Discussion questions (week 7)

In preparation for the midterm next week, our discussion on Friday will function as a sort of mini-review. To this end, I'd like you to come to class having completed three review-centric tasks:

1. Write up a list of the terms that Heather has put on the board, and their definitions. I'd like to spend the beginning of discussion reviewing terms you're unsure about.
   
   
2. Write up a list of the themes that pertain to MSND, the sonnets, MoV, and H5. These lists should include those themes Heather has put on the board or suggested in her lectures, but don't stop there -- add to these lists any themes you find striking or persuasive but which haven't come up in class.
   
   Pay particular attention to the themes that apply to multiple texts -- again, these may or may not be themes that Heather has put on the board.
   
   
3. MOST IMPORTANTLY, write an essay question in the style of Heather's examples. You can download the essay questions Heather wrote for last year's midterm here (PDF). Notice that these questions usually
   1. Require comparison either between plays or within a single play
   2. Connect to ideas Heather has raised in lecture once or twice, but not to issues central to those lectures
   3. Ask you to connect a theme (e.g. the role of power in politics and in relationships) to a technique (e.g. closure, pairing, mirroring, etc.)
      
   
   

A few quick notes about Friday's sonnet activity

1. I was quite impressed with the analytical depth of your readings of the sonnets, especially considering that you had less than half an hour to get to that depth. If you would like to retrieve your group's notes about your chosen sonnet I will have them with me during my extended office hours this week and, of course, before and after lecture. (I will make photocopies so that each group member can have the whole group's notes.)
• Everybody received 1 point toward participation credit from their small group work. Members of groups that appeared to have been especially productive or insightful received 2 points. Participation during whole-group discussion at the beginning of class was scored as usual. The maximum number of points that could be earned in this lesson was raised to 3 -- it's usually 2.
  
2. Note that the love object for sonnets 1-127 is male -- this is the fair youth that Kim and Heather talked about for the last three lectures. Although any individual sonnet, when taken out of its context, might apply equally successfully to a male or female love object, for the sake of narrative consistency and to demonstrate your mastery of the larger arc of these sonnets your pronouns should refer to a male beloved if you are writing on, say, sonnet #18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?").
3. If you would like to download the sonnets we worked with on Friday, click here. If you would like to download the sonnet worksheet we used, click here.
   

Discussion question (week 4)

There is only one discussion question this week, but it comes in many parts:

1. Print out sonnet 147 triple-spaced, identifying subtleties of meaning and connections between words and ideas therein
   
2. Write out the surface meaning of the sonnet -- what is its plot?
3. Identify and explain the wordplay in the sonnet: what purposes do these puns serve?
4. How does the speaker change the metaphor from quatrain to quatrain?
5. What does the volta change?
6. Does the couplet provide closure?
   
7. What expectations does this sonnet violate?
8. How is the form of this sonnet related to its content?