PAPER

Your major project for the quarter is to study the reception that a particular literary text, or a small group of closely related texts, has experienced over time. This project will provide you an opportunity to explore a work that has a special fascination for you. This type of research lends itself especially to authors and works that have proved controversial and have received a wide variety of commentary over a considerable period of time. With rare exceptions most recent works of literature do not yet have a long or diverse enough reception history to stimulate a rewarding exploration of this kind. Thus, unless you choose a recent work that has excited a great deal of controversy, you will probably need to confine yourselves to works produced no later than, say, the mid-twentieth century.

For purposes of this paper, reception need not be limited to what we ordinarily think of as critical reception-reviews or scholarly articles and books, though these will probably be central sources for most papers. Besides consulting these types of sources, you may also find relevant material in informal comments on a work, for example, in letters, diaries, and also authors' own later comments on their earlier work. And you might also look at film or video adaptations of the work you are studying-also at later authors' attempts to rewrite the text (for example, Jean Rhys's reworking of Jane Eyre).

Although most of you will deal with a single work-some famous novel or poem, it is possible in some instances that you can best approach the topic by examining the reception of a small group of related works rather than of a single text. For example, a student in this course two years ago found that he could get a better hold on commentary on Henry James's later style by looking at the reception history of his final three novels rather than of a particular one. Similarly a group of poems by a particular author (or even by a "school" of poets) could lead to a good paper.

As you start this project you will need to go to certain standard sources. The MLA online bibliography provides listings of secondary material back to 1963. For earlier periods you will need to consult other bibliographies, including the printed version of the MLA bibliography. If you choose an author included in the Critical Heritage series, you will find a selection of responses ranging from early reviews to later academic studies. Various critical anthologies on particular authors and/or works will be helpful-for example, the Norton Critical Editions, as well as the Prentice-Hall, Chelsea House, or MLA Critical Responses series. Some of the most telling examples of reception will not be in the form of whole essays, but of brief remarks about the text in literary histories or in writings not specifically about this text. You may also find that some of the best material for your argument will be what you come across accidentally while browsing through library shelves.

Ideally this paper should provide you with the opportunity to locate a work within diverse historical contexts-contexts that the original author likely would not have imagined. Works that have inspired quite different evaluative responses, or have been approached by seemingly antithetical critical methods, lend themselves particularly well to this assignment. Since you are likely to find much more material than you can possibly handle-much more, in fact, than you will have time to read in detail--you will need to narrow down the scope of your inquiry, especially if you are dealing with a long-famous text. With all this material at hand, you will often feel tempted to get lost in detail. To prevent this from happening, you should be on the lookout from the start for an argument around which to build your paper. Your argument may even take the form of a polemic in relation to the critical history you are examining. Above all, you should view this project as a means of developing your own point of view and your own critical voice.

You will be working on this project throughout the quarter. I shall meet with each of you during the first two weeks to hear what text or texts you have mind for the paper, and I shall give you what advice I can about how to hunt down your material. You are encouraged to seek out faculty members with expertise in the area. You must hand in a tentative bibliography by November 6. The final session of the seminar (to be scheduled early in the final week of classes at whatever time we can find a three-hour slot) will be devoted to each student's informal presentation of the paper's central argument. For this session you will need to hand in a few pages of your paper-in-progress together with your bibliography. Each of you will have no more than 15 minutes, of which half should be left for class discussion to provide suggestions for your final draft.

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