ENGL 2122
Janssen
Selected Author Reports: Oral Report and Explication
Each student in this class is expected to showcase the life and work of one of the
American authors from the list below in a 7-10 minute presentation. The presentation is
intended to provide information about your assigned author’s life and to showcase one of
the author’s works. So, it is not acceptable to merely parrot Wikipedia-like trivia
involving births, deaths, marriages, etc… Of course, biographical facts are expected to
form part of the presentation, but you also need to place your author in the context of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Literature. So, you will need to possess at least
a passing familiarity of your author’s contributions to the British literary canon.
In preparing your presentation, you must also compose and distribute a study guide on
your author for the class. Your study guide may be in the form of a PowerPoint
presentation or a one-two page handout. If you choose the latter, you must make enough
copies for everyone in class, including me. This is important because I will use the
information you convey about your author to include on the final exam.
A separate handout on the explication page will be distributed next week. Suffice to say
here that you will need to choose one work from your author on which to perform a close
reading, or, explication. So, it would be wise to choose that particular work early so that
the interpretive work you do for the explication can inform your presentation and vice
versa. I will be more than happy to help you pick an appropriate work from your author.
There are more than enough authors to go around, but choices will be decided on a firstcome, first-served basis, and your deadline for choosing is August 24. If you have not
made a choice by that date, I will assign you an author.
Author List
William Blake
Charlotte Smith
Mary Robinson
Mary Wollstonecraft
Joanna Baillie
William Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Charles Lamb
William Hazlitt
Thomas De Quincey
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Clare
John Keats
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Robert Browning
Matthew Arnold
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Christina Rossetti
William Morris
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Thomas Hardy
Wilfred Owen
William Butler Yeats
Virginia Woolf
James Joyce
Samuel Beckett
W.H. Auden
George Orwell
Dylan Thomas