1) I am sure you have heard of eating a meal at a restaurant and then sneaking out without paying for it. While this is unquestionably unethical and immoral behaviour, we can all see a certain sense in it. Now imagine paying for a meal but then sneaking out without eating it. Does this make any sense to you?

You have paid your tuition to attend Acadia, and you have enrolled in English 2283: Seventeenth-century Literature. As part of the class, you are required to read Paradise Lost. I am disinclined to let you pay for your meal and then sneak out without consuming it, so to ensure that you get the intellectual sustenance you have paid for I am going to require you to generate a question based on your reading of each of the twelve books of Paradise Lost.

I want to be perfectly clear about the purpose of these assignments. Our understanding of literature is enriched through fruitful discussion of that literature. Discussion can only happen if people read the literature and then think about it. Discussion is invariably more fruitful if people think about it for more than just a few seconds in class between the time the professor asks a question and an answer pops into your head. In order to ensure you read the poem, and to prompt you to think about it, so that we can have fruitful discussions where we can all learn from each other, I require you to generate a thoughtful question about each book of Paradise Lost as you read through it.

2) As you will be able to see from the course outline, there are other homework assignments due during the course of the term, too. These are also required assignments that you must submit, on time, in order to earn credit for English 2283.

For your first paper you must write on one of the poems or prose pieces we cover in class before we start on Paradise Lost. If you first obtain special permission, you may be allowed to write on a poem or an essay other than those we discuss in class, provided the piece you choose was authored by one of the authors whose works we read during January. You must make your paper conform to the template for electronic submission, as well as including an electronic copy of it formatted in MSWord. In both formats, your paper must also conform to MLA rules for citation and bibliography.

You will be expected to write a concise explication of the piece of literature you choose to work on, and to write to an audience of students such as those in ENGL 2283 who can be expected to have read the piece but not to have done any research on it, and not to have done a great deal of thinking about it.

You are required to read and incorporate into your paper at least two essay-length articles or chapters on the poem or prose piece you seek to explicate. This incorporation can be done in the form of a couple of paragraphs along the line of a literature review. The literature review is an integral part of longer academic works, and in it the author summarizes the critical conversation that provides the scholarly context within which discussions of the work are currently being conducted. Alternatively, you might choose to use your research to help you explain particularly difficult passages or concepts within the c17th poem or prose piece.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) has developed rules for the presentation of scholarly research in the Humanities. The purpose of these rules is to ensure scholars who read works written in conformance with MLA rules can conduct their own scholarly investigation into the sources that support the work being read, and to ensure immediate recognition of and distinction between a "Chapter Title" and a Book Title, or an "Article Title" and the name of the Journal within which the article appears. To engage in scholarly work in the humanities you need not know this meta-discourse intimately (I certainly don't), but you do need to know of it, to know that you must follow it, and therefore to know how to access it in order to make your work conform to it.

You are required to provide a list of references (a.k.a. a bibliography) you consulted as you prepared to write and wrote your paper. This list will conform to MLA rules.

In addition to adhering to the conventions of the MLA, you are also required to re-format your paper into an electronic template. I will provide you with this template, and place what will then be your webpage into the larger website for the first assignment for ENGL 2283 - 2006. Even though I will provide you with a template, you will still have to do more work to ensure your webpage is properly formatted, so be sure to plan accordingly.

I also have more faith in your aesthetic sense than I do in my own, so I encourage you to modify the template in small ways to make your page more attractive, or perhaps more functional. We will discuss this option in class.

For your second paper you must focus on the major poetic work produced in England during the seventeenth century, John Milton's Paradise Lost. We will devote the majority of our term to reading and discussing this profoundly philosophical poem, and during discussion a variety of topics will arise. Paradise Lost also has a critical history that matches its poetic and philosophical power, so you will have no difficulty finding a wide variety of approaches to the poem, or to some aspect of it. You are NOT expected to write about the entire poem. That would require a book-length study, at least. Rather, what you should do is find a topic that interests you, develop a thesis on that topic, and write a paper that consistently and coherently addresses that thesis. I do NOT expect you to produce a paper that is so startlingly new in its insights into the poem that you turn the head of Milton scholars every where. I DO expect you to use the opportunity provided by this second paper to teach yourself more about Paradise Lost and your chosen topic than you could learn without writing a solid, well-considered, and coherent paper on something that interests you. The oft-made demand for "originality" ought not to be thought of in global terms. Rather, it ought to be thought of in personal terms. If you reach a conclusion someone else has previously arrived at, that's fine, as long as you arrive there by dint of your own (i.e. original) processes of research, thinking, and writing.

For this paper, I will expect to see more evidence of research into your topic than was expected in your first paper.

This is no where near an exhaustive list, and you should feel free to develop any topic you like. I advise you to consult with me as you develop your topic, and before you put too much time and effort into it, as I am likely to be able to help guide you to secondary sources or to advise you in other ways.