our landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants. Lastly, of putting a spirit of honesty, industry, and skill into our shop-keepers, who, if a resolution could now be taken to buy only our native goods, would immediately unite to cheat and exact upon us in the price, the measure and the goodness, nor could ever yet be brought to make one fair proposal of just dealing, though often and earnestly invited to it.

Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, till he hath at least some glimpse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.

But as to my self, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal, which as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our own power, and whereby we can incur no danger in disobliging England. For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence, to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country, which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.

After all, I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion as to reject any offer proposed by wise men, which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual. But before something of that kind shall be advanced in contradiction to my scheme, and offering a better, I desire the author or authors will be pleased maturely to consider two points. First, as things now stand, how they will be able to find food and raiment for an hundred thousand useless mouths and backs. And secondly, there being a round million of creatures in human figure throughout this kingdom, whose whole subsistence put into a common stock would leave them in debt two millions of pounds sterling, adding those who are beggars by profession to the bulk of farmers, cottagers, and laborers, with their wives and children who are beggars in effect: I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.

I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing.

Lesson Three—Balance Definition: The quality—found in both individual sentences and overall argument—of carefully weighed words and ideas. Example 1: Othello is not only one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies but also one of his great love stories. The story begins in Venice, in Shakespeare’s day one of the most glamorous cities in the world. Being a Moor, Othello is an outsider in the city, but also, being a great general, someone on whom the Venetian state relies. However, Othello’s erstwhile friend Senior Brabantio, a powerful senator, is outraged when the Moor elopes with his daughter, Desdemona. Brabantio denounces Othello in front of the Duke of Venice, saying that the Moor must have used witchcraft to woo his daughter. In a moving defense, Othello claims that the only witchcraft he is guilty of is storytelling; on his visits to Brabantio’s house, he has spellbound Desdemona with tales of his travels, misfortunes, and adventures: “My story being done, / She gave me for my pains a world of sighs: / She swore, in faith, ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange, / ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful: / She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d / That heaven had made her such a man: she thank’d me, / And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, / I should but teach him how to tell my story. / And that would woo her.” Shakespeare is employing several kinds of balance in this speech. First, we have the parallelism of a construction like, “’twas strange, ’twas passing strange, / ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful,” where the similarity of grammatical form underscores the similarity of content (verb adjective, verb adverb adjective, / verb adjective, verb adverb adjective). Second, we have the paradoxical phrase “wondrous pitiful,” which communicates the nicely balanced and nuanced idea that something, such as Othello’s tales of danger, can evoke both enchantment and sorrow. Third, we have a compound sentence that pivots on an all-important conjunction: “She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d / That heaven had made her such a man …” The sentence works like weighing scales: on the one hand, Desdemona is so horrified by Othello’s account of the perils that nearly killed him that she wishes she had not heard it, but, on the other hand, she is so impressed with Othello’s exploits that she wishes she would marry such a man. Not all ideas are as simple, so therefore not all of them can be expressed through simple sentences. Often a qualified or balanced statement needs to be made in the form of a compound or complex sentence.

Example 2: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ballad “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” one of the key works of English Romantic poetry, also concerns telling tales of a fantastic journey. The title character detains and mesmerizes a wedding guest with a supernatural story of the misadventures of a sailing ship on a long voyage. Near the South Pole, the ship becomes ice-locked, but it finds a path to freedom just after the sighting of an albatross. Unfortunately (in the words of Coleridge’s marginal summary), “the ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.” The bird is avenged when the ship is becalmed. The rest of the crewmen turn on the Mariner and, in an act which has entered our language, force him to wear the dead albatross around his neck as a punishment for bringing more misfortune on this ship. As the ship languishes in the doldrums, the crew runs out of fresh water: “There passed a weary time. Each throat / Was parched, and glazed each eye.” Like Shakespeare, Coleridge is engaged in a “balancing act.” He is using a variation of parallelism called chiasmus. Derived from the Ancient Greek letter X (chi), chiasmus literally involves a cross-over. Whereas in regular parallelism phrases are grammatically in tandem, in chiasmus they reverse grammatical order. Hence, if the relevant phrases above were parallel, the sentence would read: Each throat was parched, and each eye was glazed. Grammatically, that would give us this pattern: Subject—predicate ... subject—predicate Chiasmus, on the other hand, creates a mirror effect: Each throat was parched, and glazed [was] each eye. So the grammatical form is: Subject—predicate …predicate—subject. Chiasmus, used sparingly, can create memorable assertions in prose, particularly in persuasive writing. This is not surprising considering that the ancient Greeks first developed it as a rhetorical device. Modern essayists and speech-makers have made notable use of chiasmus. Statements such as “Ask not what your country can do for you—but what you can do for your country” (John F. Kennedy) and “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us” (Malcolm X) have been labeled by humorist Calvin Trilling as “reversible raincoat sentences.” Whether you call the technique chiasmus or the reversible raincoat, you can use it to provide a sentence with a pleasing and attention-getting balance.

Example 3: There is an odd connection between Othello and Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in that some people believe that Bacon actually wrote Othello—indeed, that he wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays. That (rather eccentric) theory does not concern us here; what does concern us are the works that Bacon certainly did write: his essays. In fact, Bacon is one of the fathers of the modern essay. Like a lot of writers who develop something new, he was a great scholar of things ancient. Bacon reflects his appreciation of Latin and Greek literature not only in the quotations which often embellish his essays, but also in the classical sense of proportion, symmetry, and balance which pervade his style. The opening paragraph of his essay “Of Studies” is a master class in balance: “Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for ornament is in discourse; and for ability is in the judgment and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best, from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.” Bacon’s use of parallelism (“for delight, for ornament, and for ability”) is just the beginning of this ultimate “balancing act.” Like Shakespeare, he is adept at using a coordinating conjunction to create a perfectly balanced sentence, one that tips back and forth like a see-saw: “For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best, from those that are learned.” It is not just individual sentences that are balanced; the argument itself is painstakingly balanced; in an essay that is essentially devoted to the praise of studies, Bacon points out the potential pitfalls of the scholarly life: “To spend too much time in studies is sloth …” These kind of qualifications not only anticipate possible objections to the essay’s thesis but also help form a more sophisticated argument. The result is a better essay overall. Balance is something we admire in people as well as writing; we praise individuals for their equanimity, a word which, at root, means the quality of being “equal-minded”; a person possessing equanimity is moderate, not given to extremes; in short, balanced.

We can see that kind of equanimity at work in the logic of this essay. Bacon examines extremes (“Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them”), and then points out a sensible middle course (“wise men use them”). “I balanced all, brought all to mind,” says the speaker in W.B. Yeats poem “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death.” Writing on any given subject, you would probably need the talent and learning of a Francis Bacon to balance all and bring all to mind, but an awareness of balance, as we have seen from the examples above, can improve not only the quality of key sentences but also the intelligence of the argument itself. It is that overall quality of balance that we will focus on in the following argument. That last “balancing act” that we examined in Example #3, where Bacon considers opposing ideas and then finds, or cultivates, middle ground between them is in fact a very old intellectual operation, one that can be used to great effect in many arguments. It is a three-step operation known as thesis—antithesis—synthesis. Let’s break down that terminology. First, you have the thesis, or basic assertion. For example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a wonderful poet. Just as the antagonist opposes the protagonist of a play, the anti-thesis is an idea that stands in opposition to the original assertion. For example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a lousy poet because he had a habit of leaving work unfinished. Since you might often find both a straightforward opinion and its negation unsatisfactory, synthesis allows you to blend both ideas into a more nuanced and balanced position. For example, Though he failed to complete some of his most significant works, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a great poet. This kind of operation may be familiar to you if you have ever been faced with one of those prompts that asks you to “defend, challenge, or qualify” a certain statement. Essentially, what such a prompt is asking you to do is to: a) take the statement as your thesis (defend) b) take up an antithetical position (challenge) or: c) synthesize the statement with criticism of it (qualify) Of the three options, students often find the third, which involves striking a balance between the essential truth of the statement and problems with it, the most intimidating. So the practice that follows will get you to exercise your qualifying/balancing “muscles.”

Practice: Imagine that each of the following statements is the basis of a prompt that asks you to write a personal essay defending, challenging, or qualifying the quoted opinion. In each case, generate a balanced, qualified position by first writing sentences defending and challenging the statements. For example: Statement: “Modern education is an essential preparation for the contemporary workplace.” Thesis: In the light of my career plans, my current studies are invaluable. Antithesis: In the light of my career plans, my current studies are a complete waste of time. Synthesis: In the light of my career plans, my current studies are of limited relevance. Now it is your turn to balance and synthesize: Statement #1: “Students derive an immeasurable benefit from studying Shakespeare.” Thesis: Antithesis: Synthesis: Statement #2: “Athletics dominate the life of the typical high school today.” Thesis: Antithesis: Synthesis:

Statement #3: “Nothing effective has been done to alert teenagers about the dangers of alcohol consumption.” Thesis: Antithesis: Synthesis: Statement #4: “Modern teaching methods stress the meaning of poetry to the total exclusion of considerations of beauty and pleasure.” Thesis: Antithesis: Synthesis: Essay: Francis Bacon wrote “Of Studies”; now you have an opportunity to write “Of Modern Studies.” Bacon wrote in a cool, detached, impersonal way about book-learning; your essay should be more personal in nature, giving your reaction to your studies. Questions you could ask yourself to generate this essay include: How useful do you think your studies are? How intrinsically interesting (interesting in their own right) are they? What inspires or exasperates you about your studies? What kind of curriculum would you design for yourself? (Note that the essay is about the content of your education, not the teachers or other personalities involved!) As you draft, and especially as you revise, try to achieve as much balance as possible. Highlight or underline at least three instances of balance in the final draft. In brief marginal notes, explain what kind of balancing they are (parallelism, paradox, chiasmus, compound sentence, qualification, etc.).

Lesson Four—Argument Development Definition: The process of supporting and proving your thesis through a variety of strategies including analysis, example, and analogy. Example 1: Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play, and arguably the richest in long speeches. The most famous of these are Hamlet’s brooding soliloquies, but other speeches delivered by other characters in dialogue are also noteworthy. Of particular interest, for our purposes, is a speech delivered by Laertes in Act I, Scene iii, for it is a complete argument in itself. Laertes is speaking with his sister, Ophelia. They are the children of Polonius, councilor to the King of Denmark (Claudius, Prince Hamlet’s uncle). Laertes is about to depart for France and is concerned about his sister’s welfare. In particular, he advises her to be wary of Hamlet’s affection for her, to think of it as “Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting.” Understandably, Ophelia wants to know why she should regard Hamlet’s love as “No more but so.” In response, Laertes delivers a speech which develops his argument that she should be wary of Hamlet’s romantic interest. Before we take a closer look at its individual parts, let’s read the argument as a whole:

Think it no more; For nature, crescent, does not grow alone In thews and bulk, but, as this temple waxes, The inward service of the mind and soul Grows wide withal. Perhaps he loves you now, And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch The virtue of his will: but you must fear, His greatness weigh’d, his will is not his own; For he himself is subject to his birth: He may not, as unvalued persons do, Carve for himself; for on his choice depends The safety and health of this whole state; And therefore must his choice be circumscribed Unto the voice and yielding of that body Whereof he is the head. Then if he says he loves you, It fits your wisdom so far to believe it As he in his particular act and place May give his saying deed; which is no further Than the main voice of Denmark goes withal. Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain, If with too credent ear you list his songs, Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open To his unmaster’d importunity.

Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister, And keep you in the rear of your affection, Out of the shot and danger of desire. The chariest maid is prodigal enough, If she unmask her beauty to the moon: Virtue itself ’scapes not calumnious strokes: The canker galls the infants of the spring, Too oft before their buttons be disclosed, And in the morn and liquid dew of youth Contagious blastments are most imminent. Be wary then; best safety lies in fear: Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.

Although at first the richness of Shakespeare’s language may be a little intimidating, what we have here is a very solid and straightforward argument (and you do not need to agree with what Laertes says to recognize that). He begins with a thesis, a main opinion: “Think it [Hamlet’s affection] no more [than forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting].” In support of this thesis, he first offers a generalization about human existence—as we grow physically, so do our responsibilities grow: “For nature, crescent, does not grow alone / In thews and bulk, but, as this temple [the body] waxes, / The inward service of the mind and soul / Grows wide withal.” Laertes then deepens the argument by analyzing Hamlet’s circumstances: “Perhaps he loves you now, / And now no soil nor cautel [deceit] doth besmirch / The virtue of his will: but you must fear, / His greatness weigh'd, his will is not his own; / For he himself is subject to his birth.” He then introduces a contrast that makes his analysis more compelling and convincing: “He may not, as unvalued persons do, / Carve [choose] for himself.” An analogy will help Ophelia (and us) understand this analysis even better: “For on his choice depends / The safety and health of this whole state; / And therefore must his choice be circumscribed / Unto the voice and yielding of that body [the public] / Whereof he is the head.”

Having put in place a solid analysis, Laertes is now in a position to advance his argument (that his sister must be wary) through logic—look, especially, at the transitional word (italicized) which emphasizes the logical progression of his thoughts: “Then if he says he loves you, / It fits your wisdom so far to believe it / As he in his particular act and place / May give his saying deed; which is no further / Than the main voice [public opinion] of Denmark goes withal. / Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain, / If with too credent ear you list his songs, / Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open / To his unmaster’d importunity.” At this point in the argument, Laertes repeats his thesis—in even more forceful terms: “Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister, / And keep you in the rear of your affection, / Out of the shot and danger of desire.” In support of this “enriched” thesis (he is telling her now not just to be wary but to be fearful), Laertes offers a series of dramatic examples and observations: “The chariest maid is prodigal enough, / If she unmask her beauty to the moon: / Virtue itself ’scapes not calumnious strokes.” The examples grow more vivid and metaphoric: “The canker galls the infants of the spring, / Too oft before their buttons be disclosed, / And in the morn and liquid dew of youth / Contagious blastments are most imminent.” Laertes (and, of course, Shakespeare) is slyly using the strategy of “saving the best till last”: the image of canker killing spring flowers is much more likely to linger in our minds that the generalized observation that “Virtue itself ’scapes not calumnious strokes.” Having made sure that his final pieces of evidence are some of the best he has to offer, Laertes concludes his argument; this involves not only a restatement of his thesis but also a parting (and deeply relevant) observation: “Be wary then; best safety lies in fear: / Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.” In response to all this, Ophelia instructs her brother not to be like the kind of hypocritical pastor who preaches chastity yet indulges in “libertine” behavior himself, but she also acknowledges that his speech is a “good lesson.” It is a good lesson for students of argument, too.

Example 2: Many writers have written about Shakespeare’s genius, but it took the psychological novelist and early twentieth-century feminist Virginia Woolf to introduce us to the genius of Shakespeare’s sister. Woolf does so in her long essay “A Room of One’s Own.” In a previous lesson, we have examined its clear thesis: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf develops a supporting argument for this forceful opinion by means of insight, reflection, and historical analysis. However, her argument really takes off when she makes this bold argumentative move: “Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.” In the paragraphs that follow, Woolf employs her storytelling skill to bring to life this frustrated genius—and we as readers are carried along by this short, tragic biography. Excluded on account of her gender from the educational, social, and theatrical spheres that allowed her brother to flourish, Judith dies with her artistic talent unrealized. Shakespeare’s sister is the personification of all women writers whose ambitions were thwarted by economic and social circumstances. When Woolf surmises that throughout literary history there must have been many “a lost novelist, a suppressed poet,” we are moved; but when she shows us such a thwarted genius, we are gripped. She has made her argument vivid. Proof that this imaginative strategy makes Woolf’s argument memorable comes not only from the frequency that this section of the essay is excerpted in anthologies and textbooks but also from the entry of the phrase “Shakespeare’s sister” into the language itself (it was even the title of a rock song). Example 3: Shakespeare’s contemporary, John Donne, was a most prolific and versatile writer. Few authors, for example, have written equally brilliant love and religious poems. In his role as preacher, Donne also wrote celebrated prose. His sermons were for centuries after his death more widely read than his poems. His most famous prose piece, however, is one of his spiritual “Meditations”—“Meditation XVII”: it contains his oft-quoted assertion that “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main …” Here is a less well-known but equally clever analogy from the same meditation: “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.”

The power of this analogy comes from two main sources: First, it has a purpose—it is not just put in for show. By comparing mankind to a book (authored by a divine writer), Donne is re-enforcing his thesis: that all human beings are connected (hence his famous injunction later in the essay “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”). Second, it is an extended analogy. We as readers are impressed by the many points of comparison Donne discovers between books and man’s spiritual life. This is another strategy of argument development that we are unlikely to forget. Indeed, we could easily imagine that extended analogy as being the blueprint for an entire essay of its own (the only problem with Donne’s meditation, you could say, is that he is suffering from an embarrassment of riches when it comes to figures of speech). Donne could have used the very best of his points of comparison (“All mankind is of one author …” “God employs several translators …” “His hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again …”) as the topic sentences of a complete essay. Likewise, you could structure an entire argument based on an extended analogy. Say, for example, you are writing a personal essay about your love of science and your development as a science student. Your thesis—the thrust of your essay—is that you have matured as a young scientist and have discovered that science, and biology in particular, is your calling in life. An extended analogy drawing upon your love of the biological sciences is both irresistible and apt. Soon you know that your first body paragraph will be about your “egg days,” the second about your “caterpillar stage,” and the third your “chrysalis phase,” (which, you admit, you are still in the midst of). Your conclusion looks forward to the time when you will be a full-blown butterfly. The title of your essay? “Metamorphosis,” of course. Donne was one of a number of seventeenth-century writers whom we now refer to as the Metaphysical Poets. The Metaphysicals were erudite and intellectually curious. They loved to display their learning (in areas as diverse as Biblical scholarship and modern science) in their poetry and prose, but we should not mistake these displays for mere intellectual showing-off. They used their learning to make their writing as original and arresting as possible, creating fresh and striking metaphors known as conceits. A conceit is a metaphor or analogy involving the comparison of two things one would not usually think of as having much in common. Since they grab the reader’s attention, conceits add to the force of an argument (and many poems as well as prose pieces have an argument—a strong line of thinking).

For example, if we were to read a poem in which death is personified as a grim reaper, it probably would not make much of an impression on us, as that is the most familiar, even clichéd image we have of death. However, if we picture death as a proud tyrant, as Donne makes us do from the start of his “Holy Sonnet X,” we are likely to sit up and pay attention to his argument. In the practice that follows, you will be asked to take a close look at how John Donne builds an argument using analogy and other techniques in “Holy Sonnet V.” Since we have mentioned Holy Sonnet X already, let us use that as an example of how you should approach that worksheet.

Holy Sonnet X

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow, Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery. Thou’rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well, And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

1. How does Donne personify death? As a proud, vain opponent. 2. As the poem progresses, what does he compare death to? In contrast to Death’s self-image as a powerful being who “dost overthrow” mortal men, Donne stresses that Death is in fact a wretched creature (“poor Death”) and a “slave” to circumstances. 3. What does Donne mean why he says that “rest and sleep” are but the “pictures” of death? Why does he not talk about them in a more direct way? That is Donne’s metaphor for imitations. The figure of speech “pictures” engages our visual sense, making the argument in that line more lively. 4. Donne’s argument end with a paradox: identify and explain it. Donne says that “Death … shalt die.” He means that death shall be defeated by eternal life.

Practice: Now you are ready to answer a similar set of questions concerning another of Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” and its argument. Where you can, support your answers with reference to the text.

Holy Sonnet V

I am a little world made cunningly Of elements, and an angelic sprite; But black sin hath betray’d to endless night My world’s both parts, and, O, both parts must die. You which beyond that heaven which was most high Have found new spheres, and of new land can write, Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might Drown my world with my weeping earnestly, Or wash it if it must be drown’d no more. But O, it must be burnt; alas! the fire Of lust and envy burnt it heretofore, And made it fouler; let their flames retire, And burn me, O Lord, with a fiery zeal Of Thee and Thy house, which doth in eating heal.

1. To what does Donne metaphorically compare himself in the first two lines of the poem? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2. How does Donne develop that metaphor in lines 3-4? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 3. Who is/are the “You” whom Donne addresses in lines 5-8? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 4. What major shift in the imagery of the argument occurs in line 9? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 5. Donne’s argument ends with a paradox: identify and explain it. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Essay: For the purposes of this essay, let us examine one final “Holy Sonnet” by Donne:

Holy Sonnet XIV

Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp’d town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but O, to no end. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, But am betroth’d unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

In a short essay, analyze the logic, analogies, paradoxes and any other strategies of argument develop that Donne employs in this passionate and intelligent poem.

Lesson Five—Attitude Definition: The heightened quality of prose that comes from the writer having a definite opinion about his or her topic. Example 1: That Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is one of the most influential romantic comedies of all time is confirmed not only by the many stage and screen adaptations of the novel but also the books and movies inspired by it, including Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bride and Prejudice. The pride of the title is that of the aristocratic Mr. Darcy; the prejudice belongs to Elizabeth Bennet, who mistakes Darcy’s aloofness for arrogance. However, it is an understandable mistake. Darcy is a newcomer to the part of the English countryside where the Bennet family resides. His friend Mr. Bingley, another wealthy young man, has rented the nearby estate of Netherfield. At an “assembly,” the kind of social event that Elizabeth and her four sisters live for, Darcy stands apart from the locals, refusing to dance with any of the young ladies, even when encouraged by the genial Bingley. Elizabeth overhears Darcy remark that she is “not handsome enough to tempt me.” He warns Bingley that he is wasting his time trying to get him to dance. “Mr. Bingley followed his advice. Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings towards him.” Attitude is communicated through tone, and Austen’s tone here, as it is so often throughout her witty and perceptive work, is subtly ironic; in other words, there is more to the statement than meets the eye. To say that Elizabeth is left with “no very cordial feelings towards” the man who has just insulted her is a considerable understatement; she must have no “cordial feelings” towards him at all; in fact, she probably despises him. However, this is a social world in which etiquette reigns supreme (or should—that is why the locals are aghast at Darcy’s “shocking rudeness”). Elizabeth’s reaction is to laugh the whole thing off: “She told the story however with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in any thing ridiculous.” She will not allow herself any deeper feelings for Mr. Darcy, at this point. Austen’s understatement mirrors this restraint. This technique, which Austen displays her mastery of here, of ironic understatement through the use of a negating phrase (“no very cordial feelings”) is called litotes. Another example would be the statement that Sir Roger Bannister’s feat in being the first person ever to run a mile in less than four minutes was “no small achievement.” Litotes is an effect that should be used sparingly, but it can result in a statement dripping with attitude.

Example 2: Another nineteenth-century author with wit and attitude to spare was Oscar Wilde. These qualities make him one of the most quotable of writers. Many of his “bon mots” rely on paradox for effect, for example, “Youth is wasted on the young.” In his sparkling comic play The Importance of Being Earnest, memorable, attitude-laden “one-liners” come thick and fast. Many of them involve turning conventional wisdom upside-down; for example, the aristocratic Algernon Moncrieff remarks, after hearing his butler say something unsavory, “Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.” Wilde’s Victorian audience would have found this hilarious, for it upsets the conventional expectation that the upper-classes should set the moral tone. However, Wilde was after more than a laugh. He was a social satirist, and what he is ultimately doing through Algy Moncrieff’s quips is ridiculing the upper classes’ pretensions to moral leadership. Wilde was best known as a playwright, but he did publish one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, famous for its fantastical narrative device of a man who stays young while his portrait decays. In the novel’s short but much-quoted preface, Wilde continues his work as social critic with statements like these: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.” Wilde’s attitude is communicated, first of all, through the forcefulness of his opinion. His sentences are assertive, clear, and measured. The paired statements make a distinct impression on the reader’s mind through a combination of repetition and difference (“Realism … Romanticism,” “seeing … not seeing”). Another device that allows Wilde to communicate his attitude so swiftly is allusion: a reference to another literary or artistic source. Here Wilde is alluding to Shakespeare’s magical comedy The Tempest; in the play, Caliban is a human-like monster tamed and enslaved by the sorcerer Prospero. Allusion is sometimes a good “shorthand” way of communicating to the reader your attitude about something. However, it only works if the reader can reasonably be expected to understand that allusion. To gauge that expectation, you have to consider your audience. For example, if you are writing an essay for your English teacher, the comparison of a contemporary politician to a Shakespearean villain is a reasonable allusion, but alluding to a character in a song by an artist with a cult following is not going to be an effective strategy; the teacher will probably be mystified as to what your attitude toward the politician is.

Example 3: The preface of Wilde’s book was influenced by the conclusion of another book: Walter Pater’s The Renaissance. Pater, a teacher of Wilde’s at Oxford University, was one of the most influential Victorian essayists and critics. He was one of the originators of the Aesthetic Movement, a school of thought that encouraged the appreciation of beauty in literature, art, and life. “Seize the day” is a well-known philosophical injunction; Pater urged his followers to “seize the moment.” This intense and idealistic approach to living is best expressed by a celebrated sentence from the conclusion: “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” Pater’s earnest attitude is unmistakable: there is no satire, no irony here. But how is that candid attitude communicated, how is that zealous tone achieved? We must look, first and foremost, at Pater’s diction—his word choices. Note that he explains this ecstatic approach to life by means of a metaphor. At first glance, the metaphor is quite conventional, that of a burning flame. But Pater transforms it through his choice of adjectives—“hard, gem-like”—especially the second: “gem-like” is the inspired word choice of the entire sentence, for it sets off in the reader’s mind not only the denotation of the word “gem” but also its connotations: rarity, purity, preciousness—all qualities that Pater treasures. One might also mention the subtle but significant role that the structure of the sentence plays in transmitting the writer’s attitude. Pater has crafted this statement as a periodic sentence—that is, the type of sentence in which the subject or the verb (or both) is delayed. In this case, it is the verb. The sentence has three stages or “steps”: first we have an infinitive phrase (“To burn always …”); then another (“to maintain …”); then finally the verb and predicate (“is success …). Reading the sentence is like ascending a staircase. This rising motion gives the sentence itself a kind of ecstatic quality, which can only help to impart the writer’s attitude. To further explore just how clearly a writer’s attitude can shine through his or her prose, let us return to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which has lots of attitude to spare from the “get-go.” The novel’s opening sentence is famous: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” That sentence is justifiably celebrated not only because it is a great “hook” but also because Austen’s attitude, her fundamental opinion of her subject, is so clear. And her subject here, as it is in most of her novels, is marriage. Austen is letting us know that,

though what follows is a romantic comedy, she is no starry-eyed romantic. She may believe in love but she is realistic enough to acknowledge the connection, especially in her society, between marriage and money. This realistic attitude is further emphasized by the content and diction of the very next sentence (italics added): “However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.” After that, Austen misses no opportunity to remind us that, in her world, romantic considerations go hand-in-hand with financial considerations, as in this beautifully balanced sentence commenting on Mr. Darcy’s entry into the assembly ball, at which he will insult Elizabeth: “[Mr. Bingley’s] brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, merely looked the gentleman; but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year.” In other words, the locals admire his looks, but they admire his money even more. Jane Austen is not the only writer we have encountered in this lesson who was concerned with both romance and realism; remember Oscar Wilde and his critical pronouncements about the nineteenth century’s reactions to Realism and Romanticism? Let us take this emphasis on realistic and romantic attitudes and use it as the basis for the practice to follow. For the purposes of that practice, it is important that we have working definitions of these two—often opposing—attitudes:

• A realistic approach to life, or an aspect of life, stresses objectivity, reason, evidence, practicality, and probability.

• A romantic approach to life, or an aspect of life, stresses subjectivity, feeling,

intuition, idealism, and possibility.

Practice: Take each of the following topics and write two statements on each, one featuring a realistic attitude, the other featuring a romantic attitude. Use diction, figures of speech, literary techniques and any other resource of language to communicate these attitudes. Briefly explain how you created the tone of each sentence. For example: Topic: professional sport Realistic Attitude: Although it remains immensely popular, professional sport has been plagued in recent years by controversies involving drug use, gambling, and criminal behavior. Comment: I tried to achieve a realistic balance in this sentence by using more than one clause; the verb choice emphasizes how something strong has begun to sicken; I detail three controversies to root the opinion in fact. Romantic Attitude: Professional sport fires my imagination; my athletic heroes soar to places where angels fear to tread. Comment: The personal note (“my imagination”) makes this a more subjective sentence; a metaphoric verb (“fires”) and literary allusion (“where angels fear to tread”) gives the statement a lofty tone. Now it is your turn to express yourself realistically and romantically: Topic #1: Paris Realistic Attitude: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Comment: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Romantic Attitude: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Comment: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Topic #2: War Realistic Attitude: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Comment: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Romantic Attitude: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Comment: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Topic #3: Life in the country Realistic Attitude: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Comment: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Romantic Attitude: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Comment: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Essay: Review the reading assignments you have done for this class so far this year. Identify one character who strikes you as being most definitely a realist or a romantic. In an essay that utilizes plenty of evidence from your chosen text, demonstrate this character’s realism or romanticism. Through diction, figurative language, sentence structure, and other techniques discussed in this lesson, make your own attitude toward the character clear.

Lesson Six—Parenthetical Elements Definition: Words, phrases, and clauses set off by punctuation marks that can enrich both the content and structure of sentences. Example 1: The title of E.M. Forster’s Howards End refers to the beautiful country house at the center of its story. Set in Edwardian England, the novel dramatizes some of the great changes taking place in British society at that time, changes that would soon be accelerated by the First World War. Chief among these changes was a loosening—or the beginnings of a loosening—of the class system, which had been a defining feature of British life for centuries. A shared love of music brings together the upper-middle class Schlegel sisters with a culture-hungry lower-middle class clerk. In one chapter, he is simply an anonymous young man whom the sisters encounter at a concert, and whose umbrella one of them inadvertently ends up taking. In the next chapter, Forster wants us to learn more about this character: “The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility.” Here Forster has utilized a simple but effective—and, in student writing, often underused—parenthetical element: an appositive: a word or phrase which renames and hence gives us more information about a noun. It is set off by a pair of commas. In the very same chapter, Forster shows us that an appositive can be used to rename in the reverse way: starting with the proper noun, then giving another aspect of the character’s identity. Walking through London, Leonard encounters a colleague: “Mr. Dealtry, a fellow clerk, passed on …” Appositives can be used not just for proper nouns but objects, entities, and ideas, also. This makes them a useful tool for deepening description in many kinds of essays. For example, in an expository essay you might say: The leatherback sea-turtle, the only one of its kind in Indonesian waters, faces several environmental challenges. In an argumentative essay, you might assert: The Water Conservation Scheme, the governor’s favorite project, is extremely innovative.

Example 2: Like E.M. Forster, Thomas Hardy demonstrated a great love of the English countryside in his work. Most of Hardy’s novels are set in Wessex, an ancient name for the southwest counties of England. This is a less genteel landscape than the country surrounding Howards End. Life there, still linked to the agricultural seasons and traditional society, can be harsh and tragic, though infused with a kind of grandeur. One of Hardy’s most tragic stories is The Mayor of Casterbridge. Michael Henchard, the mayor of the title and a wealthy merchant, is a prominent man with a terrible secret. As a young man, he sold his wife and child. The dramatic opening chapter of the novel reveals this crime. Henchard, then an unemployed harvester, gets drunk at a village fair and tries to auction off his wife. The locals believe that the spectacle is just a charade, until a sailor coolly agrees to pay Henchard’s asking price of five guineas (a pound note and a shilling coin equaled a guinea). The onlookers are amazed:

“The sight of real money in full amount, in answer to a challenge for the same till then deemed slightly hypothetical had a great effect upon the spectators. Their eyes became riveted upon the faces of the chief actors, and then upon the notes as they lay, weighted by the shillings, on the table.”

The stroke of genius in the second sentence is that parenthetical element “weighted by the shillings.” It not only creates an unforgettable image but also allows Hardy to write with economy. Instead of having to write two sentences (“Their eyes became riveted upon … the notes as they lay on the table. The notes were weighed down by the shillings.”), Hardy, thanks to the parenthetical element, can enfold that detail about the shillings into the sentence about the spectators’ eyes.

Like all parenthetical elements, this phrase has a grammatical function—or job to do—in the sentence. It is a participial phrase, composed of a past participle (“weighted”) and a prepositional phrase (“by the shillings”). It functions as an adverb, telling us more about how the notes lay on the table. In other words, this parenthetical element is also an adverbial phrase.

Example 3: We have to feel sorry for Jonathan Harker as he writes in his journal at the beginning of Bram Stoker’s legendary novel Dracula. The young Englishman is on a business trip to Transylvania, in Europe’s Carpathian Mountains, and he is puzzled that all the locals are making such a fuss that he is off to meet this aristocrat Count Dracula, who has written him such courteous letters, at his castle. Of course the locals know what we know—thanks not only to Stoker’s novel but also to countless movie and television adaptations—that his host is a vampire. Harker, a modern, rational man, points out that “every known superstition is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians”; nevertheless, he is rather unnerved by the locals’ farewell as he leaves the friendly environs of the Golden Krone Hotel and heads for Castle Dracula:

“I shall never forget the last glimpse which I had of the inn-yard and its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing themselves, as they stood round the wide archway, with its background of rich foliage of oleander and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the centre of the yard.” Like Hardy, Stoker is able to economically enfold a vivid—and telling—detail into the sentence by means of a parenthetical element (“all crossing themselves”). Grammatically, this parenthetical element is a participial phrase (this time featuring a present participle—“crossing”). It functions as an adjective, telling us more about the “picturesque figures”). In other words, it is also an adjectival phrase. Parenthetical elements are typically punctuated by a pair of commas, but dashes and, of course, parentheses can also be used. For example: The vampires of Transylvania (a beautiful country) are pure myth. Indeed, using dashes can give the parenthetical element emphasis and prominence on the page: The vampires of Transylvania—a beautiful country—are pure myth. What all parenthetical elements have in common is that they are not in terms of grammar and meaning essential elements of the sentence; hence they are set off by punctuation. If an element is essential to the fundamental sense of the sentence, then it is by definition not a parenthetical element and not set of by a pair of punctuation marks. This distinction is best demonstrated by looking at the use of relative clauses (the punctuation of which often frustrates students!). Let us take the same relative clause (“which I rescued from the junk yard”) and see how it should be punctuated properly in two different sentences (every sentence, of course, being a difference context). Sentence A: I would like to present you with a vintage car which I rescued from the junk yard. Sentence B: My favorite car, which I rescued from the junk yard, has gone on display at the county museum.

In Sentence A, the relative clause is needed to define or identify which “vintage car” the writer is referring to. However, in Sentence B, the writer can have only one “favorite car,” and therefore the fact that it was “rescued from the junk yard” is additional, non-defining information—and hence a parenthetical element, set off by a pair of commas. Relative clauses referring to people are punctuated according to the same logic: Sentence C: The boy who won the Wordsworth Poetry Prize will be on Channel 7 tomorrow evening. Sentence D: My eldest brother, who won the Wordsworth Poetry Prize, will be attending Harvard in the fall. In Sentence C, the relative clause is needed to identify which boy the speaker is referring to. However, in Sentence D, the writer can have only one “eldest brother,” and therefore, notable though the brother’s achievement is in winning a poetry prize, the information conveyed by the relative clause is the grammatical equivalent of an “aside,” and therefore set off from the rest of the sentence by a pair of commas. As we said above, if the writer wants to give the parenthetical information greater prominence, he or she can employ dashes: My eldest brother—who won the Wordsworth Poetry Prize—will be attending Harvard in the fall.

Practice: Combine each of the following pairs of sentences into one sentence in which the information contained in the second sentence becomes a parenthetical element in the first. Feel free to modify wording, verb forms, etc. In terms of punctuation, you do not have to limit yourself to pairs of commas. For example: Pair of Sentences: George Washington retired from the presidency after two terms. He never hungered after power. Combined Sentences Featuring Parenthetical Element: George Washington, who never hungered after power, retired from the presidency after two terms. Pair of Sentences: Paul Montague has been charged with fraud. He is a clerk from Baltimore. Combined Sentences Featuring Parenthetical Element: Paul Montague, a clerk from Baltimore, has been charged with fraud. Now it is your turn to “fold” parenthetical elements into sentences: Pair of Sentences #1: Caesar realized that the Roman civil service was in need of radical reform. It was riddled with corruption. Your Combination: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Pair of Sentences #2: Julia married Pompey, another powerful Roman general. She was Caesar’s beloved daughter. Your Combination: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Pair of Sentences #3: The famous orator Cicero was executed in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination, though he played no part in the conspiracy. Caesar greatly admired him. Your Combination: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Pair of Sentences #4: Caesar collapsed when his old friend Brutus stabbed him. He had been weakened by the conspirators’ blows. Your Combination: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Pair of Sentences #5: The conspirators declared that “Tyranny was dead.” They raised their bloody daggers in the air. Your Combination: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Essay: In the opening pages of Charles Dickens’s masterpiece Great Expectations, the narrator, Pip, states, “My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.” Pip is referring to a day during his childhood when he really began to understand the world around him, and his place in it. In a personal essay, recall a time when you became aware, or more aware, of “the identity of things.” As you revise the essay, make sure you have at least one sentence per paragraph that features a parenthetical element, be it an appositive, phrase, or relative clause. Highlight or underline these sentences before turning the essay in to your instructor.

Lesson Seven—The Argument Clincher Definition: The means by which you can complete the process of winning the reader over to your side. Example 1: In the early scenes of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the young prince of Denmark’s grief over the recent death of his father, old King Hamlet, is compounded by his unease over the unseemly speed with which his mother, Queen Gertrude, has married his uncle, Claudius, the new king. The audience becomes convinced of this impropriety after this exchange between Hamlet and his friend Horatio, a class-mate from the University of Wittenburg:

HORATIO: My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral. HAMLET: I prithee do not mock me, fellow-student. I think it was to see my mother’s wedding. HORATIO: Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. HAMLET: Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio! Notice the difference in terms of impact that Horatio’s words and Hamlet’s language make upon us. Horatio’s statement, that the wedding of Gertrude and Claudius “followed hard upon” the old king’s funeral, is simply an assertion of fact. It registers with us mentally, but is too bland for us to feel the scandal of the impropriety of the widow marrying so soon after her husband’s death—and marrying the dead man’s brother. However, Hamlet makes us feel scandalized. He does it through the means of an image of great power and economy, one that essentially shows us that the hot catered food from the funeral became cold cuts for the wedding feast! If that does not make us share Hamlet’s sense that there is something very wrong with this family picture, then nothing is likely to.

Example 2: Hamlet is one of the most celebrated works of literature; indeed, in 1999, eminent critic Helen Vendler named it as the “poem of the millennium.” Not all critics, however, have had such unalloyed enthusiasm for this most famous of Shakespeare’s tragedies. In his essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” the Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot argues—boldly—that the play is not Shakespeare’s masterpiece. For Eliot, the play is “puzzling” and “disquieting” and “most certainly an artistic failure” because, in spite of his poetic genius, Shakespeare fails to provide a sufficient motivation for the dark intensity of Hamlet’s emotions; not even his “mother’s guilt,” Eliot notes, fully explains the prince’s despair. He observes that though a play like Antony and Cleopatra is dramatically superior, people are drawn to Hamlet like no other. This, Eliot argues, is not because of any artistic perfection but because it is “interesting,” intriguing: “It is the ‘Mona Lisa’ of literature.” One does not have to abandon one’s enthusiasm for Hamlet to appreciate what a brilliant “clincher” Eliot’s assertion is. To encapsulate his argument about the appeal of the play he has come up with a memorable metaphor. But why is it memorable? Two main reasons: First, the sound of the sentence: the alliteration, the repetition of the letter “l” makes the statement stick in our mind—makes it highly quotable (its brevity also helps in that area). Second, the metaphor takes the form of an allusion that will be readily understood. Almost all readers will be able to picture Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait in their mind’s eye; they will be familiar with its subject’s celebrated mysterious smile; many will know of the lore and conjecture that surround the painting. In other words, asserting that Hamlet is literature’s “Mona Lisa” is a clever shorthand way of stating that the play is popular, fascinating and—to Eliot’s mind, at least—over-rated.

Example 3: Though he is most famous for his satirical novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell was also a master of nonfiction and one of the indispensable essayists of the twentieth century. The freshness of his style is matched by—and indeed bound up with—the freshness of his thinking. The short essay “Decline of the English Murder” is typical of Orwell’s ability to surprise, provoke, and intrigue the reader. Its argument is in no way a defense of or apology for murder; rather, it argues that in 1940s England “the prevalent type of crime seems to be changing.” In the “stable society” that was pre-World War II England, Orwell argues, the typical murder was “essentially domestic”: it was committed by otherwise “respectable” people, and only after a long struggle with conscience. The crime was meticulously planned and had a clear motivation. However, the turbulence of the war years, Orwell observes, has introduced a new kind of murder into English society: random, impersonal, and essentially motiveless. To clinch the argument that the nature of murder in England has changed, Orwell summarizes and analyzes the notorious “Cleft Chin Murder” of 1944, in which an American G.I. and an English waitress went on a lethal crime spree: “It was almost chance that the two people concerned committed that particular murder, and it was only by good luck that they did not commit several others.” Orwell dedicates a third of the essay to this extended example, a strategy that pays off because the case contains all the criteria of the new brand of murder he has identified, the kind committed without any “depth of feeling.” Because it is so vital to his argument, Orwell refers to the Cleft Chin Murder early in his essay, but, tellingly, he makes extensive use of the case only late in his final pages. Likewise, Shakespeare gives Hamlet that devastating image of the “baked meats” late in his exchange with Horatio, and Eliot’s “Mona Lisa” metaphor is the parting shot at the end of a long, crucial paragraph in his essay. In other words, all of our master writers in this lesson are operating on the principle of “saving the best till last”—or at least saving the best till late. Indeed, by definition, an argument cannot be “clinched” until late in the proceedings.

More than that, your readers will actively welcome your saving your best example, insight, or image until late in the essay—very often in the last paragraph of the body section, just before you wrap things up with the conclusion. For one thing, people tend to remember what they read last, especially if it has substance. For another, readers have an expectation—sometimes conscious, sometimes not—that an argument will build toward a powerful point. If at all possible, you do not want to disappoint them. Do note that there are exceptions to this rule of clinching the argument by saving the best for last. If, for example, you have a metaphor with so much potential that you can use it as an extended metaphor to structure your whole argument, you will need to introduce that much earlier than the last paragraph of the body section; it probably needs to be introduced in the first body paragraph, if not the introduction. Practice: Imagine that you are the movie critic for your high school newspaper. You go to see an “off-beat” comedy called Wellington Thunder that has proven to be a big hit with teenagers across the country; indeed, your own friends have been giving it rave reviews. However, you find it to be hugely overrated. In your review, you will argue that it is pretentious, poorly written, and not at all funny. Let us further imagine that, after brainstorming, you decide that you want to make the following statements and points in the review:

a) “Wellington Thunder is the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ of teen comedies.” b) Extended analysis of the golf-cart chase—the scene “everyone” is talking about—

to demonstrate how un-original the movie is c) Contrast movie with Helen of Troy, New Jersey—a truly smart, funny, and

original film d) Mention that writer-director Sally Herzog’s debut film, Snack City, did have some

merit and promise e) Compare Wellington Thunder to the “Blitz Burger” served at local fast food joint

“Blitz Brothers” and so popular with our seniors: too cheesy, poor quality meat, no nutritional value.

f) “Here is my ‘beef’ with Wellington: it has no substance and not much style.” In the worksheet that follows, put the above points in what you think would be their most effective order. In the second column, briefly explain why you placed a particular point where you did. Place an asterisk* beside the point that you believe would, if developed well, “clinch the argument.”

As an example, the first point and explanation has been filled in.

Point Explanation 1.

f

Sounds very much like an introductory comment; the pun involving Wellington and beef is a pretty good hook; states reviewer’s opinion right away.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Essay: Just as George Orwell wrote about the “Decline of the English Murder,” you now have a chance to write about the rise or decline of some phenomenon in American Society. For example, the title of your essay might be “Decline of the American Hamburger” or “Rise of the American Sports Parent.” Whatever trend or phenomenon you choose to write about, structure your argument in such a way that, like Orwell, you dedicate a portion (at least a paragraph) of the later part of your essay to extended example. That example could come from your reading, media-watching, observation, or experience.

Lesson Eight—Pattern Definition: A property of an essay or other composition that provides greater coherence and unity. Example 1: Emma Woodhouse, the young heroine of Jane Austen’s comic novel Emma, may be “handsome, clever, and rich,” but she also has her failings, as Austen makes clear as early as the fourth paragraph of the first chapter: “The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages that threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.” Good writers are like gardeners: they sow seeds. Here Austen, on the very first page, is sowing the seeds of the entire story; she is planting in the readers’ minds aspects of Emma’s personality—her willfulness and vanity—that we will soon see emerge as a pattern of behavior in the events of the novel. These events include Emma

• taking credit for making a “match” between Miss Taylor, her friend and former governess, and her new husband, Mr. Weston.

• dissuading her young “protégée,” Harriet Smith, from marrying a man she really loves, a young farmer named Martin.

• trying to make a “match” between Harriet and Mr. Elton, the local vicar, a man who is utterly wrong for her.

• irrationally resenting Jane Fairfax, the talented niece of Emma’s friend Miss Bates.

• humiliating Miss Bates with a thoughtless “put-down” at a social event. • repressing her own romantic feelings for her friend Mr. Knightley.

This pattern of behavior reveals to the reader that Emma is immature. Luckily, it is not a fatal flaw, but rather a result of her immaturity (Emma is not yet twenty-one when the story begins). What she really lacks is true self-knowledge, which Austen indicates when she states that the danger to her own happiness, brought on by these failings is “so unperceived” by her heroine. Emma grows in the course of the novel. Austen also sows the seeds of her salvation; in that very first chapter we are also introduced to Mr. Knightley, who is not only her friend but also her unofficial mentor, and, in time, much more.

Example 2: In his critical writing, E.M. Forster exuberantly declared himself to be “a Jane Austenite,” and her influence can be seen in his own nuanced novels. His early novels, such as A Room with a View and Howards End, are not far removed from Jane Austen’s world of country houses and polite society, but with A Passage to India Forster took a big leap—away from the drawing-rooms of England to the Indian city of Chandrapore. The British often referred to India as “the jewel in the crown” of their empire, but the native population agitated for independence, which finally arrived in 1947. Colonial rule often resulted in conflict and mutual misunderstanding. It is that lack of understanding that Forster explores in the novel. As careful a gardener as his literary idol Jane Austen, Forster “sows the seeds” of this theme from the very first words of the novel; he mentions “the Marabar Caves,” a mysterious place which is pivotal to the plot and where, much later in the story, the most shocking example of misunderstanding occurs. Careful gardeners do not just sow seeds; they tend the growing plants. Likewise, Forster cultivates this theme of misunderstanding throughout the novel. He exploits many elements of novel-writing to develop this pattern. These elements include

• Diction: The book is studded with words associated with misunderstanding—“mystery,” “muddle,” and “bewildered,” to name just a few—and indeed the word “misunderstanding” itself.

• Incidents: Tiny, but telling moments, such as the time the British city magistrate sees an Indian character missing a collar stud (from his shirt) and thinks it typical of the native “inattention to detail,” not realizing that the man has just generously given the stud to an Englishman missing his.

• Scenes: Such as the fateful outing to the Marabar Caves, the central episode of the entire book, where a series of muddles and mysteries results in false accusations and wrecked friendships.

• Descriptions: From the early, almost cinematic image of the British “civil station” situated high above the native city of Chandrapore to the subtle distinctions drawn between English and Indian food, Forster’s narration constantly reinforces the gulf between the two cultures.

For our “master example” of this theme, let us examine Forster’s first detailed description of those crucial Marabar Caves. Each cave is basically the same, Forster tell us: it is dark, so that an explorer has to strike a match to see anything at all; a short entry tunnel of rough stone leads into a “circular chamber” with the “most marvellously polished” walls. This creates, as the explorer walks forward with his or her burning match, a mirror effect: “The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone.”

This sentence, with its extraordinary image of “two flames” trying “to unite” and its use of personification and metaphor (“one of them breathes air, the other stone”) is no poetic accident. It is a most deliberate and clever extension of the theme of understanding—or the lack of it. Some of the most important characters in the novel are intelligent people of good will, such as the Indian Dr. Aziz and the Englishman Cyril Fielding, who genuinely “strive” to understand one another and “unite” through their common humanity. As soon as he appears in the story, Dr. Aziz gets involved in a discussion with two other Indian characters “as to whether or no it is possible to be friends with an Englishman.” It is a question that echoes through the book—another part of the thematic pattern. The answer, suggested by both the image above and the subsequent events of the story, appears to be that two civilized, educated people like Aziz and Fielding can get very close to a real friendship, but that there is still a final barrier: that of colonial rule. As long as Britain rules India, Forster implies, misunderstanding—that pattern throughout the book—will continue. Example 3: So far we have examined a quotation from the beginning of a text and another from the middle; it is only right that, in the spirit of creating a pattern, we now take a look at one from the end. From the very end, in fact—of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “27 April: Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a bildungsroman, a novel which charts the development and maturation of its hero. Joyce’s hero is called Stephen Dedalus, which is, as he admits, a “strange name” for an Irishman. From the very beginning of the book, Joyce alerts us to the origin of the name. He takes his epigraph from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid’s classic is the elegant retelling of Greek myths involving change and transformation. One of the most notable myths is that of Daedalus, the great inventor, his son Icarus, and their daring escape attempt from captivity on the island of Crete. From feathers and beeswax, Daedalus fashions wings for them both. The wings work wonderfully, but Icarus ignores his father’s warning not to fly too close to the sun; his wings disintegrate and he falls to his death. Joyce’s novel is composed of five long chapters. In a climactic scene toward the end of Chapter Four, Stephen, walking by the coast, realizes that his vocation, his calling in life, is to be an artist. Here the pattern of references to the Daedalus and Icarus myth is at its most emphatic. Stephen imagines he sees “a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air … a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood.”

Joyce creates this pattern of references to the myth, and he also squeezes a great deal of meaning out of these allusions. Stephen identifies with both Daedalus and Icarus, both father and son. Like his near-namesake Daedalus, Stephen is creative—he is a maker, an artist, an “artificer” (an antique word for a craftsman or designer). Like Icarus, he is young and impatient to escape the island that holds him captive. In Stephen’s case, the island is Ireland; he is not literally captive, but he does feel constrained. As he says to a friend in Chapter Five, “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets”—another image of flight that becomes part of the pattern of Daedalus-Icarus references. Stephen knows that like Icarus he may “fall,” not in the sense that he will plunge into the sea but in the religious sense of sinning, going astray. All of these references come to fruition in the closing pages of the novel, which are written in the form of a diary. Stephen is getting ready to leave home, to “take flight”; he imagines kindred spirits calling to him, “shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.” In the final diary entry (quoted above), Stephen calls upon his father—not his literal father, but his mythical father, Daedalus—to accompany him in his flight. Like his fellow novelists and pattern-creators Austen and Forster, Joyce is able to reap the rewards of being a careful “gardener.” After sowing the seeds of the pattern, and tending it as it develops, he can “harvest” the crop at the end. Another way that a writer can think of him or herself, that you can think of yourself, is as an artificer, like old Daedalus, or young Dedalus. For to be a writer is to be a designer—the design, the structure of a piece of writing being almost as important as the content. Introducing a pattern is one of the most pleasing and effective ways of improving the design of piece of writing. When it comes to creating patterns, prose writers have a great deal to learn from poets, for much of the craft of poetry involves careful design and construction, whether it be the rhyme scheme of the poem or the pattern of imagery.

For example, consider this sonnet by John Milton, “On His Blindness”:

When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest He returning chide, “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?” I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed, And post o’er land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait.”

The images of light and dark—not a great surprise in a poem about blindness—jump out at you immediately, but also consider how many words in the sonnet are connected with work:

When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest He returning chide, “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?” I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed, And post o’er land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait.”

You could make a case that a few other words in the poem can be associated with work, but those underlined are more than sufficient to make our point: that there is a definite pattern here, and that that the pattern has a purpose. It underscores the poet’s preoccupation: what good am I to God now that blindness has robbed me of my ability to do my important work?

Practice: Using the Milton sonnet above as an example, underline all the words in the following poem that form part of the pattern of references to places. You should end up with at least six underlined words or phrases. The poem is another sonnet: “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats. He wrote it after reading Elizabethan writer George Chapman’s translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. After discovering the pattern in the poem, comment briefly in the space provided on what purpose you think the pattern serves. On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific – and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise– Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Your Response: What purpose do you think this pattern serves in the poem? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Essay: A popular prompt for college application essays is, “Write about an experience which has changed you.” Students often find it easier to choose the experience to write about than to turn that experience into a well-constructed essay. Creating a pattern, even a very simple one, is an effective way of giving such an essay a greater overall shape and structure. For example, let us imagine that a high school senior named Vanessa is writing a short essay in response to this prompt. Immediately she knows what transformative experience she wants to write about: last summer she spent four weeks doing a service project in a village in a Central American country. She lived with a local family and taught local children. Vanessa has many vivid memories of the whole experience; she sets many of them down on paper while writing a rough draft. Reading this draft, she realizes that it is not only too long but also lacks focus. How exactly, she asks herself, remembering the prompt and the purpose of the essay, was I changed by this experience? She discovers the essential answer to this question in one of the last sentences of her rough draft: My time in San Pedro has made me a less selfish person. Vanessa decides that in revising the essay, she needs to cut extraneous details and concentrate on the material that supports that key idea. Looking over her rough draft again, she spots a detail, almost lost among a host of less relevant memories, that could form part of a simple but effective pattern: on the first night in the village, her host family insisted that she eat the only egg they had. This made a powerful impression on her at the time. Now, in revising her essay, she is able to compare and contrast the way she typically behaved before and after her experience in San Pedro. Vanessa now has a clear plan for her second draft. A pattern of references to food will run through it:

• In her introduction, she will recall a childhood incident, when she refused to share a candy bar with her siblings.

• In the body of the essay, she will tell the story of the egg. • In the conclusion, she will briefly relate how she was inspired to organize a food

drive at her school.

Now it is your turn to write an essay in which you use a pattern—of references, images, related words or ideas. You can either use the same prompt as Vanessa: Write about an experience which has changed you Or use the following prompt: Write about something that has been a constant or recurring theme in your life. Make sure your pattern has at least three points. Highlight or underline them.

Lesson Nine—Making Connections Definition: The crucial task, especially in critical writing, of spotting similarities and drawing parallels. Example 1: Shakespeare’s Henry V concerns the young King of England’s invasion and conquest of France. However, as Henry and his army prepare for the decisive engagement that history knows as the Battle of Agincourt, the English seem to be facing a crushing defeat. They are greatly outnumbered by the French army, which boasts thousands of heavily armed knights. In Act IV, Scene iii, the Earl of Westmoreland, the king’s cousin, wishes out loud that, to even the odds, they “now had here / But one ten thousand of those men in England / That do no work today” (the battle is taking place on a religious holiday, the feast day of Crispin and Crispian, brothers and Christian martyrs). Henry, displaying his genius for inspirational leadership, seizes upon this comment. No, he tells his cousin and the assembled army, do not wish for one more “man from England” to swell the ranks; the smaller the army, the greater the share of glory for each soldier present. Henry argues that every Englishman at Agincourt will be regarded back home as part of an elite group who won a legendary victory:

This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remember’d; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Even in the shadow of battle, this is an extraordinary speech for an English king to make. In Henry’s day, and indeed in Shakespeare’s own, English society was shaped by a rigid class system which made a stern distinction between commoners (such as the ordinary soldiers in Henry’s army) and “gentle folk” (aristocrats such as Westmoreland and Henry himself). In those days, to be a “gentleman” was not a matter of manners but of birth. The egalitarian and democratic ideas that we are so familiar with today were almost unheard of then.

You can therefore imagine how shocking—and stirring—it is for a lowly foot soldier to hear the king say that they are equals—“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”— and that Henry has more in common with the rank-and-file fighter (at least today) than with his fellow “gentlemen in England now abed.” In other words, Henry has made a striking connection between two entities (commoners and aristocrats) that otherwise might seem remote; he has drawn a dramatic parallel that imprints itself on the minds of his audience—two audiences, in fact: first, the soldiers he is addressing; they must take this inspirational speech to heart, for they go out and score a great victory over the larger French army. And second, those watching and reading the play; the St. Crispin’s Day speech is among Shakespeare’s most quoted, and some of its most famous lines have been used by commanders to rally troops before actual battles. Example 2: “There’s nothing of a boy’s tale in this,” the fugitive Leggatt tells the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s strange story, “The Secret Sharer.” The comment is a useful reminder that while many of Conrad’s best-known stories are tales of the sea they are not the romantic adventure yarns typical of that genre. “The Secret Sharer” is a narrative of great psychological depth. It fits into a literary tradition that critics call the “doppelganger” or “double” story. The unnamed narrator is the newly-appointed captain of a ship off the coast of Thailand. While keeping watch one night, he is astonished to find an exhausted swimmer (Leggatt) clinging to a rope ladder on the side of the ship. The captain takes Leggatt to his cabin and hides him there from both his own crew and the crew of the Sephora, the ship where Leggatt had been an officer, and where he had murdered another sailor during a violent storm. The longer he shelters the fugitive, the more the captain sees Leggatt as his double, his “other self”; he senses there is a “mysterious similitude” between them, though their circumstances seem so different: “And I told him a little about myself. I had been appointed to take charge while I least expected anything of the sort, not quite a fortnight ago. I didn’t know either the ship or the people. Hadn’t had the time in port to look about me or size anybody up. And as to the crew, all they knew was that I was appointed to take the ship home. For the rest, I was almost as much of a stranger on board as himself, I said. And at the moment I felt it most acutely. I felt that it would take very little to make me a suspect person in the eyes of the ship’s company.” Indeed, as the captain goes to more and more desperate lengths to keep Leggatt’s presence on board a secret, he does become “a suspect person in the eyes of the ship’s company.” What appears to the crew as a series of bizarre instructions (in reality he is helping Leggatt to avoid detection and, later, to escape) leaves him isolated and distrusted—“a stranger on board” his own ship.

In other words, we start with two characters who seem profoundly different: one, the captain, is in a position of authority; the other, Leggatt, is a wretched creature fleeing for his life. Conrad’s genius is to make the connections between the two, to draw profound parallels. These bonds both unnerve and fascinate the captain; he feels duty-bound to try to save the man whom he comes to regard as his “secret self.” At one point, the captain admits that if any crew-member were bold enough to open his cabin door, the sailor would be “treated to the uncanny sight of a double captain busy talking in whispers with his other self.” After reading “The Secret Sharer,” the reader, too, is left with that “uncanny” feeling, struck by insightful connections and clever parallels. Then again, readers are always impressed with insightful connections and clever parallels, in both fiction and nonfiction. Example 3: Bleak House, one of Charles Dickens’s most satirical works, is a huge novel that centers on a lawsuit, the interminable case of “Jarndyce and Jarndyce.” Dickens uses the case as an attack on the inefficiency and absurdity of the entire English legal system. However, the law is not Dickens’s only satirical target in the novel: the failings of British society as a whole and of the British empire come under his scrutiny. The novel opens with a famous description of London, the mud-bound, fog-bound imperial capital: “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.” This description is notable not only for its witty and brilliant language but also for the clever connections Dickens makes. Specifically, he makes surprising connections between the present (the London of his day) and both the distant past and distant future. He conjures up the distant past with his images of ancient events: the seas receding from “the face of the earth” and the rule of the dinosaurs. He alludes to the distant future when he evokes “the death of the sun.”

Dickens is not just being clever; these are meaningful connections to make, and their meaning becomes clearer as the novel progresses. The image of the great city sinking in primordial mud is an apt symbol for the English legal system (or, at least, Dickens’s opinion of it), where everything is muddy, unclear, bogged down. The “death of the sun” is an example of a scientific principle known as entropy—the tendency of all systems to lose energy, to dissipate and decay; no reader of Bleak House is left in any doubt that this is exactly Dickens’s vision of what has happened to the English legal system.

Earlier, when analyzing the St. Crispin’s Day speech, we referred to the rigid social order that was a feature of English society for centuries. However, by the early twentieth century, that class system was beginning to break down under the pressures of modernity. E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End explores the difficulty and the necessity of people from different class backgrounds coming together. In many ways, the heroine of the story is Margaret Schlegel, who believes in uniting different kinds of people as well as the contrary traits within an individual’s personality. At one point, Forster sums up her philosophy: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” In fact, Forster liked that phrase “Only connect” so much that he made it the motto of the entire novel. He does not mean that connecting is the sole thing one should do in life; rather, that it is vital that one makes connections. And so it is with writing, especially critical writing, where so often we are asked to go beyond the obvious, beneath the level of superficial appearances—and get to the truth of how things really stand in relation to each other. For example, a closer examination of a play may reveal that the protagonist and antagonist, who at first seem such “obvious” opposites, are connected by the tragic flaw of pride; indeed, it may be pride that sets them on a “collision course” with each other. Characters who at first appear very different may turn out to be “secret sharers.” Indeed, as we do a close, critical reading of a text, we often begin to see correspondences between not just characters but also scenes, incidents, images, and words. It is up to us to make those connections clear—in our critical writing. Our motto, inspired by Forster, might be, “Think in fragments no longer,” or indeed, “Write in fragments no longer.” In the practice and essay that follow, you will have ample opportunity to “only connect.” Practice: First, read the two Elizabethan poems printed below: Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” Then, using the worksheet provided, make connections between the two texts. (As an example, the first blank has been filled in.) Bear in mind that a contrast can be a kind of connection, too.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields. And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. And I will make thee beds of roses, And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers and a kirtle Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle: A gown made of the finest wool, Which from our pretty lambs we pull; Fair lined slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold: A belt of straw and ivy buds, With coral clasps and amber studs; And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me and be my love. The shepherd swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May morning; If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me and be my love.

Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd If all the world and love were young, And truth in every shepherd’s tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and be thy love. Time drives the flocks from field to fold When rivers rage and rocks grow cold, And Philomel becometh dumb; The rest complains of cares to come. The flowers do fade, and wanton fields To wayward winter reckoning yields; A honey tongue, a heart of gall, Is fancy’s spring but sorrow’s fall. Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses, Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten— In folly ripe, in reason rotten. Thy belt of straw and ivy buds, Thy coral clasps and amber studs, All these in me no means can move To come to thee and be thy love. But could youth last and love still breed, Had joys no date nor age no need, Then these delights my mind might move To live with thee and be thy love.

Make connections between the two poems:

• Raleigh’s poem is a direct response to Marlowe’s. • Both poems are six _____________ long. • Grammatically, Raleigh’s poem picks up where Marlowe’s leaves off: the

“Nymph’s Reply” begins and the “Passionate Shepherd” ends with a sentence containing a(n) _____________ clause.

• Both poems feature images of a(n) _________________ world, featuring “shepherds” and “flocks.”

• Each poem has a(n) _________________; in the first it is “Come live with me and be my love”; in the second it is “To live with thee and be thy love.”

• Both poems feature what today we would regard as _____________ diction: words such as “kirtle,” “swains,” and “becometh.”

• Both poems are written in the form of ______________ couplets. • Raleigh and Marlowe use the same ___________: iambic tetrameter, which has

four stressed syllables per line. • While Marlowe’s shepherd is full of the joys of spring, Raleigh’s nymph is

painfully aware that _____________ change.

Essay: In our second “master example” in this lesson, we saw how, in Joseph Conrad’s story, the unnamed captain and the fugitive Leggatt turned out to be “secret sharers”; two characters who, at first glance, appeared quite different had in fact a lot in common. Your task here is to write a short essay demonstrating that two other characters—from the same text or any two works of British literature you have read for this class—are also “secret sharers.” They do not have to be, like Conrad’s captain and Leggatt, uncanny “doubles.” You should, however, be able to make interesting connections between them. Most of these connections will be points of comparison, but do keep in mind that some contrasts can also involve connection. For example, the captain of a ship from a Joseph Conrad story might be highly conscientious and a king from a Shakespeare play utterly reckless, but what they share is that they both have positions of authority—that is the basis from which you can make the contrast in the first place. An essay like this should almost certainly start with a brainstorm. If, for example, it strikes you that the heroes of a play and a novel you read meet similarly tragic ends (they both die), explore on paper whether there are other connections between them; if you can think of several others, you can probably write a solid short essay asserting that these two characters are “secret sharers.”

Lesson Ten—Defamiliarization Definition: A technique by which a writer gets readers to take another look at an object, person, subject, or idea they have become overly accustomed to. Example 1: Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, about a sailor named Marlow’s journey up an African river in search of a mysterious trader named Kurtz, is one of the twentieth century’s most influential stories. However, it begins on board a boat moored not on an African river but on the River Thames, the great waterway of London—“the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth,” as the unnamed narrator of the frame story tells us. We seem, therefore, to be at the heart of civilization, not of darkness, but Conrad, through his thoughtful main character, Marlow, wants to shake readers out of that complacent notion: “‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’” Marlow goes on to get his audience (both his sailing friends and Conrad’s readers) to imagine the London region from the point of view of the imperial Romans who came ashore there almost two thousand years before: a foggy, dangerous wilderness far from civilization. In other words, Conrad—through Marlow’s description—defamiliarizes London, stripping away our received images of the city (Big Ben, Buckingham Palace) and putting a stranger, fresher image in its place. By doing so, the writer makes us pause and reconsider something we think we know well. Example 2: In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce’s autobiographical novel about the growth and development of a young Irish writer, the hero Stephen Dedalus also contemplates the pre-history of a riverside European city—his hometown of Dublin. Standing one evening on a beach, he imagines “the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes ... look[ing] forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped city.” In this dreamy mood, he turns his attention toward the shore—and is struck by an image that will become for him an emblem of “mortal beauty,” an image that will pass “into his soul for ever”: “A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird.”

These moments in life, when we look upon something ordinary and see it suddenly as extraordinary or strange, Joyce called epiphanies. They are common not only in A Portrait but also in the stories that make up his collection Dubliners, where they are often moments of revelation in which characters see themselves or their familiar surroundings in a new light. In Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait, Joyce himself defines an epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation” that can be a moment when “the soul of the commonest object … leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance,” or it can simply be “a memorable phase of the mind itself.” Stephen Dedalus—and Joyce himself—“believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.” In turn, we can say that not only can writers record these moments, but they can also create them for readers: through careful observation, thought, and choice of words, writers can make readers see more deeply into an object, person, topic, or concept than they otherwise would have seen. In other words, epiphanies are a kind of defamiliarization. Example 3: Defamiliarization as a literary technique was first noted in the early twentieth century by the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky. He stressed the power of poetic language in achieving the defamiliarization effect. Think about how poetic language differs from the typical language you employ in prose: poetry relies heavily on figurative language, which involves describing one thing in terms of another. A reader’s eye—and mind—might pass quickly over a straightforward description of something, but a figurative description makes us slow down and consider the ways one thing resembles another, makes us consider something from a new and unfamiliar angle. Shakespeare, whose plays are written in poetic language, is perhaps the master of the striking metaphor, the metaphor that defamiliarizes the object or phenomenon we might otherwise pass over. Consider Macbeth. In Act III, Macbeth has murdered his way to the Scottish throne, but he is not satisfied. The three witches, the “weird sisters” he encountered in Act I, have not only predicted that Macbeth would become king but also prophesied that his friend Banquo will be the father of a line of kings. This prospect infuriates Macbeth; he bristles at the idea that he has put his mortal soul in danger by murdering the old king, Duncan, and will not in return get to found a dynasty. He plots to murder Banquo, too, this time without the assistance of his “dearest partner of greatness,” Lady Macbeth. In Act III, Scene ii, he conceals from her his plan to murder Banquo, but does admit that he is troubled: “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!”

A lesser dramatist—and poet—would have had Macbeth say something like, “O, full of dark ideas is my mind,” to which the audience would probably respond with a shrug: Yes, we know this already from Macbeth’s earlier speeches, especially his soliloquies. But Shakespeare defamiliarizes our knowledge of Macbeth’s mental state by offering us that rich and strange metaphor of the scorpions. Whereas the phrase “dark ideas” gives us a vague notion of Macbeth’s gloomy thoughts, the scorpions metaphor makes us stop and see scuttling creatures, potentially deadly creatures, creatures with stings in their tails. Macbeth’s mental state has become vividly alive to us. The examples above have shown us three ways of defamiliarizing material:

• By offering new insights or a fresh perspective • By relating epiphanies or revelations • By using figurative language

Next, we must consider how these methods could be used in your writing. On that front, the first point to make is so obvious that it could be overlooked: you are writing prose, not poetry, and therefore a poetic resource of language such as figurative language should be used sparingly, otherwise your writing may strike the reader as frustratingly indirect, and even pretentious. For example, you might create the following assertion in an essay on Macbeth: On that fateful night in his castle, Macbeth not only stabs the king but also strangles his own conscience. The moment of defamiliarization is that metaphor of strangling the conscience: it is both eye-catching (we do not normally think of immoral behavior in those terms) and it is consistent with imagery Shakespeare uses elsewhere in the play. However, a writer could easily go overboard with figurative language: On that screaming night in his chattering castle, that demon Macbeth not only knifes the king but also strangles his own conscience. The sentence, clearly, has become ridiculous, and that strangulation metaphor—originally so arresting—has become lost in a sea of pseudo-poetry.

An exception to this rule of not overusing figurative language in prose is the extended metaphor (or extended analogy). This is when a comparison between two things helps generate the content of part or all of the essay—indeed, it might become its organizing principle. For example, in tackling the essay on Macbeth, the writer might develop a master metaphor in which she compares the phases of Macbeth’s fortunes to the rise and fall of an empire—a figure of speech that can generate the topic sentences of all the essay’s body paragraphs. Epiphanies also should be used sparingly, as the significance and impact of a revelation is blunted if it is surrounded by others. Having said that, epiphanies are an excellent resource to use in the personal essay, either as a climactic moment or as a conclusion. Insights are not something you can really overdo, as fresh thinking is always welcome in an essay—in fact, it is the point of most essays. Practice: By using one of the methods discussed above (offering an insight, relating an epiphany, using figurative language), suggest a way of defamiliarizing each of the following subjects. For example, George Washington (we will use all three methods—you only have to use one):

• Insight: The real George Washington was not the wooden-toothed, cherry-tree-chopping figure we find in story-books.

• Epiphany: As I studied the dollar bill on the counter, I realized that not only have

I been looking at George Washington all my life but also that George Washington has been looking at me.

• Figure of Speech: George Washington is the Superman of presidents.

Now it is your turn to defamiliarize:

Topic Defamiliarization

jogging

suburbia

television talent shows

poetry

fast food

Essay: Write a personal essay that centers on an epiphany or moment of realization you have had. Describe this moment using careful and precise diction. Discuss its significance and impact. In the course of the essay, include at least three figures of speech (metaphor, simile, personification, etc.) designed to arrest the reader’s attention. In the final draft, underline these figures of speech, and in marginal notes briefly explain why you think they achieve defamiliarization.

Lesson Eleven—Imagery Definition: Words and phrases that engage the reader’s senses, especially the visual sense, and give your writing clarity, vividness, and immediacy. Example 1: D.H. Lawrence rose from humble beginnings in the north of England to become one of the most significant British novelists of the early twentieth century, living in and writing about places as varied as Italy and New Mexico. Although he is best known for novels like Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, he was also an accomplished poet and short story writer. One of his most frequently anthologized stories, “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” is far removed from those exotic locales Lawrence often wrote about; its setting is English and very domestic. Paul is a boy growing up in a comfortable upper-middle-class home. His parents have a glamorous social life and servants. However, all is not well. Paul’s parents are living beyond their means, and he senses this atmosphere of financial strain. In fact, he hears the house “whispering” that “There must be more money.” Paul responds to this demand by gambling on horse races (using a servant to place the bets). He has uncanny, almost supernatural, good luck, thanks to his method of “chasing” fortune by riding the rocking-horse that he has played on since he was a small child. When his mother complains that he has now outgrown the toy, Paul protests that he needs an animal near until he is old enough to have a real horse. His mother allows him to keep it: “So the horse, rather shabby, stood in an arrested prance in the boy’s bedroom.” At that point in the story, a lesser writer might have come up with a sentence like, “So the rather shabby horse stood in the boy’s bedroom.” While that would have been adequate, it makes nothing like the impression on us that the Lawrence sentence does. Knowing that the rocking-horse is the key object in the story, Lawrence wants us to see it, and see it clearly, hence the vivid image “stood in an arrested prance.” But why is it so clear, so vivid? The answer lies in Lawrence’s diction—his crucial word choices. By picking a noun denoting movement appropriate to a horse (“prance”) and qualifying it with an adjective suggesting stasis (“arrested”), Lawrence captures the paradoxical frozen motion of the toy. It is a strange image—and hence a perfect image— for it emphasizes the strangeness of this almost magical object.

Example 2: Like D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene was another twentieth-century British novelist noted for writing about exotic locales. However, his first major novel, Brighton Rock, is set in an English seaside town, which has its glamorous and seedy sides—both of which Greene captures with wonderfully atmospheric writing. Even more striking than the sense of place are the main characters. The “hero” of the story is Pinkie Brown, a seventeen-year-old thug who is already the leader of his own criminal gang. The gang’s previous leader, Kite, has been killed by a rival gang after being betrayed by a journalist named Hale. Kite’s murder is avenged when the shrewd and relentless Pinkie manages to murder Hale on the waterfront and make it look like a natural death. At first it looks as if Pinkie and his gang have gotten away with “the perfect crime.” However, a young and vulnerable waitress named Rose has spotted something that could give the “game” away. And Pinkie has an even bigger problem in Ida Arnold, an earthy woman from London who befriended Hale on the day of his death. In the best tradition of detective fiction, she does not believe that Hale’s death was natural and begins her own investigation into the matter. Ida is in many ways an admirable character—loyal, caring, and armed with an unshakable sense of justice and a determination to get to the truth, but in other ways Greene’s portrayal is unflattering: she is a vulgar woman, most at home in a shabby bar singing sentimental ballads. As for her mind, Greene writes: “She was barnacled with pieces of popular wisdom.” He could have simply written, “Her mind was full of popular wisdom,” but that would be a flat, unremarkable sentence. Instead, Greene writes figuratively (there are no literal shellfish attached to her head), and the figure of speech creates a meaningful image in our minds. Barnacles attach themselves tenaciously to ships and rocks. It would be no easier to remove the words of a popular ballad, or indeed basic notions of right and wrong, from Ida’s mind than to remove barnacles from a shoreline rock with your bare hands. With her tenaciousness and sticking power, Ida is something of a barnacle herself. Greene’s image is not just apt but also richly suggestive.

Example 3: Generations of readers on both sides of the Atlantic grew up dipping into Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, a multi-volume anthology of great English lyric poetry. American poet Robert Frost, for example, cited it as one of his key early influences. English poetry is itself a “golden treasury” of images. Prose writers can learn a great deal from these poetic images. As an example, let us take one of the classic Golden Treasury poets, Henry Vaughan. Vaughan was part of a loose school of seventeenth-century poets we call the “Metaphysicals.” They were intensely interested in both the life of the mind and the life of the spirit, and they had a special talent for conveying ideas and other abstractions through the more tangible means of imagery—imagery that was often arresting in its originality and freshness. Vaughan’s “The Retreat” features several such images. In the poem, the speaker yearns for the spiritual innocence and purity of his childhood, a time when he was ignorant of the “black art” of sinning . . .

But felt through all this fleshy dress Bright shoots of everlastingness.

In the first line, Vaughan, like Greene, writes metaphorically, and the metaphor creates an image (“fleshy dress”) that really makes us feel the physicality of the body. The metaphor in the first line is good; the metaphor in the second is inspired. “Everlastingless,” or eternity, is a notoriously difficult concept for us to get our minds around, so for a start it helps that Vaughan gives us an image to work with: that eternity is like a plant sending up “Bright shoots.” Moreover, the image is, in terms of the rest of the poem, both apt and intellectually coherent. The young shoots of a plant will be fresh and green, and “The Retreat” is a celebration of the speaker’s “Angel-infancy,” the time when he was fresh and “green” in this world. The poem, from the title to the last word, is also full of words and phrases that describe direction—the wrong turns in life, the right spiritual path—and, as the highly educated Vaughan would have been well aware, a plant sends forth shoots heliotropically: toward the light of the sun, the sun being, for Vaughan and other religious poets, an irresistible symbol for God. Imagery been a key component in English poetry for centuries. In the early twentieth century there was even a movement in English (and American) poetry called Imagism. The Imagists helped revitalize lyric poetry, restoring to it some of the vitality, immediacy, and precision it had lost during the Victorian age, which favored beautiful but sometimes rhetorical and overly elaborate verse.

The London-based American poet Ezra Pound was the group’s early advocate. He stressed “direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective,” and urged his fellow poets “to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.” These, of course, are excellent pieces of advice for all writers, not just poets. Writing does not “live” through images alone; in prose, especially, we have to have abstraction, argument, expression—but we should be thankful to the Imagists, and to writers like Lawrence, Greene, and Vaughan, who remind us what a rich resource imagery is for conveying not just pictures but also ideas. D.H. Lawrence himself contributed to one of the influential Imagist anthologies. In his poem “Snake” he recalls how that creature, which he saw in Sicily, “Writhed like lightning.” Such images in both poetry and prose illuminate literature and can illuminate your writing, too. Practice: Earlier we discussed the “golden treasury” of images that is English poetry. Review the poetry you have read for this class and/or look ahead to further poetry selections in your textbook or anthology. Poets whose work you might consider examining include:

• W. H. Auden • William Blake • Elizabeth Barrett Browning • John Donne • Thomas Gray • Thomas Hardy • Seamus Heaney • A. E. Housman • John Keats • Andrew Marvell • John Milton • Christina Rossetti • Siegfried Sassoon • William Shakespeare • Sir Philip Sidney • Alfred, Lord Tennyson • William Wordsworth • W. B. Yeats

Using our Henry Vaughan quotation (above) as an example, select one image from at least three different lyric (short) poems. Briefly state why you think the image is notable. Use the worksheet provided below. Image #1: Title of Poem: ___________________________________________________________ Name of Poet: ___________________________________________________________ Image (Quote): ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Your Comment: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Image #2: Title of Poem: ___________________________________________________________ Name of Poet: ___________________________________________________________ Image (Quote): ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Your Comment: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Image #3: Title of Poem: ___________________________________________________________ Name of Poet: ___________________________________________________________ Image (Quote): ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Your Comment: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Essay: As we mentioned in our analysis of our second “master example” in this lesson, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock has a powerful sense of place. Greene would not be able to conjure up the atmosphere of 1930s Brighton, then a hugely popular resort, with “bewildered multitudes” of tourists stepping off “the little local trams” into the “fresh and glittering” seaside air, without using imagery—it is the backbone of description. In a short, personal essay, describe a place that is important to you as vividly and descriptively as possible. This place could be anywhere from a favorite room to a favorite country. Underline at least three images in the essay—words or phrases that stimulate at least one of the senses and therefore give your description immediacy and detail. In the course of the essay, explain your attachment to this place (it does not have to be barnacle-like).

Lesson Twelve—Judging Character Definition: One of the most frequent and important tasks in critical writing about literature; the analysis and evaluation of fictional or dramatic personalities. Example 1: The task of judging or evaluating character can be a challenging one, but you can be encouraged in this task by the very writers you are studying. In the business of character evaluation, the writers often lead the way. Sometimes these character judgments can be implicit, sometimes explicit. The works of Jane Austen present both implicit and explicit character judgments. Early in Pride and Prejudice, her great romantic comedy, we come across a pair of very frank character evaluations. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are the parents of Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of the novel. “Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.” Austen’s evaluation of Mr. Bennet introduces us to one of the most important principles of judging character: we must resist the temptation to think of people (either real or fictional) as one-dimensional. It is far too easy to dismiss a character as simply evil or idiotic; that is not to say that characters do not do things which are evil or idiotic, but that is not likely to be, in serious literature, the sum total of their existence. (There are exceptions to this rule, of course: Iago, in Shakespeare’s Othello, is so devious and evil that critic A.C. Bradley famously dubbed him “a motiveless malignity,” but, then again, Iago is evil in cunning and sophisticated ways.) Most characters in literature, as in life, are, as Mr. Bennet is, “a mixture,” sometimes an odd or contradictory mixture. Writers, therefore, must resist the temptation to condemn characters as being either cardboard cut-out devils or angels (for to turn a blind eye to characters’ flaws is to do them a disservice as well). In the words of American novelist Saul Bellow, a writer must give a character “due process.”

That is not to say that, having given a character due process, you cannot offer a harsh judgment. Austen’s judgment of Mrs. Bennet is fairly scathing, but it is not unfair. She analyzes Mrs. Bennet’s character, clearly identifying her salient psychological features: “She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.” Then, with the cool hand of a scientist, she distills the essence of Mrs. Bennet’s existence: “The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.” Her life is so limited that, in spite of the flaws which Austen has just itemized, we perhaps feel sorry for Mrs. Bennet. In just a few sentences, we have been given a vivid sense of who she is, and what she is not. Example 2: We turn now from a wife who does not really understand her husband to a wife who knows her man all too well. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth commits foul crimes to enable her husband to become King of Scotland. In conspiring to murder the rightful king, the mild and trusting Duncan, she is betraying not only her monarch but also a guest in her own home. She may be bloodthirsty, but she is not blind. Indeed, she offers us perhaps the shrewdest assessment of Macbeth in the play. In Act I, Scene v, she reads aloud a letter from her husband that recounts his strange encounter with the “weird sisters,” three witches who predict that Macbeth, who already holds the aristocratic title of Thane of Glamis, will become Thane of Cawdor, and then King of Scotland. No sooner does Macbeth receive these prophecies than messengers arrive from King Duncan informing him that, thanks to his valor in defending the king against rebellion and invasion, he has indeed been made Thane of Cawdor. The tone of Macbeth’s letter is excited; he hails Lady Macbeth as his “dearest partner of greatness” and looks forward to the other prize they are “promised.” However, Lady Macbeth has her doubts as to whether her husband is capable of doing what might be “necessary” to gain the throne:

Glamis thou art and Cawdor, and shalt be What thou are promised. Yet do I fear thy nature. It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great, Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it. In his own dark way, Macbeth, like Mr. Bennet, is a “mixture.” Although he is selfishly ambitious, he is “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” to be truly evil; he lacks the utter ruthlessness and coldness required to “catch the nearest way” to royal power— murdering Duncan, the man who is his kinsman, king, and guest.

“Milk,” suggesting as it does purity and nurturing goodness, is an effective metaphor for human goodness. With chilling logic, Lady Macbeth determines that the only way to overpower that goodness in his “nature” is with the impurity of evil, the “illness” that should “attend” (accompany) murderous ambition. In the scenes that follow, Lady Macbeth shows herself more than willing to “infect” Macbeth with that disease of evil. In the very first scene of the play, in the voices of the three witches, Shakespeare gives us a significant clue about human nature in the chant: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”; most characters are a mixture of fairness and foulness, to some degree or other. When fairness is to the fore, you get a good King Duncan; when foulness predominates, or is allowed to predominate, you get a Macbeth. Example 3: Writers often give subtle signals or warning signs about character early on in a story, novel, or play. Jim (we never learn his last name), the flawed hero of Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim, comes from a genteel English background; his father is the parson in a country parish. The manner in which he chooses his career should raise readers’ eyebrows: “Jim was one of five sons, and when after a course of light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself, he was sent at once to a ‘training-ship for officers of the mercantile marine.’” A vocation, one’s calling in life, is a serious business; adventure stories and tales of “derring-do” are not. We must question the wisdom of a big decision made on the basis of “a course of light holiday literature”—what today we would call “beach reading.” We must wonder whether Jim is really suited for the responsibilities of being a naval officer. Indeed, our suspicions prove to be well founded. Jim has all these romantic fantasies about being a great seafaring hero, but in a moment of crisis, he abandons his ship, putting his own safety ahead of his passengers’. When we first meet Jim, he is living in the aftermath of this scandal: “He kept to seaports because he was a seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is good for no other work than that of a water-clerk.” A “water-clerk,” as Conrad explains in the opening paragraphs of the book, is an agent who works for a “ship-chandler,” the type of merchant who supplies and outfits ships. Since the “water-agent” is the one who actually goes out to a new ship in port and tries to convince its captain to order supplies from his boss, he needs to be amiable and engaging—a real “people person,” as we would say today—and those qualities Jim certainly has. As Conrad puts it, “A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the sun, but he must have Ability in the abstract and demonstrate it practically.”

Two times within as many pages Conrad uses the phrase “Ability in the abstract” (the capitalization, for further emphasis, is his); it becomes inextricably linked with Jim. In a sense, he is defined by that “Ability in the abstract.” A sea captain named Marlow features prominently in several of Conrad’s novels. It is he who tells the sorry tale of the crisis aboard the passenger ship Patna—the test of character which Jim fails by abandoning his post. Reading Marlow’s account, we realize that Jim needed more than abstract ability to keep his cool on a sinking ship; he needed the wherewithal of a real seaman, which he was not. His was a false calling. The American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald insisted that “action is character,” and indeed Jim’s action in abandoning his ship is profoundly revealing, but we must also remember that character can also be revealed by the characters’ own words, the words of other characters, and by their creators. These creators, as we have seen in the cases of Austen and Conrad, can cast a critical eye over their creations. Some students shy away from the task of judging character because they confuse it with being judgmental. However, judging is not the same as being judgmental. To be judgmental means to be too quick in making judgments—those judgments often being self-righteous and excessively moralistic in tone. Genuine judgment is different. It involves careful, critical thinking (the kind of “due process” we mentioned earlier). In fact, the word critical itself derives from the Greek word meaning “a judge.” And what do fair judges base their decisions on? Evidence. Therefore consideration of evidence is the basis of the practice and essay that follow. Practice: Choose a major character from a significant text (short story, novel, or play) that you have read for this class. You will already have an overall impression of the character, and this is a good place to start on the “Character Evaluation” worksheet provided below. You then need to review the evidence of the text, looking for details, examples, and quotations to develop the evaluation. Not all the categories will apply to every text. For instance, in the example below, we cannot find a quotation for “Narrator’s Description” of the character, as Macbeth has no narrator.

Character Evaluation

Text: Macbeth Author: William Shakespeare Character: Macbeth Initial Impressions:

Macbeth is capable of violence (he defeats Duncan’s enemies) and he is ambitious, but “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” to do evil things himself; his wife pushes him over the edge; maybe he is morally weak.

Narrator’s Description(s):

n/a

Other Characters’ Description(s):

• “valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!”—Duncan • “Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ th’ milk of human

kindness / To catch the nearest way”—Lady Macbeth • “Devilish Macbeth”—Malcolm • “hell-hound”—Macduff

Self-Description(s):

• (aside) “Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires”

• (to Lady Macbeth) “I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er”

• (to Macduff) “my soul is too much charged / With blood of thine already”

Action(s) That Reveal Character:

• Allows himself to be goaded into murdering Duncan • Cannot sleep after murders • Murders Banquo and his son, keeping Lady Macbeth “innocent

of the knowledge” • Sees phantom dagger; sees Banquo’s ghost • Increasingly tyrannical: has Lady Macduff and her children

murdered • Returns to consult with the three witches • Shrugs off news of Lady Macbeth’s death

Assessment: Banquo is right when he suspects Macbeth “play’dst most foully for” the crown; Macbeth gives in to the “foul” side of his nature; Lady Macbeth may be the catalyst for Macbeth’s murder spree, but she is encouraging something in his character already—his “black and deep desires”; he initiates the murder of Banquo & his son and Lady Macduff & her children; he decides to return to the “weird sisters” for more prophecy; he begins to wallow in blood and becomes a tyrant; Macbeth does become something of a devil.

Now it is your turn. Character Evaluation

Text:

Author:

Character:

Initial Impressions:

Narrator’s Description(s):

Other Characters’ Description(s):

Self-Description(s):

Action(s) That Reveal Character:

Assessment:

Essay: Transform the work you have done on the “Character Evaluation” sheet into a full-fledged essay. The material in the “Assessment” column could form the basis of both your thesis (guiding idea) and conclusion. The evidence collected in the “descriptions” and “actions” columns will come in useful in the development section of the essay, as you support your assertions and observations with details, examples, and quotations.

Suggested Responses and Additional Activities

Master Classes

Suggested Responses

Suggested Responses— Lesson One

Assignment Correct Sentence Justification 1. Trace the development of Charles Dickens’s capabilities as a novelist.

B Writer is stressing the progression of Dickens’s novels, and his progress as a novelist.

2. Select your own favorite Dickens novel, enthusiastically explaining your preference.

C Writer has made a clear choice, as requested, and responded in the personal terms the assignment calls for.

3. “Dickens excels at describing the surfaces of human beings, but has little talent in plumbing their depths.” Defend, challenge, or qualify this opinion.

A Since the psychologically subtle Pip is a clear counter-example of superficiality of characterization, this sentence would be a strong component of a challenge to or qualification of the prompt.

4. Explain how, in Great Expectations, Pip comes to a more mature understanding of what it means to be a “gentleman.”

F Joe Gargery is a powerful example of a natural gentleman, a concept which the younger, immature Pip would not recognize.

5. Account for the increasingly dark mood of the novels Dickens wrote in the 1850s.

E Discussion of “pervasive social ills” is a sensible attempt to establish a causal explanation for the “dark mood” of the novels.

6. Give your personal reaction to Dickens’s “gloomy” novels of the 1850s.

D Like Sentence E, this statement also tackles the “dark mood” of the novels of the 1850s, but it contains the necessary personal note that Sentence E lacks.

Suggested Responses—Lesson Two

Potential Thesis Sentence #1: Lemon! Whether the poems are memorable or not has nothing to do with the assigned topic, which is Shelley as political poet. A thesis that does not address the topic at all is highly unlikely to produce a compelling argument. Potential Thesis Sentence #2: Lemon! While not as disastrous as Sentence #1, this is still a very weak thesis. It is plagued by vagueness (“to varying degrees”) and tentativeness (“quite political”). Potential Thesis Sentence #3: Sedan. This thesis is likely to produce a solid argument. The writer is “on topic” and is not afraid to put forward a coherent idea: the poems have in common “a faith in the power of liberty to triumph over tyranny.” Potential Thesis Sentence #4: Rolls-Royce! The assertion here is not only a genuine opinion but also a nuanced idea, indicating degrees of political expression in the poems (degrees that Sentence #2 could only hint at).

Suggested Responses—Lesson Three Statement #1: “Students derive an immeasurable benefit from studying Shakespeare.” Thesis: Shakespeare’s language has enriched my understanding of English. Antithesis: I find Shakespeare’s language to be frustratingly difficult. Synthesis: Though sometimes challenging, Shakespeare’s language has enriched my understanding of English. Statement #2: “Athletics dominate the life of the typical high school today.” Thesis: For a sports enthusiast like me, Harrison High School is a wonderfully exciting environment. Antithesis: Over the past three years, I have not received enough recognition for my academic achievements from the school community. Synthesis: Over the past three years, the athlete in me has been very much at home at Harrison High School, but the scholar in me has not. Statement #3: “Nothing effective has been done to alert teenagers about the dangers of alcohol consumption.” Thesis: At my high school, the PTA’s “Alcohol Awareness Campaign” has been a failure. Antithesis: At my high school, leading members of the PTA have put lots of time, money, and energy into the “Alcohol Awareness Campaign.” Synthesis: Well intentioned as it is, our PTA’s “Alcohol Awareness Campaign” needs student input to become truly effective. Statement #4: “Modern teaching methods stress the meaning of poetry to the total exclusion of considerations of beauty and pleasure.” Thesis: The manner in which some teachers “decode” poetry kills the joy of reading it. Antithesis: Last year I had a teacher who mesmerized the class by declaiming classic poems. Synthesis: In my experience, a teacher can combine an analytical approach to poetry with an infectious enthusiasm for the art.

Suggested Responses—Lesson Four 1. He compares himself to “a little world” that has both physical (“elements”) and spiritual (“angelic sprite”) components. 2. Both the physical and spiritual sides of this world have been eclipsed by sin, plunging them into “endless night,” in which they will perish. 3. In this apostrophe, Donne is addressing the astronomers (those who “Have found new spheres”) and explorers (those who “of new land can write”) of his age. 4. Going into the sestet of the sonnet, there is an elemental shift from water to fire imagery. 5. For Donne, fire both burns and purifies; in its destructive (“eating”) power there is also the power to restore (“heal”).

Suggested Responses—Lesson Six

1. Caesar realized that the Roman civil service, riddled with corruption, was in need of radical reform. 2. Julia, Caesar’s beloved daughter, married Pompey, another powerful Roman general. 3. The famous orator Cicero, greatly admired by Caesar, was executed in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination though he played no part in the conspiracy. 4. Caesar, weakened by the conspirators’ blows, collapsed when his old friend Brutus stabbed him. 5. The conspirators, raising their bloody daggers in the air, declared that “Tyranny was dead.”

Suggested Responses—Lesson Seven

Point Explanation

1. f

Sounds very much like an introductory comment; the pun involving Wellington and beef is a pretty good hook; states reviewer’s opinion right away.

2.

d

Demonstrates your critical fairness—you can see that the writer-director has talent; the argument that follows will not simply be a “hatchet job.”

3.

e

Continues the humorous “beef” motif of your hook; since this is an extended analogy, best to set it up early to get maximum use out of it throughout review.

4.

b

This analysis will provide substantial support for your contention that the movie is overrated.

5.

c*

This point should “clinch” the argument since it introduces an extra dimension into the argument: you are demonstrating that the kind of originality you find lacking in Wellington can be achieved.

6.

a

This declaration, featuring an allusion everybody should be familiar with, has an air of finality and authority that makes for a powerful conclusion.

Suggested Responses—Lesson Eight On First Looking into Chapman's Homer Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific – and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise– Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Your Response: What purpose do you think this pattern serves in the poem? In this sonnet, Keats is expressing the intellectual and aesthetic excitement he felt when he first encountered Chapman’s translation of Homer. Chapman opened up a new “world” to him, transported him imaginatively to a new place, so the geographic imagery he employs is wholly appropriate. Keats keeps the most vivid image until last: that of the explorer Cortez and his men discovering the Pacific Ocean. How apt that it should be an image drawn from the history of the “New World,” for Homer’s works are a new world for Keats; the Iliad and Odyssey are epics, as immense, in literary terms, as an ocean.

Suggested Responses—Lesson Nine

• Both poems are six stanzas long. • Grammatically, Raleigh’s poem picks up where Marlowe’s leaves off: the

“Nymph’s Reply” begins and the “Passionate Shepherd” ends with a sentence containing a(n) dependent/subordinate clause.

• Both poems feature images of a(n) pastoral/rural world, featuring “shepherds” and “flocks.”

• Each poem has a(n) refrain; in the first it is “Come live with me and be my love”; in the second it is “To live with thee and be thy love.”

• Both poems feature what today we would regard as archaic diction: words such as “kirtle,” “swains,” and “becometh.”

• Both poems are written in the form of rhyming couplets. • Raleigh and Marlowe use the same meter: iambic tetrameter, which has four

stressed syllables per line. • While Marlowe’s shepherd is full of the joys of spring, Raleigh’s nymph is

painfully aware that seasons change.

Additional Activities

Activity 1 In several lessons we have focused on the task of arguing successfully. Sometimes you can learn as much from a bad argument as from a successful argument—if you carefully consider the reasons why it fails. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the heroine Elizabeth Bennet concludes on two occasions that arguments addressed to her are failures; they are marriage proposals, and she rejects them both. The first comes from the pompous Mr. Collins, a cousin of Elizabeth’s and a clergyman. Mr. Collins is very aware of two facts: that he will inherit the Bennet family home (after the death of Mr. Bennet) and that he has an aristocratic patroness. The second proposal is made by the proud Mr. Darcy, a man Elizabeth is both attracted to and repulsed by. She has reason to believe he is arrogant, insensitive, and meddlesome. It appears as if Darcy has broken up the relationship between his friend Mr. Bingley and Elizabeth’s sister Jane for fear the middle-class Bennets are “beneath” their aristocratic set. To add insult to injury, Darcy, to Elizabeth’s mind, has made a “shameful boast” of ruining this budding romance (and potential marriage). Elizabeth has also been offended by the apparent cruelty with which Darcy has treated a charming young army officer named Mr. Wickham, whom he has known since childhood. First, read each man’s proposal—effectively, his argument that Elizabeth should marry him. Then, using the worksheet provided, summarize in your own words the argument of each proposal. Finally, comment on why you think each fails. In that analysis, you may want to consider some of the writing and critical skills associated with argument that we looked at in the lessons, including

• Purpose • Thesis • Argument Development • The Argument Clincher

Mr. Collins’s Proposal: “My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish; secondly, that I am convinced that it will add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly—which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness. Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked too!) on this subject; and it was but the very Saturday night before I left Hunsford—between our pools at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson was arranging Miss de Bourgh’s footstool, that she said, ‘Mr. Collins, you must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman for my sake; and for your own, let her be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a good way. This is my advice. Find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her.’ Allow me, by the way, to observe, my fair cousin, that I do not reckon the notice and kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as among the least of the advantages in my power to offer. You will find her manners beyond anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity, I think, must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect which her rank will inevitably excite. Thus much for my general intention in favour of matrimony; it remains to be told why my views were directed towards Longbourn instead of my own neighbourhood, where I can assure you there are many amiable young women. But the fact is, that being, as I am, to inherit this estate after the death of your honoured father (who, however, may live many years longer), I could not satisfy myself without resolving to choose a wife from among his daughters, that the loss to them might be as little as possible, when the melancholy event takes place—which, however, as I have already said, may not be for several years. This has been my motive, my fair cousin, and I flatter myself it will not sink me in your esteem. And now nothing remains but for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the violence of my affection. To fortune I am perfectly indifferent, and shall make no demand of that nature on your father, since I am well aware that it could not be complied with; and that one thousand pounds in the four per cents, which will not be yours till after your mother’s decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to. On that head, therefore, I shall be uniformly silent; and you may assure yourself that no ungenerous reproach shall ever pass my lips when we are married.”

Mr. Darcy’s Proposal: Elizabeth is examining recent letters from her sister Jane, which, in the light of her romantic disappointment with Mr. Bingley, lack her normal “cheerfulness”; reading between the lines, Elizabeth sees that Jane is heartbroken. Then, to her “utter amazement,” Mr. Darcy, the man she holds responsible for that heartbreak, walks into the room:

In an hurried manner he immediately began an inquiry after her health, imputing his visit to a wish of hearing that she were better. She answered him with cold civility. He sat down for a few moments, and then getting up, walked about the room. Elizabeth was surprised, but said not a word. After a silence of several minutes, he came towards her in an agitated manner, and thus began:

“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” Elizabeth’s astonishment was beyond expression. She stared, coloured, doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient encouragement; and the avowal of all that he felt, and had long felt for her, immediately followed. He spoke well; but there were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed; and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit. In spite of her deeply-rooted dislike, she could not be insensible to the compliment of such a man’s affection, and though her intentions did not vary for an instant, she was at first sorry for the pain he was to receive; till, roused to resentment by his subsequent language, she lost all compassion in anger. She tried, however, to compose herself to answer him with patience, when he should have done. He concluded with representing to her the strength of that attachment which, in spite of all his endeavours, he had found impossible to conquer; and with expressing his hope that it would now be rewarded by her acceptance of his hand. As he said this, she could easily see that he had no doubt of a favourable answer. He spoke of apprehension and anxiety, but his countenance expressed real security.

STUDENT NAME: ________________________

Worksheet: When Arguments Go Wrong

Mr. Collins’s Argument: Your Summary: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Your Critique: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Mr. Darcy’s Proposal: Your Summary: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Your Critique: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Activity 2

Published in 1914, James Joyce’s collection Dubliners is a landmark in the short story genre, notable for its realism, its mood, and the scrupulousness of its style. The book contains fourteen stories. They are widely available in anthologies and textbooks and on-line. Locate and read one of Joyce’s stories. (Your teacher might consider giving you extra credit for tackling “The Dead,” the last and longest story in the collection.) Using the worksheet provided, briefly summarize the events of the story in your own words. (Note that little overtly dramatic action takes place in these stories; the endings tend to be quiet, sometimes featuring the “epiphanies” we discussed in Lesson Two.) Then, identify at least three writing skills we have discussed in the lessons. The relevant writing skills most likely to be demonstrated by Joyce include

• Imagery • Pattern • Defamiliarization • Parenthetical Elements • Attitude • Judging Character

STUDENT NAME: _________________________

Worksheet: A Story from Dubliners

Story Title: _______________________________________________ Summary: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Writing Skill #1: __________________________________________________ Example (Quote and/or Explain): ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Writing Skill #2: __________________________________________________ Example (Quote and/or Explain): ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Writing Skill #3: __________________________________________________ Example (Quote and/or Explain): ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Activity 3

Soliloquies are very special moments in Shakespeare’s plays, for when characters speak in soliloquy, we can be sure they are telling the truth—as they see it. In soliloquy, a character reflects, broods, argues; like a poem or essay, a soliloquy has an argument—a line of thinking. Choose a soliloquy from a Shakespeare play you have studied. Using the worksheet provided, first summarize the argument of the soliloquy in your own words, then evaluate that train of thought. Try to spot skills we have discussed in the lessons. Useful questions you might ask yourself include

• Does the argument have a thesis? • Does it develop, deepen? • Does it make connections? • Does it have a pattern? • What kind of imagery does it employ? • What does it reveal about the speaker’s character?

STUDENT NAME: ________________________

Worksheet: Soliloquy as Argument

Shakespeare Play: _________________________________________________

Act: _______________________ Scene: _____________________________

Soliloquy Speaker: _________________________________________________

Summary:

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Evaluation:

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Activity 4

One of the great traditions in British literature, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, is essay writing. Among the great exponents of the essay are

• Joseph Addison • Francis Bacon • Thomas de Quincey • G. K. Chesterton • E. M. Forster • William Hazlitt • Charles Lamb • George Orwell • Richard Steele • Virginia Woolf

Essays by these writers are widely available in collections, anthologies, textbooks, and online. Select an essay by one of these writers (or another essayist approved by your teacher) and identify at least four of the writing and critical skills discussed in the lessons. Use the worksheet provided to record your findings.

STUDENT NAME: ________________________

Worksheet: A “Master” Essay

Essay Title: _____________________________________________________________ Essayist: _____________________________________________ Writing/Critical Skill #1: __________________________________________________ Example (Quote or Explain): ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Writing/Critical Skill #2: __________________________________________________ Example (Quote or Explain): ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Writing/Critical Skill #3: __________________________________________________ Example (Quote or Explain): ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Writing/Critical Skill #4: __________________________________________________ Example (Quote or Explain): ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Activity 5

In Lesson Ten, we explored ways of “Making Connections” between different characters and different texts. In the “Practice,” we made connections between two different (but related) sonnets.

In British literature, sonnets are often related because they are components of a sonnet sequence. Poets who have created notable sonnet sequences include

• William Shakespeare • Edmund Spenser • Sir Philip Sidney • Lady Mary Wroth • Elizabeth Barrett Browning • Dante Gabriel Rossetti • George Meredith

Sonnets from these sequences are widely available online and in textbooks and anthologies. Choose two sonnets from the same sequence and make connections between them on the worksheet provided. (Refer back to the practice in Lesson Ten for guidance.) Possible connections can be found in the areas of

• Themes • Imagery • Figurative Language • Diction • Characters • Meter • Rhyme • Structure • Tone • Syntax • Musical Effects

If you are finding it challenging to make connections between the two sonnets, examine other sonnets from the same sequence.

STUDENT NAME: ________________________

Worksheet: Two Sonnets from a Sequence

Poet: ___________________________________ Title or Opening Line of 1st Sonnet: _________________________________________ Title or Opening Line of 2nd Sonnet: ________________________________________ * Attach a copy of the sonnets to this worksheet. Connections (Make as many as possible! When relevant, quote from sonnets.)

• __________________________________________________________________

• __________________________________________________________________

• __________________________________________________________________

• __________________________________________________________________

• __________________________________________________________________

• __________________________________________________________________

• __________________________________________________________________

• __________________________________________________________________

• __________________________________________________________________

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Activity 6 A bildungsroman is a novel which charts the growth, development, and progress of its hero or heroine. Many major British novels fit into the bildungsroman category. Examples include Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Emma, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Now is your chance to star in your own bildungsroman. Of course, we do not expect you to write a complete novel, just a summary or “treatment” of the story. You will be the title character of the story. So, if your name is Sally Smithers, you will summarize the plot of that great lost classic novel Sally Smithers. This activity is also an opportunity to display at least three of the writing skills discussed in the lessons of this book. Give the story an imaginary British setting (you can extend this to other countries associated with British literature such as India and Ireland). Draw upon your reading experience of British stories, plays, and novels to create the story. Your bildungsroman might feature:

• Fine Country Houses • Governesses • Aristocrats • Servants • Country Churchyards • Factories of the Industrial Revolution • Workhouses • Shepherds • Wills and Other Legal Issues

• Foundlings • Pickpockets • Afternoon Tea • Boarding Schools • Oxford and Cambridge Colleges • London • Imperial Colonies • The Class System • Balls and Other Formal Events

And so much more . . . . The only limitations are your imagination and your imaginative response to British literature.

Use the worksheet provided to write a rough draft of your summarized bildungsroman. Attach your final draft to the worksheet. Be sure to indicate on your final draft—by means of highlighting/underlining and brief marginal notes—which three writing skills you are displaying. For the purposes of this exercise, the most relevant writing skills would include

• Imagery • Attitude • Pattern • Parenthetical Elements • Balance

STUDENT NAME: _______________________

Worksheet: Your Own Bildungsroman

Writing skills you will display in this exercise: Writing Skill #1: _________________________________________________________ Writing Skill #2: _________________________________________________________ Writing Skill #3: _________________________________________________________ Draft the summary of your “novel of development”: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Teacher Resources

Master Classes

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND TITLES (Lesson numbers are in parentheses)

Austen, Jane Emma (8) Pride and Prejudice (5, 12) Bacon, Francis “Of Studies” (3) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (3) Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness (2, 10) Lord Jim (12) “The Secret Sharer” (9) Dickens, Charles Bleak House (9) David Copperfield (1) Donne, John “Meditation XVII” (4) Eliot, T. S. “Hamlet and His Problems” (7) Forster, E. M. Howards End (6) A Passage to India (8) Greene, Graham Brighton Rock (11) Hardy, Thomas The Mayor of Casterbridge (6) Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (8, 10) Lawrence, D. H. “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (11) Milton, John Paradise Lost (1) Orwell, George Nineteen Eighty-Four (7) Pater, Walter The Renaissance (5) Shakespeare, William Hamlet (4, 7) Henry V (1, 9) Macbeth (10, 12) Othello (3) Stoker, Bram Dracula (6) Swift, Jonathan “A Modest Proposal” (2) Vaughan, Henry “The Retreat” (11) Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray (5) Woolf, Virginia “A Room of One’s Own” (2, 4)

STUDENT OBJECTIVES

The following objectives are addressed throughout this book, and many of them are touched on in every lesson. The list of objectives in the lesson-by-lesson correlations, therefore, is not exhaustive; rather, the objectives that are a particular focus of each individual lesson are noted. The student will be able to: A Use imagery and figurative language to enhance meaning B Use a variety of sentence structures C Organize ideas to enhance coherence and logical progression D Provide specific support for ideas E Apply prewriting strategies to generate ideas F Use effective sequence and transitions G Revise drafts to improve organization and style H Analyze published pieces as writing models I Write in a voice appropriate to audience and purpose J Use diction effectively to enhance meaning K Apply specific criteria to evaluate writing

LESSON-BY-LESSON CORRELATIONS

Lesson One—Purpose Skill Analysis H Practice C, D Essay H, K Lesson Two—Thesis Skill Analysis H Practice D, K Essay C, E, I Lesson Three—Balance Skill Analysis H Practice C, I, J Essay B, C, D, F Lesson Four—Argument Development Skill Analysis H Practice D, H, K Essay C, I

Lesson Five—Attitude Skill Analysis H Practice A, B, J Essay A, B, C, D, J Lesson Six—Parenthetical Elements Skill Analysis H Practice B, C, F Essay B, C, F, J Lesson Seven—The Argument Clincher Skill Analysis H Practice C, E, F, G Essay A, C, D, H Lesson Eight—Pattern Skill Analysis H Practice D, H, K Essay C, D, F, I Lesson Nine—Making Connections Skill Analysis H Practice H, K Essay C, E, G, I Lesson Ten—Defamiliarization Skill Analysis H Practice C, E, J Essay A, D, F, I Lesson Eleven—Imagery Skill Analysis H Practice D, H, K Essay A, B, F, I Lesson Twelve—Judging Character Skill Analysis H Practice D, E, K Essay C, D, E,G Activity 1 D, K Activity 2 C, D, H, K Activity 3 C, D, H, K Activity 4 D, H, K Activity 5 C, D, K Activity 6 A, B, C, D, G, I, J