Rough Paper #1 Assignment: Due Friday, September 18th

 A so-called ‘rough’ paper is exactly that: an attempt to work out ideas on paper and not worry too much about being polished or turning in your best writing. It falls somewhere between the reading questions and a polished paper. Think bigger, but don’t try necessarily harder. Just try to have fun with these and not worry about the grade—they’re worth less, and you can always revise them anyway. For this paper, I’m mostly interested in the connections you can forge between the two works, each one of which is quite revolutionary in its way and was shocking to its contemporaries.

Choose ONE of the following:

OP1:     How does each work share a common philosophy (or rejection?) of love? How do they examine the attitudes and actions of love, and why might both be critical of what men and women do in the name of love? And why might both works be critical of ideals in love?

OP2:     How might we read each work as a condemnation of upper-class values and the accepted class structure? In general, each work concerns people who have wealth and luxury: what use do they make of these advantages? And what happens to the lower-class people who come into their path?

OP3:     How might each work be playing with Shakespeare’s famous idea that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts” (As You Like It). In other words, how is each work self-consciously theatrical in satirizing how people fall into predictable roles and patterns? Do people ‘act’ rather than feel? Follow the lines of their class rather than the will of their heart? Is society (or something else) our ultimate director?

OP4:     Discuss two characters (one from each work) that seem to compliment each other in something more than just their actions (their morality, their philosophy, their psychology, etc). What makes them so alike? Why might Chekhov have been inspired from the earlier character, and how did he adapt/revise this character into his own time and play?

REQUIREMENTS

• CLOSE READING: Which means, use the text to illustrate your ideas and help us understand what a passage is really saying. Don’t assume that everyone understands it. If you quote something, explain it to us—show us the small nuances of a given speech or description. A single sentence can change an entire book, after all!
• NO PLOT SUMMARY: Readers don’t need to know what the play is about—assume they’ve already read it. They need to see what you think about it. Guide us, don’t summarize things to us.
• CITATIONS: When you quote something, introduce the work (which can be as easy as saying, “In Act One of The Seagull, Trigorin says…”) and be sure to cite the page number at the end.
• DUE FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18^th BY 5pm (e-mail or in my box)