FIRST PAPER
TOPIC:
Chapbook
Analysis
General Requirements
1. Write a ten-page paper, following the "specific requirements" below. A preliminary oral report on your paper, in which you provide us with the title of the chapbook you will study, and a summary of its contents, will be due during class on October 22. A hard copy version of the paper is due at the beginning of class on Tuesday, October 29.
2. Your paper must be computer-processed. The text should be double-spaced. Please give your paper a title, and write your name on the back of the last page. Do not write your name elsewhere on the paper. All pages should be numbered.
3. Citations to texts read in this course should be made in parentheses in your paper. For example, if you refer to a passage on page 13 of Elisabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, indicate this in the following manner at the end of your sentence, after the period: (Eisenstein, 13) Full citations to any work not assigned in class should be made in footnote or endnote form. For more suggestions, see the guide to editing.
Specific Requirements
1. Select a chapbook from the list of chapbooks I have prepared. Some of these works are available online, through the Early Modern Books Online (EEBO) resource, on the Vera page of the MIT libraries. Others can be consulted in hard copy at the Houghton Library, the Rare Books Collection at Harvard. (Directions to the Houghton Library, in Harvard Yard.)2. Read the work, and be prepared to give us its title and a summary of its contents in class on October 22.
3. Write a ten page report on this work, due at the beginning of class on October 29, in which you address the following issues:
- What is the source of the story? If possible, state how the chapbook version of the story differs from previous versions of the story.
- Summarize the contents of the chapbook.
- Who is the intended audience for the chapbook? (Here you may wish to draw on the work of Margaret Spufford we read in class, or Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (available at the reserve reading desk in Hayden, 14S-100.)
- In what ways does this work blend oral and print culture? Consider the work's content and its typographical conventions.
- Would your detailed study of this chapbook cause you to modify any aspects of Ong's argument about orality and literacy? Would it prompt you to rethink Eisenstein's notion of a "printing revolution"? (You must discuss either Ong or Eisenstein in your paper, but you do not have to consider both.)