Paper #1 Césaire: “Detailed description” DUE Thursday, 2/20 at 1 pm (via Moodle)
Content/topic:
Description is one of the most important modes of writing that anyone engaging with literature (or other cultural texts) can use. Often, a formal written analysis of a literary text or work begins with some sort of description of that text or work as a whole — or a description of some small part of it — before launching into other modes of writing (interpretation/analysis/critique). (The same holds for less formal, more popular, or even experimental forms of writing about literature: book reviews, journalistic writing, introductions, prefaces, tributes.) This is partly because, according to convention, the writer should assume that the reader is not familiar with the work that is being written about. It is also partly because description is a very effective way to get someone interested in something AND a very powerful way to draw a reader into a vibe, a zone, a relationship, a problem, a question, an idea, or just generally into the space of a given work. Description precedes and, in some sense, always prepares the way for or sets up interpretation, even if it cannot always be neatly separated from it.
For this paper, you will… Write a detailed description of Aimé Césaire’s book-length poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Your paper should confine itself to pure description (no argument or interpretation) as much as is humanly possible. This means that you should NOT venture any ideas about the poem’s meaning or tell us whether you think it has value. It also means you should NOT do any research or introduce any knowledge, ideas, or information that come from sources outside the poem. (For example, you should NOT say anything about Césaire as a person, his bio, his career, his political writings, etc.; you should NOT compare this poem to other poems.) Your paper should also be as compelling and interesting to read as you can make it (that is, don’t just compile a list of the poem’s main elements but try to come up with a way to get your reader interested in it). In a word, try to draw your reader into the space of the poem!
Some aspects of the poem you may wish to describe (choose as many as you wish): length, line length, meter, the style, the type of language it is written in, the actual language it is written in, the actual language you are reading it in, vocabulary (stock of words, technical words, unusual words, etc.), diction (word choice, unexpected choices, confusing choices, etc.), punctuation (if any), line breaks, typography, spacing/use of white space, the organization of the words or stanzas on the page, its imagery/the type of imagery it uses, its metaphors/the types of metaphors it uses, its setting (or settings), its action (or actions), its principal verb tense (or tenses), the grammatical person of its speaker (or speakers), its historical or temporal orientation (is it set in the past/present/future?), the slowness or speed at which you read it when reading silently the words on the page, the slowness or speed at which you read it when reading it aloud, your thoughts as to whether it is meant to be read silently or aloud, the structure (of the poem as a whole, or of individual sequences or parts), the knowledge it presupposes, the mood it creates (if this can be done without venturing an interpretation!!!).
Once you have exhausted this list in your description of the poem as a whole, you may wish to turn to the description of an individual sequence or part, returning to the elements above as appropriate within that sequence or part.
Specs:
2-3 pages in length; 12-point font; double-spaced; 1-inch margins. Your paper should be created in a word processing program (Word, Pages, OpenOffice Writer) or, if you are using GoogleDocs, it must be downloaded as a discrete file that can then be uploaded to the Moodle (a Word doc or a pdf). Do NOT share a Google Doc with me (this is not an appropriate way to share finished writing assignments in this course). Your paper should have a heading that includes your name, the date, the name of the course, the title of the assignment, and a title of your paper. The pages should be numbered.
Hand-in via Moodle.