Theses

Metrical Analysis Essay
In her poem “How many times these low feet staggered”, Emily Dickinson guides the reader through an examination of a deceased housewife. Moving from her feet to her mouth, forehead, hair, and fingers, the poem spotlights housewife’s features in a gradual revealing that ultimately fails to rid the reader of the sense of mystery and anonymity. Through the use of a four-beat accentual meter, Dickinson establishes an underlying forward-jerking rhythm and builds up the expectation for a consistent pulse. In the second and third stanzas, however, the trochaic tetrameter with a regular leading dactyl is disrupted by further dactylic substitutions and frequent caesura. By varying the stresses and creating a disjunction between the rhythmic expectation and the visual caesura cues, Dickinson portrays as futile the attempt to understand what the housewife’s rhythmic, routine life was like by visual postmortem examination alone.

Poetry Comparison Essay
In Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” the exposure of the speaker’s insanity occurs with a linguistic shift halfway through the poem. By juxtaposing the effect of the style and form with the effect of the shift, Browning and Lowell successfully portray characters that transition between two extremes of the insane mind.

OED Assignment
In John Donne’s “Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” the tension between the power of the speaker’s verbal eloquence and the power of the mistress’s physicality is encapsulated in line 2, where Donne uses the word “labour” both in its verb form and in its noun form: “Until I labour, I in labour lie” (2). This repetition creates a juxtaposition that emphasizes the differences in the subtly varying definitions of verb “labour” – definitions which, when considered simultaneously, foreshadow the bawdy tone of the poem and accentuate characteristics of the poet and the speaker.

Criticism Review
The question that arises upon reading “The Storyteller” is whether Benjamin is writing an essay – or a story. While the lack of characters and plot and mainly informative nature of the piece characterizes “The Storyteller” as an essay, there are significant indications of story-like traits in Benjamin’s writing. Indeed, Benjamin seems to craft this essay as a hybrid of information and story, simultaneously adding to it both vividness and ambiguity.

Previous Theses

Metrical Analysis: "..She redefines the word safe, as the unfulfilled promise from Christ of life everlasting. Dickinson successfully accomplishes this task by enhancing meaning using meter to signify the cyclical nature of time, as well as the differentiation of the worlds of the dead and living and their increasing dissociation from one another."

Poetry Comparison: "Lowell and Browning use many of the same literary tools to deliver these experiences, especially in regards to execution of juxtaposition, imagery, and punctuation."

OED Assignment: ". In what follows, I analyze the poem in the context of two definitions of the word “betray.” The first reading conveys the speaker’s desire for membership into the Catholic church, and in the second reading I consider a more deceitful scheme, cross referencing the two interpretations to demonstrate the double-meaning of the poem, that may imply, the speaker’s dilemma of whether or not to reject Catholicism."

Critical Review: Sedgwick manages to address the way in which the definition and nature of sexuality, “both depend on and affect” documented power relationships and raise questions about their application to literature

Essay Theses

OED Essay: I will argue that Marvell is, instead, using two very distinct definitions of quaint. Firstly, Marvell uses quaint to describe objects and concepts that seem beautiful and eternal, yet are actually superfluous and impermanent. Secondly, Marvell employs a bawdy joke with his use of quaint, adding a layer of playfulness to an otherwise morbid stanza. His vulgar joke, however, also emphasizes the explicit imagery of the stanza, making his argument all the more powerful. These two definitions reflect a tension central to the poem—the tension between the eternal and the profane.

Poetry Comparison Essay: Both Keats and Plath describe what they fear as a negative space; for Keats, this negative is death, while for Plath, this negative is life.

Metrical Analysis: Milton registers the monotony in hell in part by keeping his iambic pentameter very regular, to the point of tedium. Milton also communicates the alienating paradoxes of Hell by deploying caesuras and enjambments as the recognizable becomes abnormal. Hell becomes not just a fiery wasteland, but also an inverted Heaven foot-by-foot and pause-by-pause.

Essay Theses

OED: As a response to W.B. Yeats’s Leda and the Swan, Carl Phillips’s Leda, After the Swan offers a reflection on the events of Yeats’s poem from Leda’s point of view, defying reader expectations by casting her experience in a positive light. In achieving this goal, it is necessary that Leda’s account take on a tone of serenity and avoid the language of fear and violence so prevalent in Leda and the Swan. For this purpose, the word “grace” used in the second line of the poem is essential.

Comparison: John Keats’s When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be and Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus each deal with the subject of death, specifically the way in which one’s attitude toward death affects the quality of one’s life. The speakers in each poem hold opposing views on death, Keats’s narrator paralyzed by a dread of death and Plath’s spurred on by an attraction to it.

Metrical Analysis: Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress is fundamentally a poem about time. In each of the three stanzas of the poem, the narrator expresses a different conception of the effect of time on his relationship with his mistress.

Essay Theses

1. Hamlet's third soliloquy conveys the heart of the paradox that underlies the play. Shakespeare's use of what is quaintly called the feminine ending, and his arrangement of caesuras and enjambments, formally execute the emotions inherent to Hamlet's monologue.

2. Just as Gunn's poem idealizes materialism as a mode of self-expression and a measure of identity, so too does Mullen suggest the importance of money in a "rotting" tangible world.

3. In every case where "perpetuity" and its analogs arrive, the word carries an undercurrent of blasphemy. With a single word, Milton posits an argument that questions the justice of God's omnipotence in the poem.

4. The ostensibly opposed conclusions Anderson arrives at when working with literature proves exactly the point that he maintains throughout "Cultural Roots": that the nation is an "imagined political community that is imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (7).

Essay Theses (and Question for the Class)

Before I post my theses I have a quick question for the class. I thought I remember someone mentioning they had a PDF of the Sedgwick criticism (on homosociality). I could be totally wrong but if someone does have it, if you could please email it to me (mje2123@columbia.edu) I would REALLY appreciate it. I am going to use it for my critical essay and all of the copies in the library are checked out, and I'd rather work with a PDF, that I can highlight, anyway. If anyone has the book that would be great too - I could photocopy it and return it right away. Thanks!

And here are my theses:

OED: Toomer embraces the blazon genre in order to draw attention to and ironize this objectification. He overgoes the blazon genre using the technical language of modern technology, such as “lamp-posts” (Toomer, line 2), “power-house” (6), and “wires” (7), to metaphorize the sensual woman, literalizing and ironizing the blazon’s tendency to make the sensual seem technical. Building off of this, he offers a critique of this tendency through his use of the words “insulate” (7) and “incandescent” (12), suggesting that perhaps the blazon genre is dangerously detached from a sensual reality. In fact, within his own poem, despite his technical language and metaphors, Toomer restores a feeling of sensuality.

Comparison: However, Housman’s use of forceful, declarative metaphors and a rhythmic, urgent meter stands in stark contrast to Larkin’s questioning similes and relaxed, regular meter. It becomes clear from these differences that while Housman forces a meaning onto nature, Larkin criticizes this approach by dismissing the idea that nature has an inherent meaning.

Metrical Analysis: This all leads up to an abundance of metrical deviations in the third stanza, which highlight, strengthen and enact Marvell’s final conclusion that even though one is powerless to stop time from causing physical deterioration, one does have the power to make time seem fleeting by having passionate sex.

Essays Theses!

Metrical Analysis (Hamlet): While Shakespeare develops the allure of death with the metaphor of sleep, he reinforces suicide's temptation with the rhythm of sleep itself, a lulling iambic pentameter punctuated by jarring reminders that keep sleep out of reach.

Poetry Comparison (Donne and Piercy): While Donne's male-dominated comparisons literally take ownership of he woman by progressing from heavenly to objectified, Piercy's progression from sexual descriptions of an inanimate uncovering to a desexualized description of a denuded woman removes the male hand from this female figure.

OED ("tape" in Jean Toomer): The interpretation of tape as a facilitator of electrical and telegraphic communication then complicates the poem's reconciliation of words and touch: while the tape's removal suggests liberation in sexual union, it also implies that this liberation compromises capacity for verbal communication.