Paper 1
Due in class Thursday, January 26

The Aesthetics of Repetition, or,
Tell Me Another One

    In this paper, you’re invited to explore a style of writing that we might instinctively regard as mediocre, maladroit, even tasteless—namely, writing that is produced and read primarily through repetition. 
    Pretty clearly, all of the major texts we will have read by January 26 are vulnerable to that charge, whether we think of the dialogues of Plato or Castiglione or the courtly poem collections of Surrey and Spenser.  From that sample alone, we see that literary repetition might take place through formal structures (such as speeches or sonnets), through persistent themes, ideas, words, or literary devices, through the constant presence of a central character, or indeed through an intertextual relationship in which some earlier book is refashioned or ventriloquized by a later author. 
    Still, however it happens, if our preconceptions are right, then none of this writing should be any good.

    You’re not required to claim that it actually is any good.  Rather, after choosing whether you’re going to write about Plato or Spenser—these seem like the most promising texts for allowing you to write something sophisticated—you should compose an interesting paper in which an attentive reader can find answers to these questions:

    --How does repetition work to structure this book—on obvious and less obvious levels?
    --What are a couple of passages you would point to as examples?
    --In each example, what literary effect does the passage produce, in itself and considered as an instance of repetition?
    --Presumably, it’s also possible to read your text in a more conventional way, looking for beginning, middle, development, and end.  So what difference does it make when you emphasize repetition instead?

    To revivify an old cliché:  how has your chosen text raised repetition to an art form?  It may or may not be good art, but why is it art at all?

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The paper should be four to five pages long, or 1300 to 1500 words.  This is assuming you use a 12-point Times font, double-spaced with 1-inch margins.

The paper should have an identifiable introduction (including one or two key sentences the reader can easily identify as the paper’s central claim), an identifiable conclusion (not necessarily a full paragraph), and a few identifiable sections in between.

You don’t need to provide bibliographical references for our assigned books. 

You don’t need to do any reading beyond the primary text (Plato or Spenser).  If you want to mention something you learned from the introductions to those books or from a book on our library reserve, by all means include it with a page citation.

Quotations and examples in a prose text should get a simple page citation in parentheses in your text.  For example:


Quotations and examples from poetry should be cited by poem number and line number.  The Roman numerals in our printed text are fine (LXX.4), or you can convert them into Arabic numerals (72.4).  If you do this consistently, page numbers aren’t necessary.  For example:



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