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Starting Your Motif Paper

Starting Your Motif Paper. What’s a motif paper?. A motif paper allows you to focus on an aspect of a short story, play, or novel. By exploring a single motif, you are able to draw conclusions and offer insight into the motivation or message of a particular piece of literature. STEP ONE.

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Starting Your Motif Paper

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  1. Starting Your Motif Paper

  2. What’s a motif paper? • A motif paper allows you to focus on an aspect of a short story, play, or novel. • By exploring a single motif, you are able to draw conclusions and offer insight into the motivation or message of a particular piece of literature.

  3. STEP ONE • Track a motif throughout the work • You have done this already in your Word Journals • As you gather your evidence, you can change your word to a similar term, or something broader • For example, “BLOOD” can become “VIOLENCE” or “MURDER”

  4. Family Cousins, Friends Guilt Violence Bravery Death Sacrifice Murder War Humanity Lineage Dishonesty BLOOD

  5. STEP TWO • Take a step back and look at your Word Journal • Do you notice any patterns? Does anything spark your interest? • For example, I noticed that “BLOOD” opens and closes the play. • “What bloody man is this?”-Duncan

  6. STEP THREE • Begin your research • Look to see if your patterns are reinforced or contradicted in scholarly articles

  7. Modern Critical Interpretations, Edited by Harold Bloom • Human nature is one’s capacity for dependent and intimate relationships • Blood-Family/Relationships • “Killing is common in natural world, not common in man.” • You cannot bring yourself to kill if you are aware of your own humanity • Bloodshed is the result of one’s inhumanity. • Bloom’s • The more bloodshed, the less humanity one possesses. -Mine She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word.

  8. Shakespeare's conception of moral order in MacbethCarol Strongin Tufts. Renascence50.3/4 (Spring 1998): 169-182. “As Jan Kott has written, "Macbeth begins and ends with slaughter. There is more and more blood, everyone walks in it; it floods the stage" (87). But even more to the point, the events of the beginning and the end of the play are, in essence, the same events seen through opposite perspectives: in the beginning, through the perspective of the rightful king threatened by rebel forces; at the end, through the perspective of the usurper threatened by the forces of the rightful king. And what is most ironic is that despite the repetition of events, despite the circle of treachery and slaughter, the concluding victory of the forces on the side of moral order is seen by the victors, as it was mistakenly seen by the victors at the beginning, as the end of all slaughter since the usurpation of the rightful king with its inversion of all things good and wholesome and "natural" has been put down.” Bloodshed in Macbeth—first seen as natural, going with the natural order of things. With more bloodshed, we see less “naturalness”

  9. Macbeth and DismembermentBell, Millicent. Raritan25.3 (Winter 2006): 13-29,175. “Macbeth has been thought to be a man of imagination, but his first murder does not spring from any anticipation of the "golden round" that promptly gleams in the inner vision of his wife. It is she who more obviously displays ambition. Understandably, she is often played as the virtual protagonist whose dream of the future gives motion to a puppet Macbeth. As far as we can detect from what we are shown, Macbeth seems, also, to lack the practical imagination that anticipates and embraces ways and means. It is Lady Macbeth who expresses the realization that "Thus thou must do." My Notes: This one discusses Lady Macbeth: Lady Macbeth supports this idea because if, according to this article, she was the one who got the ball rolling with all of this bloodshed, she is also the same character who commits suicide– the ultimate act of denying one’s humanity.

  10. STEP FOUR • Gather all of your evidence from your word journal and your scholarly articles and form a thesis statement about your motif • Use the following questions to guide you: • How does your motif contribute to certain themes/ideas/morals in Macbeth? (Ambition, Revenge, Fate vs. Free Will, Death, Guilt, etc.) • Please note, this may be the most difficult step. Play around with your thesis and do not feel “tied down” to your original word/motif.

  11. My Thesis • In Macbeth, characters who provoke bloodshed ultimately lose their own humanity. • Through examining the transformations of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, this relationship between bloodshed and humanity becomes apparent.

  12. Cite as you go… • Citing Books… Lastname, Firstname. Title of Book. City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication. *For books prepared by an editor, cite as you would and replace the author name with the editor name* *Books with no author (an Encyclopedia for example), just begin with the book title.

  13. Citing Articles… • Article in an Online-only Scholarly Journal • MLA requires a page range for articles that appear in Scholarly Journals. If the journal you are citing appears exclusively in an online format (i.e. there is no corresponding print publication) that does not make use of page numbers, use the abbreviation n. pag. to denote that there is no pagination for the publication. • Dolby, Nadine. “Research in Youth Culture and Policy: Current Conditions and Future Directions.” Social Work and Society: The International Online-Only Journal 6.2 (2008): n. pag. Web. 20 May 2009.

  14. For More Info on Citing Properly… • Visit: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/08/

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