ATS2499/3499 AUTHORSHIP AND WRITING PREPARATION FOR THE ESSAY

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
What is expected in any essay in Communications and Writing is an analytical approach to the question, that is, you must isolate the key ideas implied in the question with the aim of recombining them in the form of an argument. The argument must be supported by evidence from academic journals and books. For example, you cannot make a statement of the form Romantics believe that without providing a reference to a work on the romantics or to texts written by the romantics. In summarizing a point of view, you are not only representing what others have said but you are rewriting this material for use in your own argument, that is, paraphrased and quoted material should serve as a starting point for analysis. Large quotes are acceptable, but you should always comment on them and state how they are relevant to your overall argument. Indeed, the best way to develop your writing is to extract material from other works and explain how it suits your argument. You may find that you have too much to say in the space of a 2500 word essay or that you would like to focus on one key element of authorship. This is fine, but you must state what you intend to do in the introduction. For example, In this essay I will focus on the relationship between the role of creativity in Romanticism and psychoanalysis. I also need some demonstration of research and this must involve either academic books or journal articles a couple of articles outside the set readings would be sufficient. The articles may be online but they should still be in registered academic journals.

QUESTION 1
The main difficulty with the first question is that the theories are not fully reconcilable. They are different theories with different aims and concepts and they arose in different historical periods. The question then is, what does it mean to reconcile the theories? In short, it means to find areas of common ground, areas that both bodies of thought address. This does not mean that they fully agree but rather that there is a common ground upon which you can make a comparison. This would be very difficult if you were asked to look at the issue in a broad sense, but do not forget that both theories are studied in a unit on authorship. The common ground that you are looking for should always involve questions of authorship. I stated in the ancillary points that the essay will require reading outside the set texts but this does not mean that you will find an article that addresses the relationship between psychoanalytic criticism and authorship. You should read some secondary texts on both psychoanalysis and romanticism in order to develop a better understanding of the key issues. However, it is up to you to examine the link between the two theories and it is entirely possible that you may conclude that there are few areas of agreement. I am happy with any such judgement, as long as you have examined and assessed a range of points of view. I also stated that you should examine the issue of intention and, I will give you a clue, this will involve a discussion of conscious and unconscious intention. So there is no need to outline all the features of Freudian psychoanalysis but focus instead on psychoanalytic criticism, and how the critic/analyst conceives of the relationship between intention and text (author and text).

In regard to Romanticism, you may note that the poets do not necessarily present a completely coherent theory but there is plenty of material to analyse and examine in both Shelleys article and the poems in the book of readings.

QUESTION 2
All the points about analysis also apply to this essay topic. You should look for key terms in the question such as authentic and tension and use them as the starting point for your analysis. This question is very different to the first because it requires you to analyse a specific autobiographical text. So much of the evidence must be drawn from that text. You might say that the narrator of the text has a particular approach to the question of authorship and in making such a claim, you should refer to a quote or an event in the text to demonstrate this. As was stated in reference to the first topic, your response must always be framed in the context of the unit. I do not want an analysis of Sartres book but rather an analysis of the book in the context of questions of authorship. To do this, you have to look back upon what you have studied so far and use this in your analysis. So what are some of the theories you could use. Here are some examples: You could look back on the theme of Romantic authorship and how this is configured in the text. Sartre repeatedly refers to the ideals of authorship and what it means to be a writer. Are the ideals of authorship structured into the way he looks back on his past? You could look at the psychoanalytic perspective and as to what degree is his reconstruction of his past built around narcissism. You may even question this approach to the text by looking at the Wellek and Warren article, where they argue that writing always fits to a genre or serves particular literary aims. So the past of Sartre is not simply retold but reconstructed to suit literary models. Or you may look at existentialism and how it forms a model for rewriting Sartres childhood.