University of Toronto

OPEN BOOK In-tutorial paragraph, 14 October

Pick a section of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" of about ten lines and write a paragraph explaining the lines and their significance to the poem as a whole. You may comment on whatever elements of these lines you like: whatever interests you, and whatever you think should interest others. You may choose and consider the section in advance, and you may also (and likely should) look up in advance any unfamiliar words, allusions, or techniques. But please save the actual writing of the paragraph for in tutorial. You will have twenty minutes in which to write. Please double space (you'll need at most two pages of lined paper), and, for your own sake as much as ours, be neat. We can't grade what we can't read.

So you know, this first assignment has several purposes. Most broadly, we want to see early on how well you write, and in a small assignment where the cost of not doing as well as you might like isn't punitive (it's only worth 5% of your course grade). And we want to assess your ability to understand and say something about literature, to find something interesting to say about it and say it an interesting way. Don't worry about repeating ideas you picked up about the poem in lecture or tutorial, but do worry about demonstrating those ideas in other, more specific ways than you heard in class. As with all literary criticism, assume as your audience a generally educated reader who has read the poem but not recently.