Sample Undergraduate Writings

An Analysis of the Functioning of Types of Discourse in Selected Works by Oscar Wilde. A close structuralist examination of what characters in Oscar Wilde's major works expect from different forms of expression. This was my English 150 paper at UC Berkeley; probably the most concise explanation of what this means is to say that it was my bachelor's thesis.

Temporal Dislocations and Visions of Interpretation in Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. Argues that a variety of conceptual problems prevent the poetic-hierophantic narrator in Shelley's poem from achieving his intended ends. Written for a junior seminar on Romantic poetry.

Stripp'd of Context: A Publication History of William Blake's Songs of Innocence. Songs of Innocence contains a group of poetic works that the artist conceptualized as entering into a dialogue with each other and with the works in his companion work, Songs of Experience. He also saw each of the poems in Innocence as operating as part of an artistic whole creation that was encompassed by the poems and images on the plates he used to print these works. While Blake exercised a fanatical degree of control over his publications during his lifetime, after his death his poems became popular and were encountered without the contextual material that he intended to accompany them.

The Existential Anguish of J. Alfred Prufrock. A close reading of Eliot's poem. Written for a freshman Intro to Lit class and published on a CD-ROM accompanying Kennedy & Gioia's Literature: An Introduction, Eighth Edition.