Prompt, Week 4: Close Reading Poetry

DUE: Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Explanation

Last week we began looking at poetry in a new way. Rather than reading a poem and trying to say something general about it, we began with the poem itself, looked at its rhetorical effects, and then derived meaning from those effects. This process results in careful reading and true interpretation. In fact, it can be considered a kind of invention. From the language of the poem we invent meaning.

For this week, you will be required to perform this kind of close reading on a poem of your choice. Just as we did in class last week with Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” you will begin by identifying and examining particular rhetorical effects. Remember, this process is akin to observing and describing the parts of an image. During this initial phase you don’t yet make any judgments or create meaning; instead, you catalogue what’s there. Some of these things will be important, some will not, but try to see everything you can.

In the second phase, you will select the most important rhetorical effect and begin to interpret its meaning. In “A Slumber,” we identified two significant rhetorical effects, parallelism and ambiguous pronoun use, and we then did interpretive work on both effects, deriving meaning from each. In interpreting your poem, you will do the same work. After selecting the most important rhetorical effects for interpretation, you will argue for a particular understanding based on those effects. For example, in class we noticed the ambiguous use of the pronoun “she,” and from that effect, we came up with different ways of interpreting it. For your reading you will do the same, but you will argue for only one meaning, the meaning you feel is best.

Method

First, Observe

• Carefully read your target text 
• Identify all rhetorical effects that you can. Use your Bedford Glossary or the Figures of Speech posted on the blog site. Do not limit yourself to the master tropes, but look at all figures of speech and versification. 
• Ask questions about what things mean, either effects or particular words (when we identified parallelism, we then began to ask what things were parallel and why did it matter). 
• Narrow down those rhetorical effects you believe are the most significant 

Then, Interpret

• Think about how your chosen rhetorical effects influence the meaning of the entire poem 
• Form an argument for reading the poem based on your interpretation of the effects. 
• Writer your interpretation in a valid argumentative form: begin by asserting your argument, follow by close reading the rhetorical effect/s that support your argument, describing how the effect operates in the poem, and finally interpret the meaning of those effects. 

If you get stuck, think about the work we did in class last week. We effectively performed this exact process, we just didn’t write it down in argumentative form.

Logistics

• Read the poems assigned for week 4 and choose one. 
• Perform a close reading and interpretation on one and only one poem, focusing on only a single, important rhetorical effect. 
• Write your argument in 350 to 550 words. 
• EMAIL ME YOUR WRITTEN ARGUMENT IN .DOC OR .RTF FORMAT. 
• All assignments must be EMAILED TO ME by Wednesday, 6 pm. All late posts will automatically receive half credit. If the post is not EMAILED TO ME by Friday, 6 pm, it will receive no credit. 

NOTE: You will no longer post assignments to the blog. Instead, all assignments will be emailed to me, and I will publish a small selection of them to the blog on a weekly basis.