English 11.67
Unit 1: Irish Creation of Irish Popular Culture
Writing Spotlight: Pathos & Concision

feeder 1A / feeder 1B

On April 27, 1907 in an Italian lecture hall, James Joyce slammed his place of birth in a lecture entitled "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages." As this excerpt suggests, the famous writer of Dubliners (1904; 1914) and The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1914) found plenty of reasons to live his adult life in Europe. While greatly respecting the green isle's long history of learning and artistic production, Joyce actively disliked contemporary Ireland for what he considered to be a suffocating political, social and religious environment. Nearly a century later, Ireland continues to evoke in inhabitants and outsiders alike the most intense, polarizing associations and emotions.

In the early 1990s, for instance, Ireland was simultaneously viewed as a dangerous hotbed of political discontent and the ideal venue for romantic vacations. Irish artistic production has long captured, packaged and disseminated the most extreme facts of Irish culture and society for international consumption. While expressions of Irish culture are richly diverse, often the most successful cultural capital offered by Ireland is the most extreme. The emotional tenor of such cultural packages has tended, arguably, to cluster around the most melodramatic, the most violent, the most sentimental, or the most spectacular events and situations. (Witness the success of the ecstatic, joyful Riverdance and Martin McDonagh's recent, morbid Broadway hit The Beauty Queen of Leenane.) Westerners seem to apprehend and appreciate the drama, the excitement, the chills just as much as the thrills.

This unit's assignments will consider the use of pathos in the hands of Irish musicians, writers and film directors, encouraging you to recognize and thoughtfully analyze exactly how a number of artists create a wide range of emotional reactions in their respective audiences.

Feeder 1A: Music Analysis

Purpose: to clearly convey two musical works’ differing emotional impact
Audience: readers of a music magazine like Paste
Writing Focus: concision, arguable thesis, points backed up by supporting details & examples

This first writing assignment requires you to select and analyze two different pieces of indigenous Irish music. One selection should be instrumental only, and the other should include lyrics. These constitute your only restrictions. You may choose pieces from any era and any musical genre.

In a 2-3 page essay, consider each pieces’ “intended” impact. While this may sound very subjective (whatever conclusions you draw will obviously be rooted in your own appraisal of the chosen piece), write authoritatively, like a professional attempting to convince a general audience that the music does something, something definable and consistent. Focus on the emotion evoked by each piece—given its particular mix of voice, instrumentation, and lyrics—using those references and terminology most familiar to you. That is, the non-musicians among you may find yourselves relying heavily on metaphor and analogy—perhaps even an extended, imagined story—to describe the music’s emotional impact. Those of you more familiar with music-making might discuss such elements as dynamics, tempo, key, instrumentation, voice, etc.

Be sure you: 1) speak as specifically as possible, using supporting detail and examples; 2) keep comparisons with other music to a minimum (maybe limit to intro or conclusion); and 3) interweave your analysis of the two pieces somehow, wrapping your discussion around an arguable thesis that differentiates between the two pieces’ use of pathos. Your conclusion might be that the pieces evoke very different emotions, that one more successfully evokes emotion, or perhaps that the emotion one piece evokes is less appropriate, perhaps less ethically or socially responsible when compared with the other.

If you prefer not purchasing an entire album, just purchase the individual works from I-Tunes or some such (legal) online service. Each peer-editing group will need to somehow get all of their (8-10) songs on one CD so I can listen to the music you’re analyzing before reading your work. (This way I end up with 4 CDs instead of 19).

Draft Workshop: Fdr 1A

• Is the author's thesis clearly stated and arguable? His/her argument should be an opinion you can debate, though it should also be stated as a fact (without reference to 1st-person singular pronouns like "I" or "me").
• Does the author's thesis actually involve a comparison of the two pieces of music?
• Does the argument highlight how each piece of music uses pathos, and the particular ways it evokes emotion from the listener/audience?
• Does the author bolster each point with supporting examples and detail, or do s/he instead make large generalizations without supporting evidence?
• Is the author's language concise and terse, or do they have difficult with wordiness and repetition?
• Is the argument clear and convincing?
• Does the paper fall between two and three pages, double-spaced, 12-pt font, Times New roman, with 1" margins?

______________________________

Feeder 1B: Literary Analysis

Purpose: close analysis of a short fictional excerpt’s particular use of pathos
Audience: readers familiar with the chosen piece (thus, no plot or context set-up necessary)
Writing Focus: concision, arguable thesis, points supported by detail

This 2-page essay should identify the tone the author intends to evoke in the work or passage you select (options below), and should dissect the means by which he evokes a particular pathetic reaction from the reader. You might consider such basic descriptors as the adjectives, adverbs, and verbs used, as well as the narrator’s shaping of imagery, atmosphere, and character. You could consider pacing or dialogue as well. Actually, the possibilities are endless. Just make sure you back up all assertions with supporting detail (references and, occasionally, really short quotes) and that you choose a narrow argument—focus on just a few points and ground them well in the text.

Options:

• James Stephens’s “Hunger” from the collection Etched in Moonlight (1928)
• chapters 1 & 2 from Flann O'Brien's The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story About the Hard Life (1941)
• chapters 51 & 52 from Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine (1937)

Draft Workshop: Fdr 1B

• Is the author's thesis clearly stated and arguable? His/her argument should be an opinion you can debate, though it should also be stated as a fact (without reference to 1st-person singular pronouns like "I" or "me").
• Does the author's thesis actually involve a comparison of the two pieces of music?
• Does the argument highlight how each piece of music uses pathos, and the particular ways it evokes emotion from the listener/audience?
• Does the author bolster each point with supporting examples and detail, or do s/he instead make large generalizations without supporting evidence?
• Is the author's language concise and terse, or do they have difficult with wordiness and repetition?
• Is the argument clear and convincing?
• Does the paper fall between two and three pages, double-spaced, 12-pt font, Times New roman, with 1" margins?
  

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu