, focus on any one word that appears in Beowulf
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Choose a word whose meaning, as it is used in the early English text, doesn’t come across fully — nor, perhaps, even accurately — because of the way the class edition presents it.
Your word, for instance, might be glossed by the editor or translator in a way that misses a crucial meaning in, or flattens an ambiguity or complexity in, the early text.
Or it might not be glossed by the editor at all, leaving only the present-day English cognate of that word as a guide, and maybe an insufficient one, to its meaning in the early text.
Or it might be translated in a way that sacrifices sense for poetic flow, or poetic flow for sense, in a way that might be best understood and unpacked when reconnected to the original wording. Or it might be something else entirely! This is an assignment that requires you to think with specificity, not generality, in a truly close reading.
Choose your word with this full essay prompt in mind. You’ll likely have to try out a few words before you find the one that works — leave time; plan ahead.
Make sure you are dealing with the word as it appeared in the earliest known version of your text (distinguishing between early texts and modern mediations is one of the fundamentals of ENG 202!).
If the word you’ve chosen appears more than once in the text, you should focus your attention on one usage in particular — but you’ll have to take its other appearances into account in your understanding of that one usage. If the word you’ve chosen appears only once, that’s fine too.
Look up your word in the relevant scholarly dictionary (we’ll introduce each during our class sessions): the OED for Blazing World and later Robin Hood texts; the OED and MED for earlier Robin Hood texts and the Canterbury Tales; the DOE for Beowulf (which rules out any word that doesn’t begin with the letters A through I).
But remember: your reader can already look words up in a dictionary. This is not a dictionary report: don’t waste space enumerating every possible meaning of your word; rather, hone in on what you want to argue about the word’s meanings as used in this particular case.
Perhaps you may see something that even the dictionary has missed. Consuly my guide to using dictionaries if it helps.
For this assignment, you are not required to interact with the early text in its original medium (that is, by referring to scans of the original printing, or the original manuscript); the original media will be made available to you in class and you can certainly try to work with original media if you wish, to the degree that your argument depends on something specifically visible in that medium (I’ve had one student who discovered that a key word in a class text had been transcribed incorrectly from the original!) — but all you’re required to work with is the transcribed early text that appears in your class edition.
This is not a compare-and-contrast essay: you are considering how one modern edition or translation handles a particular word. (You may, however, want to take other editions/translations into consideration as a way of better understanding the one you’ve focused on).
Next, use logical argumentation to make a complex case that deepens, disagrees with, or destabilizes the editor/translator’s handling of the word:
Your argument may or may not involve a correction of the editor’s handling of a word — some of our translators are already making consciously creative choices, so there isn’t much at stake in correcting them! Corrective or not, your essay must use thorough research, close reading, and critical thinking to deepen, disagree with, or destabilize the current edition in a way that will enrich and deepen your reader’s understanding of the early text that contains it.
Develop a close analytical reading of your word, analyzing how it functions and carries forth meaning in the text, and determining how the modern edition or translation misses some crucial part of that meaning. Your reading should be ambitious, risky, complex, in-depth, and non-obvious enough that a roughly 1250-word scholarly argument is required to fully explain and defend it. You may likely need to find and include research from any previously published studies (if there are any that are relevant to the particular usage you’re studying), as well as close readings from elsewhere in the text, as far as these are necessary for your argument.
Remember: literature’s artistry usually makes use of words’ ambiguity. Do not aim to settle or solve verbal ambiguity; aim to reveal its complexity.
As you develop your argument, start writing!:
By the deadline, you must compose a roughly 1250-word essay (it does not have to be exactly 1250 words!) in which, through the close analytical study of a single word in one of our class texts, in relation to its presentation in a class edition, you execute a logically organized and rigorously focused thesis that enriches future readers’ understanding of some part of that text/edition. Your job is to dig more deeply into your word of choice than anyone has before: a successful paper will genuinely show your TA something useful that they did not already see or know, in a way that will change (even in a minor way) how they read and teach the text in the future. Cite secondary sources clearly, using signal phrases to show where your innovative reading is departing from what has already been said. Include in your bibliography any texts you consulted.