ENG 133                    Unit 5 – Best Poetry of 2005             Winter 2006               Rosalez

At the beginning of the year, we talked about how the semester would include two parts: how others analyze and your own analysis.  Guess what?  It’s time to do this yourself.  Hopefully by now you feel comfortable enough with most or all of the different critical approaches to tackle doing this yourself.  Our book “Best American Poetry 2005” will serve as the puddle you’ll get your critical feet wet in before you dive deep into an actual critical analysis of a short story in the next unit.  This is a chance for you to do some critiquing of your own.  So here is how this unit will play out:

1. As a class, we will look at several poems together.  We’ll talk about their meanings (and/or possible meanings), how we would approach them if we were to analyze them according to the various criticisms, and what each might look like in an actual paper.

2. You will personally be assigned a few poems from the book to do on your own.  Your responsibility will be to write an “Analysis Proposal” for each poem from at least three different critical approaches, at least one text-based and one context-based.  This will look very much like the last question on your mid-term exam: If you were going to write a formalist (psychological, historical, feminist, cultural, etc) critique using this text, how would you go about it?  What questions would you ask, what texts would you analyze and do a close reading of, what might you want to research, etc?  You may NOT do Reader Response as one of these, however, because…

3. You will choose one of your selected poems and write a Reader Response analysis of it.  This minor analysis paper must be 2-3 pages long and will be graded on a 4.0 scale and averaged in with your Crit Bib grades.  I highly recommend returning to the “Texts and Contexts” book for a refresher on how to go about this: a Reader Response critique is not the same thing as a simple response.  It is considered an actual critical approach and must be written as such.

4. You will “present” your poetry to the class, selecting a poem or two to read and talk about briefly—five minutes.  Graded with a check, etc.

Here is the schedule: