English 389
Professor Newmark
Essay One
Due: Monday, September 25th
Length:
Six pages
Works Cited as page seven
Please answer one of the following questions. Cite from your primary text on multiple occasions. You may use critical texts to support or complicate your argument, but be sure to cite them and quote from them correctly. Please follow MLA guidelines (review them in your Everyday Writer, or other style guide, in you have questions). Your paper must pose an argument in the first paragraph, and you must support this argument with ample textual evidence.
1. What does Cabeza de Vaca become by the end of his journey across the American south and southwest? Is his journey a knowledge-journey? A spiritual journey? A journey of conquest? What does de Vaca conquer, perhaps?
2. Please consider the items surrounding the “Native American Trickster tales” in the Norton (John Smith and William Bradford). Analyze the inclusion of Native American Trickster tales in the anthology. How do these tales reflect very distinct differences between the cultures occupying the same lands, indeed vying for control over these lands, in the seventeenth century? Please identify the differences, with textual evidence, that you think best demonstrate the conflicting worldviews of Native and Euro-American cultures. Or, do these texts provide evidence that Native and Euro-American life philosophies are, in some instances, in sympathy with each other?
3. In “The Author to her Book,” Anne Bradstreet compares her book to a child. Identify lines in this poem where this comparison is clearest. How does she inflect her poetry with her experience as a mother and how is birthing and raising a child akin to birthing and raising a poem (to use her metaphor)? Are there examples that you can draw from other Bradstreet poems that demonstrate that her experiences as a woman – and as a wife and mother – particularly influenced her poetic expression? Do her poems suggest that, for her, artistry, motherhood, and womanhood are inextricably linked?