Outline & Annotated Bibliography for New Passport Essay

Hi everyone,

Please find below an outline of how I might rewrite the passport essay to respond to the new language, along with a (brief!) annotated bibliography.

Best,

Erin

Comprehensive Exam

Passport Essay

Reading Punctuation in “The Wanderer”

Outline:

Thesis: A reading of “The Wanderer”’s dependence upon minimal punctuation itself depends upon both a New Critical notion of textuality and a Lacanian notion of signification.

I) The first three points <·> of “The Wanderer” can be seen as delimiting three identities, reinforcing the ambiguity of how the anhaga (“solitary one”), eardstapa (“land-traveler”), and ic (“I”) interrelate.

II) This “close” reading favors a New Critical approach, examining the text itself (rather than its relation to outside bodies like the Exeter Book, Anglo-Saxon England, or the literary canon) and finding in that examination ambiguity inherent to the text’s structure.

III) At the same time, the reading assumes the validity of Lacan’s claims that de Saussure’s direct relationship of signifier and signified is “faulty” (“Letter,” 1293) and that what “I” signifies is unclear (1301).

Annotated Bibliography:

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. Orlando, Florida: Mariner Books. 1956. This study of ten canonical poems, first published in 1947, is an exemplar of the New Critical method. Its style of close reading is the one upon which this essay’s analysis is modeled.

The Exeter DVD: The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. Ed. Bernard J. Muir. DVD. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006. This electronic reproduction of the Exeter Book also contains the glosses of several editors. This essay employs these glosses to demonstrate how differently critics have read the relationship between anhaga, eardstapa, and ic.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1290-1302. Lacan’s 1957 work relates the unconscious to language, creating a bridge between psychology and linguistics (and semiology more broadly) that would prove essential to both disciplines. This essay depends upon Lacan’s interrogation of “I” as a material signifier.