Write an essay of approximately 3000-3500 words (10-12 typed double-spaced pages) on one of the following topics. Remember to present a clear, focused argument, and to deal directly with the language and form of the text(s) you are examining. These are suggested topics only; you need to refine and develop them to reflect your own critical thinking. Please use M. L. A. style to document secondary sources.

1. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the figure of the New Woman emerged in English, Irish and North American culture to represent a newfound intellectual, social and political freedom for women. The "Woman Question" of which John Stuart Mill had written in the mid-1800s had, in the first decades of the twentieth century, been answered by challenges, in the literature of the period, to the traditional roles accorded to women in social and domestic life -- and by new, radical theories of female psychology (such as those of Freud). Focusing on the work of one modern poet, examine the ways in which the forms and frameworks of gender are either confronted or rearticulated. How are masculinity and femininity put at issue in the poetry of the early twentieth century?

2. T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture consists of a series of lectures proposing to recover Western culture, which had been devastated by the Second World War, through literary and aesthetic means. Art -- especially poetry -- offered both writers and readers a means of redeeming themnselves, of recuperating lost values and shattered identities. What do modern poets mean by culture? How is culture interrogated, or recovered, in modern poetry? Examine in detail the work of one or two poets on the course syllabus.

3. Literary modernism accompanies, at least historically, the rise of the academic study of English. Many of the poets we have studied in this course are also practising critics, or have close ties to the emerging critical establishment at English and North American universities. Discuss in detail the correspondences between criticism and poetry in the work of one modern poet. How do critical and aesthetic modes or forms mesh, or conflict, in the writing of this period?

4. Many of the poems we have studied are explicitly concern with questions of power -- whether intellectual, political, social or artistic. Focusing on the work of one or two of the writers on the course syllabus, discuss the aesthetics of power. How is power described, investigated, circumscribed, or liberated in this writing? What are the formal consequences, on poetic language, of the deployment -- the use and abuse -- of power? How does poetry empower or disempower the writing or the reading subject?

5. The work of a number of writers, especially women and writers of the working classes, has been excluded at times from the High Modernist canon; many modernist poets are often accused of aesthetic and political elitism. Concentrating on the work of one or two poets on the course syllabus, examine the idea of a modernist canon. How do these poets frame the idea of greatness? How do they position themselves within, or without, a literary tradition?

6. In The Renaissance, the nineteenth-century critic Walter Pater wrote that "[a]ll art aspires to the condition of music." For most modernist poets, music is a favourite trope of artistic success or of absolute expression. Many of these writers -- including Eliot, Auden, Sitwell and Thomas -- actively collaborated with musicians, having their work set to music or writing (for example) the libretti for operas. Look specifically at the presentation and representation of the musical in the work of a poet on the course syllabus. How is music described? To what use is the idea or form of that music put?

7. In the early twentieth century, the whole idea of a nation -- variously described in terms of country, ethnicity, race, government, language -- appeared to be under fire. Many modern poets incorporated material from other cultures and languages to evolve a hybrid, polyglot style, while others seemed to draw their borders more firmly and vigorously. Discuss the tensions between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the work of one or two of the poets on the course syllabus. How is the idea and the form of home, of a homeland, interrogated? How are these writers, to borrow from James Joyce, exiles in their own world?

8. A topic of your own devising. Make sure that you discuss your idea with me before you begin to write.

Due in class on Monday, November 27.