Early Modern Lit and Eco Presentation


 

On Wed May 1 (Badore through Mangione) or May 8 (Morholt through Triay), you will give a brief (10-15 min max) presentation of your paper (unfinished) to the class.  The central purpose here is to present an argument.  I expect you will not have worked everything out, that some ideas and readings may be preliminary.  Your argument might alter some between the presentation and the final paper.  All that is understood.  Even so, I’d like you to offer an argument as clearly and authoritatively as possible.  Please present most of your material: that is, work from notes or short batches of written text.

 

Here’s the format

 

1.  Offer the argument.  Try to be as concise as possible.  One approach that works is to state your claim in a few sentences, and then to back up and elaborate, making sure to include and repeat some of the language you use in your brief statement.  This section can be written if you like: just be aware that it generally takes at least two minutes to read one page of text.

 

2. Give a brief summary of your method—what in your primary text you will be looking at (a character, a repeated element, a particular set of images, a particular section of a text, etc.) and how you will be looking at it.

 

On this second you may find it useful to,

a. Describe a “theoretical” text offers a set of priorities. That is, “an ecocritical reading seeks representations that value conservation and preservation, as described in ….”

 

b. Align your reading of your primary text with a reading offered by a particular critic, whether working with your text or another. So if I’m working on dominance in the natural world of “Penshurst,” I might explain that, like critic x, I am looking at how the poet places culture above nature, but where she focuses on political power I focus on aesthetic power. Alternatively, you might advertise yourself as asking a question similar to another critic, but putting it to a different text: “Just as Williams asks what has happened to the ‘working year’ in Elizabethan pastoral, so I look to Marvell's mower poems to see in what forms labor appears, whether/how it is valued, and whose interests such a valuation supports.”

 

3.  Paradigmatic reading.  Choose a brief passage of a longer text, and read it closely either to raise a problem or to support your overall claim.  If the former, you should include a second, brief reading that addresses the problem.  Photocopies will be helpful.