Wednesday

Revisit, in your notes pertaining to oral commentaries, your section on THEME. Be sure you are exposing a statement the extract or work makes about a thematic idea. A theme is not "isolation" but "Urban accumulation creates an unresolvable isolation" or "Vast accumulations of knowledge in the modern world create a new kind of ignorance." See, it's universal (can fit several works of art, not just "Preludes") and makes a statement. Moreover, it allows a thesis to "move." You prove a point. A thesis then might read, "Eliot uses blah, blah, and blah to reveal that the city brings people together only to isolate them still further" or "...that all our knowledge of one another is partial and fragmented but is still bridgeable by strenuous exercise of imagination."