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pompompurin1028 · 8 months

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oh my goodness. you mentioned Wilde in the tags in the thing you reposted about people with niche information and i went this is my time to shine.

Oscar Wilde by Katherine Worth and A preface to Oscar Wilde by Anne Varty are both great overviews that also go into quite a bit of detail about his specific works.

also, Wilde's non fiction works and essays are also really great reads to get more understanding of his fiction, i've read Soul of Man Under Socialism and De Profundis; this is a link to a website with a lot of his works including these: https://www.wilde-online.info/essays-and-lectures.htm

(btw, if you ever have a feeling Wilde was influenced by someone but you're not quite sure, look for their name in either of those texts - they all namedrop about fifty people. i don't know if you need to write about Wilde but i've found those super useful for evidencing links and showing influence of other authors on his ideas)

speaking of De Profundis, this blog post is a really interesting one looking at Wilde's love of and use of mythology in his works.

there's also a novel called Green Carnations by Robert Hichens which I've heard is a really great fictional/satirical story inspired by Wilde's life and relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas.

and finally, here are some JSTOR articles i have saved which you may found interesting

https://doi.org/10.2307/372764 - Richard Foster, goes into a lot of the nuances of Importance of Being Earnest, specifically how Wilde uses and changes literary conventions in his comedies (i found this super useful bc with his comedies, you can always kind of tell that he's playing around with ideas but i find it really easy to oversimplify things so i liked the detail in this analysis)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45269274 - Nils Clausson, looks at the symbolism in his poem The Sphinx which is just generally one of my favourites

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40754628 - John Allen Quintus, looks more broadly at Wilde's place in the aestheticism movement and ideas of morals in his works

(btw i do believe you need a jstor subscription to access these - let me know if you can't access them and i can send you them another way)

anyway, apologies for the long ask, i'm way too excited to talk about Wilde at a moment's notice, but i hope those are helpful and interesting!!

Oh my goodness thank you so so much for the detailed answer this made me so happy😭❤️

I took a course on Oscar Wilde (this summer) and kind of fell in love (not that I didn't after reading Dorian Gray but still). I also sort of knew he wrote a lot and honestly two months is hardly enough :')

I really adore his prose and essays <3 (I've read Dorian Gray, De Profundis, "The Picture of Mr. W.H" and "The Decay of Lying"). I was rather sad he didn't write as much prose in fiction, but I'll definitely have to check out Soul of Man under Socialism! I've heard of it but I hadn’t had the time (or at times energy) to check it out yet. And of course all those other essays too, I rather like approaching his works through a theoretical/philosophical angle

And thank you for the blog on De Profundis, and the jstor articles, I will dig into them when I can :3. And yess, it's so easy to simplify works like The Importance of Being Earnest, and honestly I felt that I did so too on first reading. But my professor approached the work through an angle of his characters rejecting skepticism regarding the question of personal identity, which was a concern through many of his works (especially quite a few plays I have read) and instead looking for what they personally felt to be truth and such (I argued and felt in my paper for the course lol) allowed a comic and complete ending for all the characters :)

And I do have a jstor account! If I can't access them, I'll just try through my uni library agsjsk.

And please no worries! I love talking about these things ❤️❤️ I'm so happy to be recommended some papers to read because honestly I have no idea where to even begin in that sector haha

#asks 💌#Sweet Visitors⚘️

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thoodleoo · 3 years

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i just love this blog & first up want to thank you & i hope you enjoy your latte or coffee/beverage of choice ! i have had a pressing question for a while (ever since translating book four of the aeneid in ap latin when i was in high school) & was hoping you could provide some resources: why does dido fall in love with aeneas ? i mean i get that she was struck by cupid’s arrow etc and she was ‘made’ to fall in love w him by juno & venus etc but like, in the symbolic sense that stuff has to mean something right ? she was a queen who had everything, she had her own city and tons of power and powerful suitors (okay, bad ones but whatever) — why would she throw it all away & like literally kill herself over some dude she knew for a hot sec ? i just don’t understand the character motive here and when the gods are often representing other deeper meanings in the text then surely there must be some symbolic significance or insight into the human mind or the nature of love regarding her suicide ? it just seems so wrong and such an ... un feminist ?? end to her story after her boss life as a queen & the image i have of her when her story is being told is completely not of the type of woman who would kill herself over a man. any thoughts ? what did she see in him (beyond her being moved by his story and his loss of his wife that he LEFT BEHIND) ?! i’ve read a few jstor articles on this but none of them are really analyzing the relationship between aeneas & dido so i would love to get linked up w any books articles etc if any come to mind that specifically delve into this (to me) problematic aspect of dido’s character !! thank U :’)

hey! thanks for the coffee!

to answer your question: i don’t really have any resources, and tbh i dont have the energy to go searching them up, but what i CAN tell you is my own personal opinion!

i’d pitch it to you this way: why do the gods have to have some deeper symbolic meaning? this is an epic poem; their presence isn’t metaphorical. they are direct actors in the story. when we’re told that dido is made to fall in love with aeneas because of juno and venus’s meddling, that is LITERALLY what happens in the story. the truth of it is that the gods are cruel, and when they interfere with mortals in order to get what they want, humans are the ones who end up suffering.

even then, it’s not like dido only knew aeneas for a “hot sec.” he spends a good deal of time with her in carthage, so much so that mercury has to come tell him to get a move on. even without venus’s charms, it’s not too hard to believe that dido could fall in love with someone whose life is so similar to hers. and while it’s true that she is a powerful queen who has been living without a husband for a while now, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to see her being devastated by losing someone she loves for a second time (especially when aeneas makes such an....unsavory exit)

ultimately, though, dido’s suicide is tied to the fact that her love for aeneas isn’t entirely natural. we see this in other myths, like the story of medea- when the gods force people to fall in love, that love is so intense that it consumes them. i don’t see it as coming out of nowhere. still, you’re well within your rights to find it unsatisfying, and i do recommend that you look into some of the alternative stories about dido- she doesn’t always die because of her love for aeneas!

#to-kalon #aeneidposting

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jawnkeets · 4 years

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Hello Frankie, hope you’re staying safe and well in lockdown. You obviously read a lot and l was wondering where you get your actual literature (books, poems, plays, etc) from? Does your university provide them? Do you go to the library or do you buy them? I’d love to start reading more classic literature and poetry but the books can be expensive! If you have any suggestions on how to source them I’d be really grateful. Thank you so much and have a lovely day! ✨

hi, and you too anon!! so before i got to oxford it was mostly a mixture of charity shops (often unsuccessful but i always lived in hope and found a few gems), jstor (whatever i could access for free) project gutenberg and poetry foundation. it is still disproportionately the latter two. since i’ve got to oxford it also tends to be SOLO (search oxford libraries online) for a lot of online articles and a few online books accessible to oxford uni students, my college library, and the english faculty library. i do buy (majority second-hand) books but i would say i could read the vast vast majority of what i read without very many at all (i’m just a sucker for them and like material books, and don’t have my spending priorities right...). also most of the stuff i read is in the public domain as it’s written before late 20th century so can be found pretty easily online!!

if you’re wondering what to find online/ in a library/ what to buy (you’re absolutely right that things can mount up), i’d say chunky books are generally better in material form, especially if you’re studying them, to flick back and forth etc, set texts are better bought for annotations and familiarity with where certain lines are on the page etc, and maybe also buy the odd book you KNOW you’re going to love and/ or want to continually come back to. and and also maybe if you think the work will be hard to understand without an introduction to put it into context - an oxford world classics or penguin edition might be useful then (wiki can give u plot and so can sparknotes etc, but if you want a slightly more academic/ analytical take), but only buy if you can’t find it in a library of course - i personally don’t have access to one at home. other than that no need to spend a penny (and even this isn’t absolutely necessary)! and that’s something i really love about literature, and about the internet for making it possible. sadly this isn’t the same for secondary texts, criticism, etc - without oxford i’d be a bit stuck, and i really was at school. but for primary texts the internet is a magical place, and unless you’re getting reaally obscure classic lit will be readily accessible. hope this helps 🌹

#asks

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realtalk-princeton · 4 years

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I have a paper due on dean's date and I'm really scared because I've never written a paper like this before (I have writing sem next semester and I never really did anything like this in high school)?? Is there any advice you can give on how to start the actual writing process (I think I've found some good sources but idk man this is all so scary!!!)?

Response from Sulpicia:

I’ve written somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 papers and formal written assignments of various lengths, and I will say that things get much easier as you get practice. Don’t expect things to be perfect the first time! This is my personal writing process, so feel free to adapt as necessary.

Step 1: Understand the question. How long should it be? Are you supposed to be close reading a passage, bringing together research from different readings/areas in class, or conducting original research? Often, it’s a combination of a few things. For this example, I’m going to assume you’re doing a research paper with a fairly open-ended prompt. Page count matters a lot too; a 5-7 page paper will be much smaller in scope than a 10-12 page paper, which will in turn be smaller than a 15-20 page paper. I’m going to assume you’re doing a 10-12 page paper but most of the same tips apply.

Step 2: Develop a topic. It seems like you’re already mostly there! I find this to be the hardest part of the writing process. I usually like to start by going through class readings that I can draw upon for the paper (for some classes that’s all of it, for others that’s a subset) and rereading them, looking to see if there are any questions that were left unanswered in class. If you have a more structured prompt, then it might be useful to reread the material and see how much you can develop an answer through that. At this stage, I like to make a lot of notes on paper, and if I’m using a lot of sources I might make a web or chart to figure out how the concepts relate. Personally, I find it helpful to center my research papers around one “lead” concept and one “supporting” concept. By that I mean that you can focus on reading one piece of text through multiple theoretical lenses/the broader themes of the class, or you can apply one theoretical lens to multiple pieces of text/the broader themes of the class. The key is to focus on one specific thing.

For example, in my Fall JP my “lead” concept was a group of poems, where I narrowly focused on the treatment of slavery. In addition to my own close reading, I researched some theoretical sources and then used those sources to help understand this particular area of the text. Even though I was critiquing and quoting these scholarly sources, they were the “supporting” concept because they were helping me (and the reader) understand the main thing I was writing about.

I actually like to brainstorm term paper topics all semester and write them down when inspiration strikes. Good term papers are typically about something that, when you’re reading it, makes you think “That’s weird” or “You’re wrong, [insert scholar/author name]”, or “This contradicts with [other reading]”. Academic paper writing, just like good storytelling, requires conflict; it’s not useful to anyone to write papers that just go along and agree with everything in a source. Going back to primary sources or comparing secondary sources is how you find these conflicts and bring them to light.

The last thing you should do in this step is write a clear, specific question you want to answer. For example, I once wrote a paper where the question was “Based on manifestos from Italian Futurist writers, how was clothing incorporated into the Futurist movement, and how was this similar to and different than other Futurist art forms?”

Step 3: Brainstorm Solutions. Once you have a topic, you probably have some sources already. At this time, it’s helpful to go to the library and look for some research on your topic. Sometimes I go to the library to get ideas for topics, while other times I have specific questions I want answered and look for those answers in an existing text. In addition to our amazing library, you can look on Jstor, which is freely accessible to Princeton students, as well as Google Scholar, which has a lot of links to useful books and articles. This stage of research will help you start developing answers to your questions.

Once again, I like to make paper notes because I think it’s easier to think non-linearly on paper. Write anything down; all ideas are good ideas at this stage! I also like to make scans and print out passages from books so I can annotate them. After you’ve done this for a while, look at what you’ve written and see if there are any common themes. If you had to answer your question in one sentence, what would you say? Try to avoid the “three-pronged” thesis; this kind of roadmapping can be helpful for you and a grader if you’re writing a timed essay for a test, but isn’t really helpful for college-level writing, where you want to give more room for your ideas to breathe. The prompt that I learned in Writing Sem for writing a thesis statement goes like this: “By looking at [lead concept,] we can see that [answer to your question], which is important because [connection to broader concept/theme of class]”. If you can it’s good to not use these exact words, but it’s also okay to have some sort of structure, especially at this stage. Here’s the thesis statement from my Futurism paper, which was not my best thesis statement ever, tbh:

“I argue that Futurist fashion, as exemplified by Volt and Balla’s manifestoes, creates a realizable posthuman experience characterized by the destruction of traditional boundaries of the human condition.“

That was for a paper that was about 10 pages long. If your paper is shorter then you’ll probably need a more specific thesis statement, and if it’s longer you’ll need one that is broader or has more details.

Step 4: Develop a structure. Writer/editor Yung In Chae ‘15 wrote a really great piece about writing (which I’ll link below) in which she said that “ If the sections of your article are completely interchangeable, then you have not figured out the structure.” This is the same with your essay. Think about the first thing you need to prove for someone to buy your thesis statement, then the next thing that builds on that, then the next thing that builds on that. If I’m writing about a text, I often find it helpful to begin at the beginning and progress roughly chronologically, although you should feel free to jump around as sometimes you need to present a later piece of evidence for someone to understand the earlier one. I’ll make a rough outline either on a piece of paper or on a Word document, making bullet points with pieces of evidence and things I want to cover. Some people like to outline so heavily the process of writing is just stringing the outline together with transition words. I don’t do this, but think it’s helpful to include usable sentences in your outline so that way you make easy spots for yourself when writing. Then I print out my outline and keep it next to me.

Step 5: Write a rough draft. I lied. This is the hardest part of a paper. The blank page is like a speed bump; if you’ve done a lot of prewriting/acceleration it’s easier to sail over, but if you’ve done nothing, it feels daunting and impossible. I like to start at the beginning with my writing, but some people prefer to jump into the middle and write the introduction later. I find the introduction helps orient me, but you can see what works best for you. I’m a huge fan of what writer Ann Lamott calls “shitty rough drafts” in her book on writing, “Bird By Bird.” While the aim isn’t for the draft to be garbage, telling yourself that you will revise (and giving yourself time to revise) helps liberate you from the feeling that you have to make perfect prose every time. Just start writing and see what your paper looks like; I have never written a paper where I didn’t find more evidence while writing, or where my structure hasn’t changed in ways I could have predicted by doing anything but writing the paper.

Don’t get too stuck on a perfect first sentence. I find it helpful to open with something we discussed in lecture, or the weird, incongruous thing that led me to write the paper in the first place. Here are some first sentences I’ve written in the past:

1. “At its core, elementary education is a concise synthesis of a society’s core values, biases, and contradictions; the “basic” concepts which make up the first years of learning become the foundation upon which all later thought must necessarily rest, both in and outside of the classroom. “ (JP)

2. “A man wanders through city streets alone, buys his groceries, and returns home unharassed, noting that in his solitude he is more fortunate than even a famous senator” (JP)

3. “In his 1920 “Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion,” Vincenzo Fani (using the pseudonym “Volt”) writes that Futurist thinkers will “transform the elegant lady into a real, three-dimensional complex,”[1] encouraging the use of “one hundred new revolutionary materials”[2] in the making of women’s clothing, including “paper, cardboard, glass, tinfoil. . .gas, growing plants, and living animals.”[3] Readers a century later will find striking comparisons to the daring and subversive ensembles worn by celebrities on contemporary red carpets, such as the singer Lady Gaga’s infamous “meat dress.”” (Term paper I’ve been using as an example)

As you can see, in (1) I started off with a broad generality meant to orient my reader which I, in my intro, narrowed into my specific topic. In (2), I used a narrative opening which I then expanded to get inside my topic. In (3), I introduced my source right away and then compared it to a contemporary source. I’m not saying any of these are the best writing ever, but there’s no “one way” to do an opening, even within one writer’s style.

Your intro can be as many paragraphs as you want and should end with your thesis statement. I like to think of this as the first part of a rollercoaster; you’re bringing your audience up a hill, slowly dragging them along as you introduce all of the major ideas of your paper (as well as any assumptions you may be making) before seamlessly placing your thesis statement at the top of the big hill and letting the argument run its course. The rest of the paper should be like a roller coaster as well; just like a rollercoaster pretty much zips along on its own force, you should aim for paragraphs and evidence to smoothly follow each other, with each sentence contributing to the last. Follow a pattern of evidence and analysis, and try to incorporate little chunks of evidence into your sentences rather than dumping them into sentences. Try to end your paragraphs on analytical points rather than evidence dumps.

Finally, you have to write a conclusion. My sixth-grade English teacher explained that the conclusion is where you “go beyond,” and this is what I think is key to a really successful essay. Yes, it’s awesome that you’ve proven your thesis, but why does it matter? How does it connect to broader course themes, the scholarly conversation, or even just life in general? Don’t be too trite, but try to think about how you, in 4-5 sentences, can summarize your argument and also make the meta-argument about why the world is smarter with your paper in it.

Step 6: Cite, Cite, Cite! Do this while you are writing your rough draft. Make a works cited page and add to it as you go, and also add in your in-text citations as you go to save yourself a world of stress. If your professor doesn’t specify you can use any style. I personally prefer Chicago style but I know APA is standard for sciences/social sciences. There are loads of resources online like EasyBib and Purdue Owl which are helpful for figuring out how to write citations, but the writing center is also helpful and you can always ask a research librarian as well (check your email for the “personal librarian” contact info). I brought both my JPs to my department’s subject librarian to double-check my citations.

Step 7: Revise! This is where your paper really takes shape. I revise like this. First, I print out my paper. Then, I sit down with it with a pen and write notes all over it, marking places where I need more information/evidence, where my argumentation is weak, where I’ve made typos, etc. Then, I open a new document and retype the whole thing from my revised copy. This helps me because I get overwhelmed by lots of text, and it also forces me to make all the revisions. Once I’ve got a clean non-rough draft, I also like to read my papers out loud, since that’s a good way to make sure you don’t have endless run on sentences or awkward prose. When I came to Princeton, I was usually doing 4-5 revisions of my papers, and I did about 5 complete drafts of my JP (with the biggest changes happening between my rough and first drafts). Now I typically only do 1-2 revisions, but that’s because I put the time in early as a self-editor and developed the skills to write better first drafts. I also find it helpful to have a patient friend read a draft, although it’s important to be conscious of their time.

I really can’t emphasize enough how much doing proper revising helps you stand out; most people here do not revise their work substantially, but that’s the space where you’re thinking critically about your work and enriching it. Unfortunately, our best ideas don’t come all at once but in stages, so editing is just as much about allowing your thinking to progress as anything else.

Step 7: Polish. Once your paper is edited, take this time to check for typos, add page numbers (with your name in the header), double-check citations, add a title (it doesn’t need to be art, but should be a real title and not “ENG 101 Term Paper”), and either cut down the paper to length or elaborate on a point to get it to the minimum length.

And you’re done! At this point, it takes me about 1hr/page to write a paper once I’ve done all my research, but I would allocate about 2hrs/page if you’re starting out. My #1 advice would be to not be afraid; the wonderful thing about writing is that your early drafts can be as bad as you want and nobody will ever know because you can revise, so liberate yourself. Also, you’re probably a really good writer already, so don’t be nervous :)

Here’s the link to the article which has much better writing advice than me, and write if you have more specific questions: https://eidolon.pub/ten-things-i-learned-about-writing-by-editing-68f3f93e45ef

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