Post for Tuesday, April 7th - "Wit" (Just a Comma) Essay and Late Work

Overview and Homework: As we discussed, below you will find materials to prepare you for our next class session. I provided a link for our Google Meet on Friday. With regard to late work, please email any work you complete to my K12 account, and make sure it is dated and labeled by Friday, April 17th. The last assignment is the close reading essay for Wit, titled "Just a Comma" (The essay may be posted to Turitin.com, also by the 17th).  I provided the video of myself teaching the lesson, below. You will also find the complete prompt, assignment, and film clip to make it easy for you to proceed.  We will go over the writing assignment and I will answer questions on Friday.  I will also go over the next assignment and give you time to work on the essay with me in the chat so you can ask questions while you work.  If you have any questions, please feel free to put them in the comment section of this post.  See you Thursday!

Google Meet for Friday, April 10th (10:30 am - 11:15 am)

Mr. P. gives tips for writing this essay, from last week's post

"Just a Comma" Assignment, Prompt, and Film Clip

Essay Prompt:  The following dialogue is an excerpt from Wit a play by Margaret Edson, produced in 1999. Read the passage carefully. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze how Edson reveals her values about the importance between literary analysis and real life experiences through characterization and other literary devices.

VIVIAN. (Hesitantly) I should have asked more questions, because I knew there was going to be a test. I have cancer. Insidious cancer, with pernicious side effects – No, the treatment has pernicious side effects. I have stage four metastatic ovarian cancer. There is no stage five. And I have to be very tough. It appears to be a matter, as the saying goes...of life and death. I know all about life and death. I am, after all, a professor of seventeenth century poetry...specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne...which explore mortality in greater depth...than any body of work in the English language. And I know for a fact that I am tough. A demanding professor. Uncompromising. Never one to turn from a challenge. That is why I chose to study John Donne...while a student of the great E.M. Ashford. (Professor E.M. Ashford, fifty-two, enters, seated at the same desk as Dr. Kelekian was. The scene is twenty-eight years ago. Vivian suddenly turns twenty-two, eager and intimidated.)

Professor Ashford?

E.M. Do it again.

VIVIAN. (To the audience) It was something of a shock. I had to sit down. (She plops down).

E.M. Please sit down. Your essay on Holy Sonnet VI, Miss Bearing, is a melodrama with a veneer of scholarship unworthy of you...to say nothing of Donne. Do it again.

VIVIAN. I, ah…

E.M. Begin with the text, Miss Bearing, not with a feeling.

“Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for thou art not soe.”

You've entirely missed the point of the poem, because you've used an edition of the text that is inauthentically punctuated. In the Gardner edition –

VIVIAN. That edition was checked out of the library –

E.M. Miss Bearing!

VIVIAN. Sorry.

E.M. You take this too lightly, Miss Bearing. This is metaphysical poetry, not the modern novel. The standards of scholarship and critical reading...which one would apply to any other text are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful. Do you think that the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail?

The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the

enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death and eternal life. In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation.

And Death – capital D – shall be no more - semi-colon! Death – capital D – comma – thou shalt die – exclamation point!

If you go in for this sort of thing I suggest you take up Shakespeare. Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610 – not for sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads:

And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt die.
(As she recites this line, she makes a little gesture with a comma.)

Nothing but a breath, a comma separates life from life everlasting. Very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something...to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause.

This way, the uncompromising way...one learns something from the poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death, soul, God...past, present. Not insuperable barriers. Not semicolons. Just a comma.

VIVIAN. Life, death, I see! (standing) It's a metaphysical conceit, it's wit! I'll go back to the library and re-write the paper –

E.M. (Standing, emphatically) It is not wit, Miss Bearing, it is truth. The paper's not the point.

VIVIAN. Isn't it?

E.M. (Tenderly) Vivian, you're a bright young woman. Use your intelligence. Don't go back to the library, go out. Enjoy yourself with friends. Hmmm. (Vivian walks away. E.M. slides off.)

VIVIAN. I, ah, went outside. It was a warm day. There were students on the lawn, talking about, nothing, laughing. The insuperable barrier between one thing and another is…just a comma? Simple human truth. Uncompromising scholarly standards. They're connected. I just couldn't...

I went back to the library.