Oral Reports:
Each student will present a 10-15 minute oral report on a critical article on one of the readings. You may choose the article yourself. Oral reports will be on Wednesday, but you should provide the class with the bibliographic reference on Monday. In your presentation you should summarize the argument, evaluate its persuasiveness, and consider its usefulness to the class. Graduate students will do two oral reports, one on Shelley and one on Byron. Please stay within the allotted time frame. This assignment is 10% of your grade.

Written Assignments:
There are three formal written assignments for this class, each worth 20% of your grade. Of the first two papers, one should be on Shelley and one on Byron (it does not matter which you do first); the final paper should be on both poets (presumably some sort of comparison and contrast). Undergraduate papers should be 4-5 pages each; graduate student papers should be 6-8 pages each. One of your papers may be, but need not be, based on your oral report(s). Your papers may address poems not on the syllabus, but check those out with me first.

My advice is always to focus your discussion sharply and narrowly, especially on papers as short as these. Have a clear, specific thesis based on a close reading of the text. Obviously you need not discuss longer works in their entirety, but even if you discuss only a few lines of, say, Prometheus Unbound you should gesture toward the relationship of your point to the poem as whole.

You may choose your own topic, but here are some suggestions to get you thinking:

• Attitudes toward Napoleon
• The Byronic Hero
• The poet as hero
• The relationship between / among the human, nature and / or the divine
• Attitudes toward sexuality or male / female relationships
• The use of simile or metaphor
• The limitations of language
• Politics and / or morality
• The use of the literary or mythic past