300, English Essay #1 Fall, 2010 Due : Wed. Oct. 6th at the beginning of class. Late essays will be marked down 1/3 grade for each day they are late i.e. B to B-. Turning the essay in after class begins as late. Any paper received after Oct. 13th will fail, although the assignment must still be completed if you wish to pass. Length : Minimum 5 pages, No Max Format : 12 pt. type, double-spaced, 1 inch margins. Please edit your work carefully, as papers with many errors will have lower grades. DO NOT USE OUTSIDE SOURCES (such as film review, etc.). Any quotations from the Broadview Anthology should be given in-text citation. Then include a list of works cited; each text you use requires a separate citation. Topic : We see the past through lenses that show us
something of the world we are living in. (Jordan and Carroll, Longman Anthology, 667). Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a film that offers a selfconsciously modern perspective on King Arthur, the legends we associate with him, and the medieval period. It is rich with the witty, ironic tensions between the period it represents and the period that produced it. Your essay should be devoted to examining the cultural work that the film is doing, I mean that you should consider and reflect upon the idea of the medieval period as the film offers it to us. How is the film reading the medieval period? What is the purpose the ironic tension between the modern period that produced the film and the medieval period that it purports to portray? How is the film affirming the cultural life of the texts that we read? Correcting them? Distancing them from us? Interrogating our modern interest in them? Why would the writers (the Monty Python troupe) want to do this? How is the film a reflection of modern sensibility? A critique of modern sensibility? (These questions are not meant as a list for you to go through and diligently answer, but rather as a series of prompts to help you formulate your ideas and your thesis). Your reflections should be based on both the film and what should be your source of information about the period that is, the texts that we read (and ONLY those texts). be Please specific in your discussion. That is, use specific examples from the film AND our early modern sources to illustrate what you are analyzing and arguing. Do
not try and use all the texts we have read from this period; rather, use what works best for you and the arguments you are offering. A successful paper will follow directions, be well-written, with very few errors, and offer a coherent thesis that addresses the essays prompt.
Quoting : Poetry must be reproduced just as it appears on the page, line breaks and all. Poetry that is transformed into prose is incorrectly cited. Poetry quotes of less than four lines should be incorporated into the text with the line breaks preserved through a slant line between lines: Mary had a little lamb./Its fleece as white as snow. Poetry quotes of five lines or more should be set apart and formatted as a double-spaced block quote. Prose quotes of 40 words or less should be incorporated into the text; 40+ words should be set apart as a double-spaced block quote. Citation : Please use in-text parenthetical citation for your quotes. (Sir Gawain, Part 1, II. 5-10, 146). Works Cited List : You must include a works-cited list from which you quote. This list should be in alphabetical order according to the author of the primary text. Each text citation may vary slightly but for our anthology, the citation will consist of: 1) Author, last name first; 2) Name of text; 3) Title of the anthology; 4) Volume and edition; 5) editor of the anthology; 6) place of publication; 7) pages of text you are using. All lines after the first line are indented 5 spaces. Mallory, Sir Thomas. Morte Arthur. The Broadview Anthology of British L iterature. Concise Edition, Volume A. Eds. Jospeh Black, et. al. Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2007. (404- 45) Film: Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Dirs. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. John Cleese, Eric Idle. Columbia, 1974.
E-Res: Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Knights Tale. T he Canterbury Tales. Trans. Nevill Coghill. Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1952. 48-108. 20 Sept. 2010. http://copleylib.sandiego.edu/eres/download.aspx? docID=31219&shortname=the_knights_tale.pdf