One of the glaring flaws that exists in the rough draft of my paper about The Blithedale Romance is that my ideas are not fully-formed enough and are coming across as too vague. In working on the revisions to my paper, I have been trying to hone in on the key points that I am interested in tackling with my paper. To do this, I have been re-reading the text and reviewing the notes from my group. I am in the process of going through my paper with a focus on tightening up my thesis statement and building out the paper around that thesis.
The general idea that I was attempting to convey in my paper was that the author believes that utopian societies are not possible. I originally believed that he uses foreshadowing throughout the early passages of the novel to indicate that this is the underlying belief of the novel. In re-reading the text, I have come to the conclusion that it isn't quite accurate to say that the author uses the art of foreshadowing to epxress this idea. Instead, he offers the reader insight into the narrator's perspective in order to make a broader statement about humanity.
My goal in making these revisions is to more clearly explain how the early passages of the novel convey the book's underlying belief that a utopian society is not possible. I plan to shift my focus to the way that the author does this through the voice of the narrator instead of trying to make a vague statement about the use of foreshadowing. Ultimately, my goal is to come up with a single thesis sentence that sums this up succinctly and to use the passage I identified previously to support this.
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2 comments:
Adam, I suggest you check the etymology of utopia in the OED (link in sidebar of this page). I can only think of one place, of the top of my head, where the word is used in Blithedale, and it's an odd moment in the text.
I'm curious what selections from the text you're using to make you argument. When I was reading the novel I looked for indications of criticism of utopian or socialist ideals (as the essay about the novel in the start of the book mentions this as one of its possible interpretations), but I didn't see much to work with, at least without reading too much into what was written. Obviously the failure of the Blithedale community can be used as a point of evidence in this regard, but it seems to me to be a rather weak one, as the connection between the community's failure and socialist (or utopian) ideals does not appear to be fleshed out.
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