"ULYSSES" ESSAYS DUE NEXT FRIDAY, MAY 2ND
Gentlemen,
A few housekeeping items. First of all, as the banner notes above, your four-graph essays of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses" is due next Friday -- one week, seven days, 168 hours, or about 10,000 minutes from now.
As we've gone over in class, the topic for the essay is the virtues and vices of Ulysses's motives and decision in Tennyson's "Ulysses."
If I were you, I would take time this weekend to do three things:
1. Write your thesis statement. It should take one of four forms: Ulysses makes a good or bad decision based on good or bad motives. So, it's either good-good, good-bad, bad-good, or bad-bad. Dig?
2. Organize your two Main Points. This will be easily done after your thesis is written. Your two mains points are, in effect, the two parts of your thesis. So, if your thesis is "In Tennyson's "Ulysses," the title character is driven by pure motives to commit a horrible act of selfishness." So, your MP1 will be something like, "Ulysses is motivated to leave because of the lessons he has learned from a long life of noble adventure" (that is, "good motives"). Your second main points (MP2) will be: "Despite his nobility of intent, Ulysses fails to see that his decision to leave Penelope and Ithaca is fundamentally selfish and dishonorable" (that is, "bad decision"). The two main points will serve as the second and third sentences of the introductory paragraph and also as the first sentences, respectively, of the second and third paragraphs. This kind of work is a big chunk of the thinking part of essay writing.
3. Mine your facts. Once you have your thesis and MP's squared away, take twenty minutes to pull three or four quotes that support each of your main points. Anything in the text of the poem that strenghtens your argument, pull it out, make note of it -- you will use it later when writing your essay.
Next week, we'll talk about a few new concepts -- climactic ordering of your arguments, weaving quotes more easily into your writing, and conclusion-writing. But you'll have time in class to work on the essay, too. Final drafts, again, are due Friday. Don't let the next two days go to waste.
HOOPER PROJECT: To catch everyone up, Benny Mauri won Tuesday night's Hooper by murdering the murderers of the four murdered characters from Hamlet: Claudius kills King Hamlet, Laertes kills Prince Hamlet, and Prince Hamlet himself kills both Polonius (by accident) and Claudius (on purpose). Good job to Benny, who now has an average closer to 200% than 90%. Wednesday night, Thomas Bonatti sniped the Shakespeare Day two-parter: Benedick does indeed end up with Beatrice in Much Ado, and Falstaff gets the Fall-shaft at the hands of Price Hal/King Henry V. Well done.
This weekend, some Hoopers about the Bard himself rather than his plays. Five points to the first, and one to each additional Comp student, who can tell me the following: (a) What was the name of Shakespeare's wife?, (b) What were the names of his three children?, (c) What was his hometown?, (d) What was the name of his acting company?, and (e) What was the name of his most famous theater? Not always easy to kill 400 year old Hoopers, but we do as we must...
