Addendum to Syllabus

The Emergence of the Gothic from the Realistic and Romantic in Different Contexts, Fall 1999

Dr. Ellen Moody

DIRECTED JOURNAL ENTRIES; or, how to write an essay with guidelines:

In this course, you will be asked to write a number of journals to cover everything we read and see this term which will constitute our form of guided essays; there will be no outside research required, and there will be no on-the-spot essay with the theme prechosen or long closed book tests. The idea is to read or listen and watch carefully and then on paper to show that you have read carefully, thought about what you have read, and had some genuine mature or intelligent response of your own to the material.

Guidelines for Writing your Directed Journal:

The entries are to be numbered. Your name, the texts or films and authors or filmmakers covered, the date you wrote each entry, together with the number of the question you have chosen, are all to be put into a heading on the right-hand upper part of the page. The journal entry is to be typed using double-spacing. Those written at home are to be 4 - 5 pages long (they may be longer than 5; but may be no shorter than 4; 2 1/2 is too short and fails; if you are on page 9 tell yourself you have said enough); each is due on the day indicated on the syllabus. They will be graded and the grades will be taken down one element for every session an entry is late.

1. The first paragraph should give a very brief summary of the author's life, or, in the case of a comparison between two or more author's lives, a summary of these in a couple of paragraphs. You are asked to relate the specific text you are dealing with to some incident in the the life of your single author or two or more authors or to some events in the period in which your chosen writer or writers lived. You must shape the author's life so as to tell how the text fits into the life of the writer or writers you are dealing with. You can pick just a bit of the author's life which has to do with when the book was published; but you must connect, and an inner connection is the thing that is of most interest. This should be 4 - 8 sentences, or a short paragraph chock-a-block with dates and information.

2. The second paragraph should give a brief summary of themes or ideas the work or works explore; here you should show how these mirror the period in which your text or texts were written or produced. A theme is a central idea or comment that the work makes on the human condition. It is not the same as the work's subject. The subject of a work may be love; you can state the subject in one word love. Its theme is what the author says about love. The subject of Shakespeare's sonnets is love; its themes are what he says about love. Thus the theme of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 is not "constancy" but "True love remains constant whether assaulted by life's tempests or by time." A theme is a complete sentence in which you move from a concrete or particular situation and generalize out to state the work's idea in such a way as to make it relevant to analogous situations during the work's era and in our own time. Again, use the editorial material in your edition or classnotes. (In the case of a movie, you could instead tell how the director sought to convince the viewer that what he or she was seeing is a genuine recreation of the period in which the action of the story is supposed to take place in.) This should be 6 - 10 sentences, or a medium-sized paragraph just packed with ideas and concrete description.

3. The third paragraph should give a concise synopsis of the plot. Do not give a blow-by-blow account. For example, of the famous Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, you could write: "This book is about Holmes's investigation of Sir Charles Baskerville's death, the attempted murder of Sir Henry Baskerville, and their relationship to an old west-country legend." Of a long complicated movie, Excalibur, which retells the legend of King Arthur, you could write: "this movie takes us from the conception of Arthur through the love of Lancelot and Guenevere and the entire Grail quest." I wish I could give prizes to all those who do this in one sentence. Keep it to 5 sentences at most, or a very short paragraph using general concise language. If it's a case of three short stories, try to sum up each story in two sentences each.

4. Then you chose one question from the list below and write a detailed answer to it. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE BOOK JOURNAL; IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT YOU FOLLOW THE REQUIRED LENGTH. First type the question (with the number) and then for the rest of your journal (3-4 pages) respond by answering your question as maturely or in as much depth as you are able in such a way as to use concrete details (describe incidents and characters and images from your book) and to quote from what you read as part of your answer (surround each quotation with quotation marks and follow it by a parenthesis with the page in the book it comes from). Let me be frank: you are asked to include these details and quotations to demonstrate whatever you want to say in order that I can know you have read the book and understood it. If you are dealing with one or more works, you must answer the question in such a way as to compare the two or more works in question.

1. Describe briefly three memorable dramatic scenes from the text (or movie). (You could explain why these would make a movie based on your text interesting and dramatic.) Explain why you chose these scenes; that is, why do you remember them particularly.
2. Discuss the most interesting incident in your text (or movie). What made it interesting to you? Or, discuss the most interesting character in your text (or movie). What made him or her interesting to you?
3. What kinds of conflict are dramatized?
   • Discuss an internal one; or
   • Discuss one or more conflicts among the characters; or
   • Discuss how one character is in conflict with society in general; or
   • Discuss how one character is victimized by or takes advantage of the circumstances in which he finds himself.

   What ideas does it seem the author wants to suggest by dramatizing this conflict.

4. How does the natural setting influence or control the characters? (If this is about a movie, you could instead discuss the use of lighting, landscape, costumes, props, and so on.)
5. How does the author's tone influence the effect of his story? (If this is about a movie, discuss the use of music or a particular actor's performance: how does one or the other influence the effect of the film on the viewer?)
6. Did you think the story in the poem or play or novel or movie would end differently? Why? Why do you think the author did this?
7. Does anyone's character in the poem or novel or play or movie seem to change during the story? What caused the change?
8. Discuss how a major character in your text figures forth a particularly important theme in the book.
9. How is a character in your text responsible for what happens to him or her.
10. Do the characters or speakers in the book or movie behave like real people? (If this is a movie, you could discuss individual actors or the cast as a whole.) if they seem real, why? if not, why not?
11. If the characters are not real, what themes do they embody and through what actions or words? Did it matter that the characters were not real?
12. What forces of change or new beliefs are present in the text? How do they affect the characters in the story or the author?
13. Discuss the versification or prosody of your text (if it is a poem), the style of the sentences (if it is a prose work), the use of the camera or stylization (artificiality) in the presentation of scenes or characters (if it is a movie). Tell and show how the techniques you describe enable the author (or director) to figure forth one or more of his themes.
14. Analyze the connotations of the imagery in the text (if this is used for a movie discuss the visual imagery on the screen). What themes are embodied here?
15. Discuss the allegory or symbols in your text. (Actually this is one aspect or way of working out imagery so can be regarded as a specific case of #14; it differs from #14 in that it includes characters and settings and whole phrases which, like imagery, can be used allegorically or symbolically.) Think to yourself, is some character or image made to mean the same idea as the story unfolds? What meaning is conveyed by this equation?
16. Discuss a major theme in the text. At what point did you become aware of this theme? Explain how or why?
17. What patterns of love (or sex) are depicted in the text?
    • or what patterns of family life; or
    • or what patterns of ambition; or
    • or what patterns of religion; or
    • or what patterns of political behavior. Is this pattern like or unlike patterns you are familiar with?
18. What attitudes are expressed by the author or filmmaker or characters in the story towards
    • sex; or
    • marriage; or
    • family ties; or
    • religion; or
    • science; or
    • the class system; or
    • slavery; or
    • money; or
    • war (or violence); or
    • authority or the political establishment (kings, princes, dukes, judges, politicians, the police, courts); or
    • power; or
    • ruthless action; or
    • suffering; or
    • criminals (or prisons); or
    • literature (or any form of art, painting, music, &c); or
    • death. Did the author change your views or consolidate them on this topic?
19. Are there similar kinds of events in the story; that is, does the same sort of thing happen more than one time and perhaps to more than one character or group of characters? If so, describe the kind of incident which seems to repeat itself over and over, and discuss the thematic or dramatic effect of these patterns.
20. If there is more than one story or plot in your text or film, do they mirror one another in some way? Is it that the situations in the stories are parallel and similar or parallel and contrasting? Without retelling the story (remember you've done this in Paragraph 3 of the introductory matter) describe the parallels and discuss how they operate in the text or film.
21. How does the genre (tragedy, comedy, romance, satire) affect the action or mood of the text? Think whether if it had been in a different genre, how the reader or audience's reaction would have been different.
22. What kind of an audience is envisaged by your text (or movie)? How do you know this?
23. Has your text made you aware of any social problem. Explain.
24. Has the book or movie taught something you did not know or never expected to find in its historical period? Explain.
25. Has the book taught you something about a place or culture that you did not know anything about before? Explain.
26. What was the general moral or emotional effect of this text or movie on you? What made you feel the way you did as you were reading or watching and listening to it?
27. If your text was clearly autobiographical (from internal evidence or what we say in class or what your editor says), did this change the way you responded to what you were reading? Explain.
28. If you feel you know enough about the author's life, how did this text reflect his or her life. Point out parallels and show how author changed the "real" story to suit his or her themes, or obsessions, or preoccupations, or genre.
29. Left blank so that you can add a personal self-question of your own and write privately. This is not meant for you to invent a new general question of your own; the personal question should relate to yourself; that is, be autbiographical in part, talk about how you personally related to your text. You should not forget to quote and describe your text in detail here too; the idea is to relate it to your life, not to dismiss it. If your text has hit on some personal issue or problem of yours, you can talk about the parallels between your personal life and what you have read. You might label such a journal entry "personal," and would not be expected to read it aloud in class. You can write a personal entry twice.

A. The principle object here is for you to learn to communicate to someone else how you read a text or texts: thus, please

1. assume "with a pessimism surely born of experience" that whatever isn't plainly stated this reader will invariably misconstrue;
2. that you can express your profoundest ideas in simple words and sentences;
3. that I cannot know what is going on inside your head about yourself so you must explain any of your autobiography that you want to discuss or bring up at any time; and
4. that clarity and unpretentiousness are virtues we all appreciate when we read. I will evaluate you on how clearly you followed the guidelines and answered the question you chose, on the supporting details and quotations you used, and how carefully and thoughtfully you read your texts.

B. The secondary object is to make everyone read all the books and to judge everyone on the amount and care and thought with which they read. Thus, you are not permitted to write more than one journal on any one author. All extra credit journals must be on an author or (in the case of a movie) work you have not written upon.

TWO THOUGHTS FOR THE WISE:

1. If you do not like a book or movie; do not simply dismiss it with "I hate this thing!" Examine your prejudices. Try to think up a reasoned argument to support your dislike. If it is a matter of the book's style or message, analyze what is source of your distaste.
2. Don't try to show off or convince me how smart you are by using big abstract elegantly-varied words when little concrete ordinary ones will do. It is not so much that pretentious difficult and dead tongue called Formal English is boring; it's that it's coterie, and elitist and most importantly deliberately obscures what is the actual thought of a piece or is a substitute for clear ideas. But if there are some students here who have been lead or forced to believe that when someone's prose "is wondrous dark, 'tis wondrous deep," I want them to know I disagree. I take the view 'tis wondrous muddled.

The English Department Policy on plagiarism: