Hum/En
5 Major
British Authors
Winter Term 2007
Section 2
Problem 2
Due before class on January 18
In this assignment, you're asked to put yourself in
the shoes of a 16th- or 17th-century poet. Specifically, you're
asked to put into practice their favored techniques for keeping their
poetry fresh even when its themes were repetitive: as we saw in
the last class, these were variation and the avoidance of the obvious.
Our model is Erasmus' redoubtable list of ways to
say "thank you for your letter"--a list in which he conspicuously
declined to include the most obvious way (which would be "thank you for
your letter"). See the handout if you'd like to refresh yourself about this.
The assignment is to write 10 variations
on the equally useful sentence "It sure is cold out there." Among
the techniques you could try: changing the subject and verb of
the sentence; analogy and comparison; metaphor; quotation or allusion;
sound effects (like alliteration or rhyme); elaborating on the
circumstances, as in "who, what, where, when, why."
My criteria for evaluating this piece of writing are:
--
You use a range of techniques to produce the variations.
(It's not adequate to write 10 sentences of the form "It's colder
than p," "It's colder than q," . . . .)
-- No matter how elaborate your variations, it's always possible
to infer what the obvious sentence you're avoiding is. (You
haven't written simply "Holy Toledo!")
This assignment is due an hour before class, at 6
p.m., on Thursday, January 18. You can email your text
(haugen@hss.caltech.edu) or bring a hard copy to my office (301d
Dabney: through the double doors near the elevator).
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