Lockdown Literature 10.1

Hello again,

Thanks for your interpretations sheets and your emails about Keats’s ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ metaphor. I’ll be collating your responses and sharing your ideas and my thoughts later in the week. It’s not too late to contribute; if you haven’t sent your ideas yet, you can find the tasks here.

Let’s keep it simple today. You are going to read a critical essay which I found in the Casebook Series book, Keats: Narrative Poems. The essay is by the great American Keatsian critic Jack Stillinger, who, I have just learned, died in April. So it goes. I think it’s a really useful argument in terms of seeing the poem in terms of tragedy, pessimism, scepticism and anti-romance – which is exactly what we’re after. I’ve been asking students to read this essay over the last few years and, although it’s quite long and requires some deep thinking, it’s actually quite accessible and readable. My classes have found it very useful in the past in terms of helping them reach more confident conclusions about how to read this poem through the lens of tragedy.

To make the most out of this task, I’d like you to make some notes and come away from this essay with a 5-10 ‘takeaways’. In other words, 5-10 bullet-points or quotes or ideas from the essay which you think are interesting or important to remember. Write them down on paper and take a pic, or just stick them in an email to me when you’re done. I’m going to re-read this essay too. Maybe I’ll quiz you on it next time!

The essay is called ‘The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Scepticism in The Eve of St Agnes’. It’s 23 pages long in this pdf version (download a copy so it's easier to read), and if you want to chunk this task down, it’s broken into 4 parts.

So, to recap:

Your work for this week (due Thursday):

1) Read and make notes on Stillinger’s essay.

2) Email me your 5-10 takeaways from this essay – and any thoughts or questions you might have.

That’s it. Enjoy! Next time, we’ll think about how we can put this reading into use in our writing.

Hope everyone’s well.

Mr M