When you have completed the assignment, please send it to your tutor to arrive no later than 23 January 2014. Remember to put a word count at the bottom of your assignment and to follow academic conventions as set out in Section 4.5 ‘Presentation and academic conventions’ in this Assessment Guide.
There are two parts to TMA 03:
First, write a reflective commentary of 350 words describing how the feedback from your tutor on your first two assignments will inform your approach to TMA 03.
Then in an essay of 1,500 words compare and contrast the ways in which Shelley and Hoffmann depict ‘a life in pursuit of the ideal’ in the two passages below.
Please note that both parts of the TMA are compulsory. Fifteen per cent of the marks are allocated to your reflective commentary and eighty-five per cent to your essay.
Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: – the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, [130]
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them: – Winds contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath [135]
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome [140]
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
(Shelley, from ‘Mont Blanc’, verse paragraph 5, pp. 216–17)
Nathanael refrained from giving way to the bitterness that Siegmund’s words aroused in him. He mastered his annoyance and only said, in grave tones: ‘Olimpia may well inspire a weird feeling in cold prosaic people like you. It is only to the poetic soul that a similarly organized soul reveals itself! I was the only one to arouse her loving gaze, which radiated through my heart and mind; only in Olimpia’s love do I recognize myself. People like you may complain because she doesn’t engage in trivial chit-chat, like other banal minds. She utters few words, certainly; but these few words are true hieroglyphs, disclosing an inner world filled with love and lofty awareness of the spiritual life led in contemplation of the everlasting Beyond. But you can’t appreciate any of this, and I’m wasting my words.’
‘God preserve you, my friend,’ said Siegmund in very gentle, almost melancholy tones, ‘but I feel you’re in a bad way. Count on me if anything – no, I’d rather not say any more!’ Nathanael suddenly felt that the cold, prosaic Siegmund was truly devoted to him, and when the latter extended his hand, Nathanael shook it very heartily.
Nathanael had entirely forgotten Clara’s existence and his former love for her; his mother, Lothar, and everyone else had vanished from his memory; he lived only for Olimpia and spent several hours with her every day, holding forth about his love, the heartfelt rapport between them, and the elective affinities linking their souls, to all of which Olimpia listened with devout attention. From the darkest recesses of his desk Nathanael fetched everything he had ever written. Poems, fantasies, visions, novels, stories, were supplemented daily by all manner of incoherent sonnets, ballades, and canzoni, which he read to Olimpia for hours on end without ever wearying. But then, he had never had such a perfect listener. She did not sew or knit, she never looked out of the window, she did not feed a cage-bird, she did not play with a lap-dog or a favourite cat, she did not fiddle with scraps of paper or anything else, she never needed to conceal her yawns by a slight artificial cough: in a word, she stared fixedly at her lover for hours on end, without moving a muscle, and her gaze grew ever more ardent and more animated. Only when Nathanael finally rose and kissed her hand, and also her lips, did she say: ‘Oh! Oh!’ and then: ‘Good night, my dear friend!’
‘Oh, you wonderful, profound soul,’ cried Nathanael, back in his
room, ‘no one but you, you alone, understands me perfectly.’
He trembled with heartfelt rapture when he considered how the marvellous harmony between his soul and Olimpia’s was becoming more manifest by the day; for he felt as though Olimpia had voiced his own thoughts about his works and about his poetic gift in general; indeed, her voice seemed to come from within himself. This must indeed have been the case, for the only words Olimpia ever spoke were those that have just been mentioned. Although Nathanael did have moments of lucidity and common sense, for example just after waking up in the morning, when he recalled how entirely passive and taciturn Olimpia was, he nevertheless said: ‘Words? What are words! The look in her heavenly eyes says more than any terrestrial language. Can a child of heaven ever adjust itself to the narrow confines drawn by miserable earthly needs?’
(From Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’, pp. 330–1)
Guidance notes
Reflective exercise
This assignment asks you to do two things. First of all, it asks you to reflect upon the feedback you have received from your tutor on your two previous assignments. This means that you will need to look carefully at the remarks made on the PT3s and the marginal comments on your first two assignments. Begin by summarising what the tutor has suggested as ways you might improve your writing of future assignments; then detail which parts of this advice you intend to work on in the essay, and how you propose to do it. Here is an example of a reflective exercise:
One way feedback from my tutor will inform my approach to TMA 03 is in the writing of introductions. On my second TMA my tutor writes, ‘I’d like to see you step up to writing more informative introductions’ (Smith, 2012J, p. 1). The way I have tried to approach this is to introduce more specific details about the texts I am studying and be clearer about the stages the essay will follow instead of simply re-stating the question.
Another thing kept coming up: the lack of a clear focus on the question. My tutor explained that she knew I had understood the question, and had responded positively to the two passages in TMA 02, but I had ‘spent too little time dealing with the actual demands of the question, which involves close textual analysis’ (Smith, 2012J, PT3). There were other pointers, but the main issue I need to reflect on is how I sustain my focus on the close reading aspect of the question. This was confirmed when I looked back at TMA 01 and I saw similar comments there. When I looked more closely at my tutor’s comments on both assignments, I could see that although I didn’t do a bad job of identifying different literary techniques used in the passages, I needed to spend a lot more time explaining the effects produced by those techniques.
As I prepare for TMA 03 I am going to go back and look at the way the authors of the module material discuss the effects produced by different literary techniques, making notes on the way the passages are written, trying to be specific about how this affects the way I respond to them. Then I will work my way through the sections of the online skills tutorials, as advised by my tutor on TMA 02. This will help me to gauge whether I have understood the techniques clearly and can identify them in different examples. It should also help me to think about how the two passages are similar to one another and how they are different. (347 words)
Essay
In preparing your answer to this question, you should read the texts from which the two extracts are taken (Reading 2.7 ‘Mont Blanc’ and Reading 4.1 ‘The Sandman’) in ‘Readings for Part 1’, and the relevant study material in Chapters 2 and 4 of Romantics and Victorians. You should also listen to the audio recording ‘Romantic authorship’ and complete the relevant sections of the online ‘Skills tutorial: poetry’ (1.1–5, 2.1, 2.2, 2.7, 2.8, 3.1) when preparing your assignment. You may also wish to revisit sections 1.4–6 and 2.1–3 of the ‘Skills tutorial: prose’.
The assignment offers you the chance to compare and contrast the depiction by Shelley and Hoffmann of ‘a life in pursuit of the ideal’. Before you start please read the subsection ‘Textual analysis’ in section 4.2 of this Assessment Guide, which will remind you of what your tutor will expect from this assignment. You will find it useful to refer to the discussions in the module book of Shelley as a ‘quester after ideals’ (Chapter 2, pp. 61–6) and the sections ‘Ways of seeing’ (pp. 111–13), ‘Clara and Olimpia’ (pp. 117–19) and ‘Art and automata’ (pp. 119–25) of Chapter 4, which consider Hoffmann’s representation of the constraints and delusions associated with the ideal. Once you have read through the passages (checking any references you are unsure about in Romantics and Victorians), you should consider the following: how the two writers frame their quest for the ideal; and the nature of the relationship between the speaker/narrator and the object(s) of their attention. You should also compare and contrast the writers’ use of language and their different genres of poetry and prose.
In your answer be sure to consider poetic form and devices, such as rhythm, rhyme, imagery, alliteration and assonance, when writing about ‘Mont Blanc’. With ‘The Sandman’ you need to take account of prose narrative techniques such as narrative voice, point of view, focalisation, repetition, punctuation and vocabulary. Each of these is discussed in the sections of the Poetry and Prose skills tutorials mentioned above.
Next: TMA 04
