Finals Are Here!!!

Two of my English classes this semester--2140, British Literary History I, and 2150, British Literary History II--have a final paper (normal, right?). I'm having a hard time brainstorming for 2150 part two of the survey course, which, strangely, is the class I like the most. At the same time, I'm coasting through a paper for the other half of the survey, which I didn't like much at all. How weird is that? Plus they're both due on Friday, so I really need to get myself in gear and get them done (procrastinators unite...tomorrow).

English 2140 covers Anglo-Saxon to Restoration periods, and our example texts were Beowulf (Anglo-Saxon), various tales from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (medieval), Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Elizabethan Age), Milton's Paradise Lost (17th century), and Swift's Gulliver's Travels (18th century), as well as many smaller texts to fill in the gaps. I've decided to write my paper, which is supposed to be 3-5 pages (originally I thought it was 6 pages, so this is one of the few times that I am very much relieved that I was wrong), on the use of elements of the romance genre in the Wife of Bath's Tale from Canterbury Tales. Basically my paper will be about how things like chivalry, the quest, magic, etc put and keep women in power. Looking at my outline/brainstorm I think it will be an awesome paper. Maybe I'll post it.

English 2150 covers Romanticism to the present. We've had more example authors than texts: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft (her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is one of the few example texts), Jane Austen (!!!), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. The major text to which we refered is Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. For the final paper we're supposed to use our first two small drafts about how Krapp (the character) is neither a Romantic nor a Victorian writer and combine it with a discussion of WHY Krapp isn't a Modern writer either. I'm getting confused knowing when I'm comparing Krapp to a character or a writer. Hopefully I get this paper done in the next two days. Wish me luck.