Answers to Questions about the First Assignment

In the thread below, SMR and Cholie  had a cluster of similar concerns about the expectations for this assignment, which I suspect others might share.  My response got so big that it will be easier to read as a separate post, anyway, so here goes...

Cholie and SMR are asking the right questions and worrying about the right things.   And as SMR presciently observes, that IS part of the point!  The goal of this assignment is NOT to give me a way to (a) reward those who come to the class with extensive vocabularies and background knowledge and (b) punish everyone for not already knowing all about the later C18. 

No.   

The goals is to give you some guided practice in the frustrating, complicated, uncertain, and circuitous ways that literary history gets constructed out of the past.  If you’re finding it hard, and you’re questioning everything you think you know, then you’re doing it right.   

Down to specifics...

The Oxford English Dictionary

The OED (available only through the UIUC library website) can be a great resource for this assignment, but it IS frustrating to use.  It seeks to capture the full complexity of words and the ways their meanings change over time—and it relies on the interpretive skill of the reader to resolve gray areas.  So you get some definitions, but you mostly get real-life textual examples from the range of time the word has been in use.  When you’re trying to gloss a word from the C18, it’s often helpful to pay more attention to the OED examples than the definition—look for the ones that are dated closest to the texts we’re working with, and see if the word is being used in similar ways (and be aware that there may be a few different ways that the word gets used).  If you aren’t finding the word, make sure you’re spelling it right—after all, you’re looking at a printout of a scan of a really really old book, and the type isn't always as readable as one would like.  Sometimes it’s easy to read an “r” and “n” together as an “m” or to miss the fact that v’s sometimes get substituted for u’s and I’s for J’s.  Also, be open to the possibility that the typesetter made a mistake and transposed letters, added an extra one, or left something out—it happens!.

Other Places to Look for Information

By all means, feel free to look to other resources to help you understand the poem or make your footnotes more accurate.  It never hurts to Google, but there are resources available within the UIUC library site that may get you to helpful information faster: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Literature Resource Center. 

The Standard of Accuracy for Your Footnotes?

As for the accuracy of your footnotes—give it your best shot!  I won’t take points off for people not knowing what they don’t know or for not recognizing a misinterpretation when they’re making it (though I’ll probably point it out, just for future information).   But if a poem has puzzling or opaque elements that you haven’t at least tried to explain, I will take points off.  Keep in mind that “giving it your best shot” is the best that the most renowned scholars can do.  When I’m teaching out of one of the Longman anthologies, I routinely come across footnotes that annoy the hell out of me, because I think the editors have misrepresented things or not quite gotten the point--or are flat-out wrong.  And if I am ever in the position of editing such an anthology, no doubt others will have the same reaction to my footnoting decisions.  It’s not that we’re all stupid—it’s that the past is a complicated place, and nobody can be right about it all the time.  But if everyone gives it their best shot, and seeks to reconcile disagreement in a spirit of goodwill and collegiality, then we stand a better chance of understanding its complexities.

But My Poem Has No Redeeming Social or Literary Value!

Don’t worry too much about picking a poem that will stand the test of time or is a brilliant work of literature.  If there’s something about it that interests you, that’s enough!  It’s good if the nature of your attraction to the poem is something that other readers might share, rather than something specific to you (e.g., “It’s interesting how this poem depicts the details of 18^th-century shopkeeping” rather than “I like this poem because I’ve spent a lot of time helping out in my uncle’s hardware store”).  

The Headnote

If there's really nothing to say about the poem in a headnote, then it's probably not a great choice.  Keep in mind, the suggested length for your headnote doesn't give you a lot of space for the kind of detailed biographical and textual information that you get in the Blackwell anthology or a Longman survey textbook, so try and keep the focus on information that will help another reader arrive more quickly at the things that make the poem interesting and the understanding you have after spending some time with the poem.