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Purpose: This activity affords you the opportunity to work on a piece of scholarly writing that demonstrates a pointed, analytic thesis about a work of literature in its informing contexts. Though you will need to present facts and information in your paper to illuminate your thesis, your purpose should be analysis of a work of literature, not simply the reporting of information. You will produce an 8-10 page essay documented in MLA format, which you will write and revise with a specific audience and purpose in mind. Your bibliographic projects will supply you with some research, but as you get deeper into your subject, you may find that you need different sources to support your thinking. It's very important that you try to devise a topic that genuinely interests you. Focus on a question or concern that matters to you personally. Throughout the course, we will examine seventeenth-century literature in the context of the very real political, social and economic struggles that characterized the early modern period and that remain struggles today. In your essay, you may address any of the questions that we will be asking in class, that is, questions about: state authority and the individual, religion and the state, the role of art and culture in the production of subjects, sexuality, gender, the social construction of masculinity or femininity, the class system, capitalism, race or ethnicity, colonization, religion, empire building, marriage and the family.

Analysis of Text and Context(s): You will use research both to illuminate the contexts within which you wish to read a literary work and to engage the ideas of other critics and scholars who have written about the same work of literature. You will consult the MLA Bibliography to familiarize yourself with the most recent criticism and scholarship on the work of literature, and you will use some of this in your essay. You may look at any number of contexts: historical, social, economic, theological or philosophical, scientific, discursive, critical and scholarly. By discursive contexts, I mean the vast web of literary and non-literary discourses that circulate in a culture, discourses such as: anatomy, biology, exploration narratives, geographical mappings, conduct literature, sermon literature, devotional or popular treatises on marriage and the family, treatises on government or kingship, popular treatises on witchcraft or demons, etc. You may also consider non-discursive practices as contexts within which to analyze literature. By non-discursive practices, I mean the real, material, social behaviors, habits, routines, customs, pastimes, systems, and practices that characterize everyday life. Non-discursive practices include things like: family systems, courtship and marriage practices, gender-roles and behaviors, educational practices, the apprenticeship system, medical practices, economic systems of exchange, commodity marketing, clothing and dress habits, practices in the arts (cross-dressed theatre, patronage system, same-sex eroticism on the stage and the acting apprentice system), the guild system, the plantation system, the colonial system to subdue and administer settlements in "new" lands, the servant system, etc. You may wish to examine a particular literary theory as the context within which you will analyze a work of literature. For example, you could offer a reader-response or deconstructive analysis of John Donne's sermon, Deaths Duell, or a feminist-deconstructive reading of Francis Bacon's New Organon. In these instances, part of your research would involve reading and annotating texts that explain one of these theories.

Audience: In the past, students' work has been accepted for presentation at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research and the RU Undergraduate Research Forum. You may wish to write your paper with one of these audiences in mind, or you may wish to write to another specific audience. Your audience need not be an academic audience. For instance, you may wish to address an audience of prospective teachers or of practicing teachers or school administrators. You may wish to address an audience outside the academy because your research has yielded you insights that you think are important to share with them--insights about the past and its literature that you think are relevant for an audience today. As you are completing your research, we will consider strategies for defining an audience and crafting an effective style given your intended audience. You will revise your essay to achieve an appropriate style and voice given your audience and purpose. Whatever your audience and purpose, keep in mind that good writing has work to do in the world. Ask yourself who your specific audience is and what you would like your written piece to do for them.

Thesis: Your research essay must have a clear and specific thesis about a work of literature in its informing context(s). You should "nail down" your thesis for your reader early in the paper. Often your first draft only begins the process of formulating a thesis, which a second and third draft must refine. The purpose of your essay is to articulate your thesis clearly, explain and offer specific examples of the context(s) within which your are arguing it, and demonstrate its reasonableness through close analysis of the literary text that is your primary focus.

 The female body in the lyric poetry of Donne (or Jonson or Herrick, etc.)

 The implied female auditor in Donne's love lyrics

 Gender and sexuality in Donne's religious lyrics

 Eroticism/Homoeroticism in Donne's religious lyrics

 A reader-response reading of Donne's Deaths Duell

 A deconstructive reading of Donne's Deaths Duell

 A feminist and/or ecocritical reading of Bacon's Great Instauration and New Organon

 Sexuality and sexual ambivalence in Marvell's poetry (the reaper and garden poems)

 The fashioning of femininity in love lyrics of the Seventeenth Century (or some other works we read)

 Gender and power in seventeenth-century lyric poetry

  The Calvinist religious vision and aesthetics of Fulke Greville's Caelica

 Greville's Caelica and Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin's theology of sin, redemption, mortification, and revivification)

 George Herbert's The Temple and the Anglican theology of the Eucharist (or Anglican theology of sin and redemption)

George Herbert's "emblem" poems in The Temple

 George Herbert's The Temple as emblem

 Greville's theological vision and poetic practice compared to Herbert's theological vision and poetic practice

 Same-sex eroticism and love in Shakespeare's Sonnets

 Mary Wroth's subversive re-vision of Petrarchan poetics in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

 Female bonding and same-sex eroticism in the poetry of Katherine Philips

 Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips, and women in love

 Portraits of James I painted throughout his reign and changes in his self-fashioning or image construction

 Clothing, gender and class in selected pieces of Renaissance literature

 The representation of native peoples as "other" in exploration and discovery narratives

 Joseph Swetnam's The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women and Renaissance discourses on female sexuality and female conduct

 Women writers' responses to Swetnam's Arraignment (Rachael Speght's A Muzzle for Melastomus, Esther Sowernam's Ester Hath Hanged Haman, and or Constancia Munda's The Worming of a Mad Dogge. You could do any one or all of these. Several students could collaborate on a longer research project and paper)

 Class, gender and sexual transgression in The Roaring Girl

 Same-sex eroticism in The Roaring Girl (either male same-sex eroticism or female same-sex eroticism or both)

  Shakespeare's Othello and exploration/colonization narratives

  Race in Othello (using post-colonial theory)

 Male sexuality and masculinity in Othello

 Male bonding and power in Othello

The circulation of homoerotic desire in Othello

 Female sexuality in Othello and Renaissance ideas of female conduct

The discourse of female conduct and Othello

The discourse of female conduct and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedie of Miriam

 The discourse of female conduct and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedie of Miriam and Othello

 Female speech and female silence in Othello and The Tragedie of Miriam

 Ben Jonson's "A Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyric Pieces" and Renaissance discourses on female sexuality

 The Eve myth and Renaissance women writers' revisionary myth-making (Aemilia Lanyer or Rachel Speght)

 A comparison of Aemilia Lanyer's "To Cookeham" and Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst" as Renaissance "country house poems"

 The role of women in male-authored "country house" poems (Jonson's "To Penshurst" and Marvell's "Upon Appleton House") and Aemilia Lanyer's "To Cookeham"

 Rules for female conduct and the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer

 The Renaissance conception of a lady and female virtue and Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and women's community

 Female silence, speech and subversion in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum or Elizabeth Cary's Miriam the Faire Queene of Jewry

 Cultural suspicion of female speech and Elizabeth Cary's Miriam the Faire Queene of Jewry

Baker's Home Page | 434 Description | 434 Requirements | 434 Syllabus | Course Descriptions and Syllabi