Dear students,
Now you should start thinking about planning the essay you want to write for your Irish Poetry and Drama seminar, as you have two weeks to upload your plan here by May 3.
So firstly, think about what plays or poems you wish to discuss in your essay, which must be between 2,000-2,500 words in total. For short one-act plays, you need to discuss more than one, but it is okay to write a full essay on one of the longer two-act plays by Friel or Reid or McDonagh. If you prefer to write on poetry, your essay should discuss 3 poems in detail. If you wish, you can write about a combination of a play and a couple of poems.
Secondly, decide what theme you want to address in the plays or poems about which you are going to write. Try to be specific rather than vague. Say, for example, you decide to write about old age. Narrow this topic down to something like: remembering and forgetting in old age in XYZ plays or poems. Or another example: instead of Nature in the poetry of XYZ, you could write about fixity and movement in landscape or seascape in the poetry of XYZ. Your topic needs to be anchored clearly in the plays or poems about which you write. If you chose to write about two different plays or three different poems, you should NOT divide your essay into sections, with a first section discussing one play or poem, then a second section discussing a second section. No, instead of this, you need to COMPARE aspects of the different plays or poems right through the course of your essay, as they relate to the topic you are examining. This makes for a much better essay.
Thirdly, you need to consult at least 4 or 5 critical sources in developing the argument of your essay. These sources can be essays published in academic journals that are relevant for the topic about which you are going to write. You can also find relevant information for your essay in books held either in the office of the Institute of English and American Studies in Danubianum, or in the Library Office in Sophianum Building basement floor. There are some good libraries in Budapest that have excellent holdings, including the Szabó Ervin library near Mikszáth tér or the MTAK (Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences). An excellent online source for journal articles is JSTOR:JSTOR Home
It is okay to receive some help from a native speaker in checking your grammar and phrasing when you are writing your essay, but under no circumstance generate an AI written essay. All essays are checked for AI and any use of AI results in automatically failure this course.
So then, your plan should consist of:
A paragraph explaining the general argument of your essay and the play(s) or poems or play(s)/poems that you are going to discuss in making this argument.
Two or three sentences explaining the argument that you plan for each section or paragraph in your essay. These sentences should specify the parts of the play(s) or poems or play(s)/poems about which you will write in each section/paragraph.
The references from journal articles or book chapters that you plan to use. For your essay play, this does not need to be a complete list of references, but you do need to indicate in your plan what the critical sources will be.
