Introduction

L3—littérature nord-américaine : ANNE CARSON Jennifer K Dick CC Essay Assignment: You have 1 essay due in 2 steps:

1) Get the thesis statement/essay map (ie your intro paragraph) approved by week 8 or 10. 2) then write the essay & turn it in when done. DEADline for final papers explained below.

Please choose one of the topics/questions on the list which follows (on pp2-3) and form YOUR THESIS STATEMENT (or propose your own for approval to me) by narrowing that topic to your very specific argumentative focus. Then, using complete and correct sentences, write an essay about your topic choice.

 Include an introduction, body and conclusion to your essay.

 Be sure to cite clearly with page and paragraph numbers from these works, using specific examples from the texts to support your points whenever possible.

 Citing Anne Carson books we studied: feel free to abbreviate book titles in citations. For example “Quote from text”(3, AoR), “Quote from text” (83, PW), “Quote from text” (78, GG)= the citations are for page 3, Autobiography of Red, page 83, Plainwater, page 78 in Glass and God.

 Remember, you should include a thesis statement in your introduction which narrows your topic choice to what you want to argue about that topic. Do not use a series of questions to open your paper.

 Avoid that French royal “we” or generalized “you see that”.

 Feel free to use other books by Carson which are available in the library for examples as well as the books we have already studied in class.

 If you do research and you quote even a single sentence by someone else you MUST CITE THAT WORK and include it with proper citing styles in a Works Cited list at the end of the essay (see the Livret d’Anglais if you do not know how to cite work)

LENGTH/Format—given that this is a take home, you will need to TYPE your essay. It should be double spaced, 12 point font, 8-10 pages/3500-5000 words,. With INDENTED paragraphs and NO EXTRA SPACES between paragraphs. Remember— longer quotations of poems should be single spaced. Due dates:

1) Step one Intro Thesis statement due dates: either by week 8 or 10 (8 if going for revision opt, otherwise 10)

2) Step 2: Essay Due: by class time on Dec 11th in MOODLE devoirs CC essay section. No late papers will be accepted as MOODLE cuts you off: DEADline is really that. NO emailed work will be accepted either. Early papers are acceptable and encouraged.  Emailed work will receive a 0.

3) OR: early work bonus: IF YOU WANT THIS GRADED WITH REVISION OPTION: TURN the essay in to the revision option system on MOODLE BY NOV 27th. You will then receive it graded & corrected for 11 Dec. At that point you will have the choice to keep the grade you got OR to revise it for a higher grade.

TOPICS: select one. You must quote examples to defend your essay from ALL 3 WORKS STUDIED

1) The ever-ending nonending of Carson’s writings.

2) Normaity and monstrosity. Appropriate behaviour/civilized manners vs unexpected “strange”.

3) Carson’s works as forms of organized, structured collages.

4) Do you agree that these books are “an allegory about the power words have to transform the real” as Sébastien Ducasse said of Autobiography of Red? Write an essay in which you explain and defend clearly your response using the 3 books we studied this semester.

5) Simulacra: look over the handouts summarizing Baudrillard and Jameson. Use these to locate

and write a thesis statement then essay about simulacra in Carson’s work.

6) How the story telling element of narrative, plot OR character participates in Carson’s genre- bending practices, altering how her books are perceived as poetry, essay or novel.

7) What is significant to these works about the relationship of the parent (mother/father) to the

key characters/narrators in Carson’s works? (Here, you will have to decide what the significance of those relationships are to form a thesis).

8) For Eric Murphy Selinger, Carson’s writings are a “deft textual weaving of truth and fiction”1.

Address this statement in an essay exploring the oxymoron of these writing as a kind of “true fiction”. You may find that the references to Heidegger and Hegel can help inform your argued position on this.

9) In Plainwater Carson wrote ““It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than

of what binds them together”. Address the topic of separation, absence OR loss (choose 1) in your thesis statement about the works we have read by Carson.

10) How does Carson’s work make the argument that classic myths are our contemporary

realities? Make your argument about this question as you see it addressed or demonstrated in the books we have studied.

11) Carson’s poems participate in a strong avant-garde focus on using the rhetoric of the

unexpected. Address the unusual forms and structures in Carson’s works and how this affects and influences readership. (You will need to narrow this slightly to get to your thesis)

12) Imprisonment of love in Anne Carson: In a poem we did not study, “Liberty” Carson writes:

“Well, there are different definitions of Liberty.

Love is freedom, Law was fond of saying.

I took this to be more a wish than a thought”

Write about how the main characters and narrative voices in the works we have read experience love as a form of entrapment only desiring love to be freedom. (You may ask yourself, is love a cage, for Geryon?)

13) Are Carson’s travelogues a form of elegy? Geographer Nigel Thrift defines place in the modern era as “‘stages of intensity’, traces of movement, speed and circulation,” rather than fixed and bordered (1994). This sense of perpetual motion is often evident in the

attempts of modern elegy to locate the relationship between mourner and deceased as elastic and shifting instead of as a static placement on either side of the epitaph. Discuss Anne Carson’s travel-based work as a kind (or kinds) of elegy. You may use this definition, or your own, of ‘Elegy’: “(in modern literature) a poem

of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead” (dictionary.com).

1 Eric Murphy Selinger, Truth and dare: A classicist takes words into the Cubist era and beyond Full text available at:

http://bostonphoenix.com/alt1/archive/books/reviews/12-95/ANNE_CARSON.html