Topic: “Language and Power.” Language, names and naming, maps and mapping, are all tools for communicating, and are all often used in ways that exert power. Choose a poem by Eavan Boland or Paul Muldoon and discuss how it uses language to exert power, question or challenge it, redirect it, or surrender to it. An explication is a mini-essay on a very short passage (a paragraph or two of prose, a brief poem, or a brief section of a longer one) from a literary work. For this assignment, you’ll need to choose an excerpt from Translations. Your explication should contain a very short introduction that states a thesis, and a short conclusion that explains how the body of your paper has proved that thesis. The middle is all focused on the details of the text. Begin by reading the passage carefully and underlining any provocative words or phrases that catch your eye and relate to your topic. Circle any words that you dont understand. Look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary (Links to an external site.). Look for the ways that the author uses figurative language (similes, metaphors, symbols) to convey meanings. What other words might the author have used instead of the ones that s/he did? Why choose these words instead of the others? What affect do the words s/he chose have on this passages significance to the cultural issue that you are examining. If you get stuck or have trouble getting started, ask yourself: What is the author leaving out or not saying? What is simply interesting or weird about this passage? What words or other characteristics jump out at you or seem particularly striking or even incongruous? What words seem to have multiple meanings? What connotations do these words carry? How do these connotations relate to your topic? You might consider any of the following that apply: from whose point of view do you get this passage? What is the passages tone (sad, foreboding, celebratory?), imagery (stark, beautiful, inconsistent with the passage?), style (flowery, grandiose, plain?), sentence structure (long, short, flowing, choppy?), point of view (first, third, omniscient, limited?). Remember, these elements only matter in so far as they affect your interpretation of the topic you are investigating. With poetry, consider formal matters like rhyme, meter, line breaks, etc. How does the way the poem’s put together relate to what it means? When writing your explication, make sure to do the following: Name the work and the author; identify the speaker and/or characters involved; briefly explain the context of the passage (where it occurs in the work, and any important incidents associated with it) and the cultural issue that you will examine. Assert an argument about how the passage illustrates the texts attitude toward or stance on a specific issue. Support this argument by pointing to literary characteristics (sentence structure, figurative language, imagery, tone, plot, word choice) that elucidate the meanings of the passage and/or the work as a whole.
