Anthony Lioi
Principles of Literary Study

Essay 3: Research in the Dark Wood

For your final 5-6 page essay, you have a choice:

1. The first possibility involves the Inferno. If you choose to work with Dante, I want you to select a particular canto for close reading. Read through the canto once, taking note of the mythological, political, and religious allusions, as well as the dominant symbols and metaphors at work (e.g., the suicides as barren trees which speak by bleeding).

Now determine what you want to know more about: for instance, the shape of hell in the Aeneid, the place of the Harpies in Greek mythology, troubador love lyrics, the story of the destruction of Sodom in the book of Genesis, etc. Then do some external research on the topic, keeping in mind that your needs are modest: you only want one or two secondary sources for the purposes of this assignment. Your sources may be journal articles, scholarly anthologies, critical works on Dante, other literary or theological works with some connection to the Inferno, and so on. One of the purposes of this outside research is to make you familiar with the tools that literary scholars employ to analyze literature; therefore, I encourage you not to use general encyclopedias and other high-schoolish sources---they aren't specific enough for your purposes, and using them won't teach you anything new.

Once you have done the outside research, reread your canto to see what difference it has made in your interpretation of the poem, and incorporate this new perspective into your close reading. Remember to integrate the new information into the argument as a whole: if you want to show that Dante was influenced by the troubadors' ideas about love, use the entire close reading to demonstrate your point.

2. Your other option is to go through a similar process with another poem of your choice. You may use a poem we have already read, like Gary Snyder's "The Hump-Backed Flute Player" or Denise Levertov's "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus," or you may select a poem from outside the syllabus. In either case, you must clear your project with me before you proceed.

Whatever you choose to do, I strongly suggest that your first research path pass through the Rutgers IRIS system and the Modern Language Association's Bibliography, which is available in hard-copy in the reference section of the Alexander Library and on-line through the INFO option on the Rutgers Homepage (Web address = http://www.rutgers.edu). If anyone wants help in using these resources, I'd be happy to provide it.

Remember to document your sources and provide a bibliography as described in the MLA Handbook