Parable of translation

The poem wants to be itself in translation

To speak with the same voice

Mais non. C'est impossible

Le poème traduit veut être quelque chose d'autre

Habiter toujours un pays étrangère

Bad Poem #51

Good lines of verse are locked up in a vault

Once a year they are released for the poetry contest

Every writer get one

To be the last line of a poem



This year I've gotten one that I cannot hope to match

At least my poem will end well

After this pedestrian start

Summer grasses tickle bare feet at church picnics

How to Generate Ideas and Write your Paper

1.  Start by reading.  Just read.

2. Now brainstorm.  Make a numbered list of ideas, in no particular order. Just the order they occur to you.  They can be major ideas or small observations.  Don't worry about which are good or important for now.

3. When you have enough ideas so that you think you can write a paper, eliminate some of the less relevant or weaker ones, and order the rest into a more logical order. See if they form an argument. Maybe some are sub-categories of one of the major ideas?

4. Now write an introduction to your paper, with a thesis statement that summarizes the shape of your entire argument.

5. Now write the body of the paper, using your numbered list of ideas.

6. Now throw away most of your introduction and rewrite it from scratch so that it actually conforms to what the body of the paper says. Nothing is worse than finding out that the paper doesn't end up doing what the intro said it would do.

7. Now set the paper aside a few days.

8. Now revise it paragraph by paragraph. You should have at least some revision in each paragraph, a sentence that doesn't work or two paragraphs that have to be combined into one.

There.  Now you will have a first draft of your paper.

How to Write a Seminar Paper

1. The model for the seminar paper is the academic journal article. That doesn't mean that your paper will be publishable, but that is the model. What makes the seminar paper publishable?  It must make a contribution to the field by saying something new, and it must also be good in other ways. But it can be good (A level) without being publishable.  I find it odd that student trying to write a seminar paper have not read enough critical articles to know what the "form" is supposed to be.

2. The title should be well-crafted. It needs to convey some essential information in a concise and elegant form.  The colon almost always works. You will have to decide for yourself whether you want a "clean" or a relatively ornate title. I don't like parentheses or other unclean elements, like "(re)cuperaciones del (trans)género." But it's up to you to figure out what your preferences.  Alliteration?  Quotes? Super-long titles, medium ones, very, very short ones?

Some elements that should be present: names of authors being studied, titles of works where relevant, some "thematic" or theoretical element (what about that work). The title doesn't have to be super interesting but it cannot be something like "structure and theme."  In other words, so deadly dull that the reader distrusts your judgment. I would say that "the theme of ... in the work of ..." would make me want to reject an article out of the gate.

Not having a good title means that you haven't thought of the title rhetorically.  You've wasted an opportunity to make a rhetorical effect before you've even begun the paper per se.  My first paper published was "William Carlos Williams and the Free Verse Line."  It isn't horrible, but it isn't great either, since it is kind of dull-sounding. I turned in a paper my first semester  of grad school with the title "Some Aspects of Translation." The professor should have come down hard on me for this, but he didn't.  

3. The epigraph.  I love epigraphs, but they need to be short, sweet, and relevant.

4.  The introduction has to be extremely well crafted. Usually, a good introduction tells me that the entire paper will be good (and vice-versa). You need to work on the first sentence and the thesis quite extensively.  Here are some elements you need to include in your intro:

A.  What works are you studying? Who is the author if it is not a well-known one. Be sparing on the contextualization, and never do it in an irrelevant way. For example, don't list the prizes the poet has won unless you are making a argument about the process of their canonization or reception. Don't talk about their life unless you are talking about the relevance (or lack of) of biographical information.

B. What have other critics said about your author / topic.  Once again, relevance is key. There are a few approaches here:  critics have spoken about other novels by X, but not the one you are studying. Critics have written about the same novel, but they have ignored this particular aspect of it.

C.   What you are contributing to this critical dialogue.  Your thesis.  A strong thesis means a strong paper, if you can find evidence for it.  The thesis should, in some sense, contain the elements of an argument.

D. Some idea about what the structure of your argument. You can "sign-post" if you want. What I like to do is signpost, and then at the end re-write to eliminate the signposting so as to make the writing more elegant.

E. A theoretical framework.

This is a lot to do in a short space. The intro has to be proportionate to the length of the paper. You can't be making sign-posting gesture "as I will prove in the pages that follow" on the page 10 of a 19-page paper.

The introduction also has a rhetorical function.  It establishes you as a trustworthy source who can speak with authority. You can uses rhetorical hedges, but you shouldn't be too tentative in putting forth your views.


4. The Body of the Paper.  Sometimes, after a dismal introduction, a student will write a decent body of the paper.  The body is where you demonstrate the thesis. This means analyzing something. Analysis is also rhetorical, in the sense that you never just stop dead in your tracks to analyze something and interrupt the flow of ideas. For a dissertation chapter, you need to be more expansive, but for a seminar paper, you should never have sense that you are filling up space by redundant analysis. 20 pages seems long, but it is actually very short for making a significant point.

The organization should be relatively fluid.  You shouldn't have to do much sign-posting in the middle of the paper. The poems (or whatever units) you use should make different points, not versions of the same point over and over again.

When dealing with narrative, the plot itself can serve as a structuring device for the argument, but with as little plot summary as possible.

5.  Never, ever center each line of the poem if the poem is not printed like that in the original text.  That is an undergraduate move.  Other undergraduate moves:  dictionary definitions.  "From the dawn  of time...."  openings. Paragraphs that are too short and undeveloped. References to the class itself: "As the professor stated in class..." Plot summaries.  Encyclopedia-type information. Thesaurus words.

What I am calling undergraduate moves are things that you really shouldn't do as an undergraduate, even.  

6.  Obviousness and originality. You don't want to belabor obvious points at the expense of original points.  There should be a rhetorical hierarchy operative here.  You are telling the specialist reader something that he or she doesn't already know.

7. The conclusion should be concise.  The paper shouldn't end too abruptly.  Avoid "routine" sounding phrases in the conclusion. "As we have shown." Don't give the subtitle "Conclusion" or your conclusion. Don't summarize in a way that's too dull or merely repetitive. Suggest some new idea that flows logically out of our argument but is not too far from what the argument say.  The last sentence should be extremely well-crafted.

8. The entire  paper is a rhetorical performance. You are never just laying out information, but presenting information, analysis, etc... in the context of an argument.

9. One final thing: using previous criticism wisely and well. You shouldn't get bogged down in numerous quotes from other critics, but you shouldn't ignore them either. There are two or three main relations your work can have to previous criticism:

A. Contextualization / background.  You use a quote from another critic to make a more obvious background quote, or to provide relevant contextualization.

B. Reinforcement.  You use a critic who thinks the same thing you do. So maybe your thesis isn't so crazy?

C.  Antithetical.  You are using a critic in order to highlight your own originality.

10. Ok. One more thing.  You are using the paper to develop yourself intellectually.  If this doesn't happen when you write the paper, you are wasting your breath.  What is the paper leading to? A dissertation chapter?

Precise

What if we say poetry as a more precise, rather than a more vague, use of language?

https://youtu.be/flQlSb1mKyI

There is no such thing as literature

Wednesday is a socially constructed concept. There is no such object as Wed. in the natural world. That doesn't mean that we can arbitrarily decide that it is not Wed. Social constructions are very strong in this sense. When I say that it is a fact that today is Wed., I am pretty sure of myself. I could make a mistake, for example during a vacation I might lose track of what day it really is, but that's the exception that proves the rule.

Literature is also socially constructed, but in a more profound way. Once again, there is no object out there called literature. It is a category, not a set of objects. Who gets to decide what gets called literature? We do. There is no God of literature who tell us what it is; rather, it is the collective decision of people who use that category.

Let's look at some definitions.

"written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit: a great work of literature.
• books and writings published on a particular subject: the literature on environmental epidemiology.
• leaflets and other printed matter used to advertise products or give advice."

Let's take the first one, because the others are clearly different meanings of the same word.

*The first idea we have about literature, is that it should be written. The idea of "letras" or "letters" is at the heart of the matter. Yet I don't think anyone seriously believes that works of a primarily oral nature do not belong to the general category we are talking about. A few dumb journalists might think this, but nobody who has contemplated the problem for more than a few hours.

*The second idea we have about literature is that it has to be good to count as part of the category. In other words, bad plays or poems are not "literature," only good ones. This is very strange, since categories like this are usually not honorific. I guess colloquially we can say: "You call that breakfast!"[Where the breakfast is a badly cooked one.] I was always puzzled by the idea of "literary fiction" because all fiction [prose narrative] is literary. It might not be good, but it is literature. But since we are talking about a social construction, we have to look at the way people decide to construct it, and that honorific term is certainly part of it. If I said I was a drummer and you hired to play on my record, and I give you an incompetent rhythm track... you wouldn't be very happy if I said: "Well, I never said I was a good drummer." In order to fulfill the drumming function it has to be good drumming, in a certain sense.

*A third idea is that idea of "fiction" itself. The idea is that the essence of the literary is it made-up quality. So a science fiction novel set in the future does not describe reality, and even a confessional lyric constructs a fictional self. I'm not sure that's a defining concept, because a lot of things that are literary aren't primarily defined by it, but we have to recognize that it is part of the way we construct literature socially, despite the rise of "creative non-fiction."

*A fourth idea is that if it's non-fictional, it has to be even better written. In other words, the absence of one "literary" element means there has to be some compensation. So a diary, or essay, or lyric poem, or real-life letter is literary if it is good enough, whereas a pulp fiction potboiler is literary because it is made up. Other things are literary because they seem to aspire to the honorific quality, even if they aren't actually good. So a middle-brow "literary" novel (not genre fiction) is literary like a Mary Oliver poem is. It may be crap but it wears its literariness on its sleeve.

Since these ideas about literature are shifting, there is no such thing as literature: only shifting frames of reference. We don't have the same conception as obtained in previous centuries.

So the Nobel prize in literature is a prize in nothing in particular. There isn't the consensus we have about Wed, even.

Let's look at the case of Bob Dylan. The easiest objection to rebut is the idea that his art is mostly musical and oral, and hence not literary. But everyone knows that literature derives from something that used to call "poetics" and that lyric poetry, sung to the lyre and in modern times the guitar, is a major genre. Musically, Dylan is not that great. He can't sing, is an average guitar player, and I don't think his melodies are great. If you gave him an award for music (and in fact he's won many awards) nobody would object that his actual achievement is in the words. But it would be true. That is his strong point for most who admire him.

The second objection is that he simply is not good enough. This is fine, if you really believe he is not that great a writer. But I fear that there is a confusion here. The idea he is not good enough also stems from the fact that he belongs to a world that people have constructed as music, or entertainment, or pop culture. But those are just categories too, right?