Consider how the lines of this poem focus/control the reader’s attention/experience. At what rate does information arrive? Why? How do the lines end? How is enjambment used? When is it used? What gives the poem closure? What work does the title do? What is the persona like? Why do you think so? How and where does the persona change?
Consider the same questions of these couplets.
These football haiku may be dated, but here they are.
Here are some examples of excessive editorializing. Remember, “The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment.” –Ezra Pound
Let’s follow the directions Graff and Birkenstien give on page 90, but replace the paragraph they provide with the following, from Ruland and Bradbury’s From Puritanism to Postmodernism:
Because of such exclusions, much later American writing, and some would say the American imagination itself, revolted against Puritanism. In fact to many later artists the very idea of a “Puritan imagination” would come to seem a contradiction in terms. Hawthorne, one of whose ancestors was a judge at the Salem witchcraft trials, returned with a sense of curious ambiguity to the world of his steeple-hatted Puritan ancestors in The Scarlet Letter (1850). He tests the idea of “iron-bound” Puritan society against the world of nature, but discloses as well that the power of the Puritan spirit has not died. (31)
Or this one, about Anne Bradstreet:
But, though [Bradstreet's poem's] strongest subjects are drawn from the stuff of daily life . . . they have a metaphysical wit and texture that anticipate the works of a New Englander of two hundred years later, Emily Dickinson. This comes in part from the struggle between dissent and acceptance in the life of a strong-willed woman living in a commonwealth which required double submission, to domestic and divine duty, but also in part from the sense of felt experience she inherited from British poetry, mixing an alert vivacity with an apparent simplicity. Her love is marital, her landscape plain but brightly seen, her meditations troubled but ultimately pious, her awareness of nature acute but also respectful of the Maker of it. (22-23)
From A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson, the collection of scholarly essays edited by Vivian R. Pollak, here is an chronology of Emily Dickinson’s life. It provides some context and may help give your research direction.
Consider The Columbian Orator, a copy of which Douglass describes as crucial to his own literacy. Also, here are other examples of 19th century schoolbooks. What do these texts suggest about the historical context around Douglass and other slaves? How might the language of The Columbian Orator have influenced Douglass? What would Greenblatt say about it?
“Skeptics May Object” is a chapter from Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say I Say. I recommend it for students writing arguments in my classes.
Here are three points to guide our discussion and an assignment:
How might you argue for other characteristics, based on what we’ve read in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass?
