Return to syllabus Engl 272
Guidelines and Topics for Sourced Paper
Guidelines
The purpose of this paper is to provide you with the opportunity to examine ideas that you have begun to consider within a detailed analysis of the literature that is relevant to this class with the added dimension of incorporating quotes and ideas from secondary sources to support your own points. Each paper should contain a strong original thesis statement that presents your ideas in the introductory paragraph and subsequent paragraphs with clear topic sentences that function to prove your ideas throughout the paper. Consult the primary text, the text that you choose to analyze, for quotes that support your ideas. Be sure to explain the quotes from both types of sources fully and clearly so that you interpret them for your reader and relate them to your main point. Avoid explaining someone else’s argument. The secondary sources are for support only.
Specifics:
The paper should:
• Incorporate quotes and ideas from secondary sources smoothly. (Use the MLA search under the "Literature" section on the desktop of the library’s computers.)
• Be typed and between 4-7 pp.
• Use MLA form correctly and consistently. (This stylistic concern is especially important for this paper.)
• Contain a "Works Consulted" page.
• Have a title, which appears on a title page.
• Contain an "Acknowledgements Page" in which you thank your friends, relatives, classmates, or coffee brands that made this project possible. It should come in between your paper and the bibliography.
• Use both long and short quotes from the primary text for support.
The rest of the grade will depend on how well the paper conforms to the standards of organization, structure, mechanics, and development that have been established in the "Evaluation Criteria" checksheet.
Topics
1. Trace select characters in Eliot’s poems, either The Waste Land or "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and identify if any of them can be seen to resemble the image of the artist that he outlines in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Once you decide upon the character with which you will work, explain how these characters relate to the modern world, and, thus, comment upon it. (You will need to locate Eliot’s impressions of the modern world at some point in the discussion.)
*2. What did Stein gain and lose by living in a foreign country, France, where the daily language was other than her native language? Many other modernists spent much time abroad, including Eliot, Pound, and Hemingway. Why? What other American writers became ex-patriots for long periods of time? What impact does this trend have, and how does it inform and shape Stein’s poetry and prose?
3. William Carlos Williams had strong ties to the world of the visual arts. Research his relationship with cubist Juan Gris, painter and sculptor Charles Demuth, and photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Trace some of the ways that these artists influenced Williams, and explain the influences in terms of one of his poems.
4. Explain how H. D. engages in a gender-inflected revisionist myth-making in her poems. Trace the conventional myth that H. D. invokes to examine thematically and linguistically how she uses and transforms tradition.
5. Although Hemingway’s story "Hills Like White Elephants" seems like a simple story, it is carefully structured and packs quite a bit into a small space. Explain how formal elements, such as plot, setting, dialogue, point of view, and character identification, relate to the content. Using this information, explain how this tory comments upon sexual relationships at the modern moment. (It might be beneficial to draw comparisons between this story and the representations of sexual relationships in The Waste Land, namely in "A Game of Chess" and the section of "The Fire Sermon" that falls in between lines 218 and 268.)
6. Take into account the use of the first-person retrospective point of view in Faulkner’s "A Rose for Emily." Perform a subtle and careful analysis that considers how the narrator gives a sense of the events described but yet does so in a problematic fashion, and be sure to explain the implications of using such a narrative.
*7. Read Jean Toomer’s Cane. Choose particular characters who fit into Locke’s idea of "The New Negro" in different ways, and explain the cultural climate to which the characters react and the ideals toward which they aspire (and this is where Locke’s essay will prove to be useful.) What optimism do these characters share, and what obstacles must they yet overcome? Use you own judgement to determine the ultimate balance of Cane. (See Baker, Houston A. Jr. Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic.)
8. Compare Hurston’s concerns in "The Gilded Six Bits" to those of Hughes in his poems. Identify the reasons for Hurston’s desire to foreground gender relations over race relations. (Take into account the historical moment at which both were writing and their respective positions in the Harlem Renaissance.)
9. Take into account the impact of poverty on gender relations, especially in terms how each sex understands his or her identity and relation to the social structure, as you explain the use of point-of view, narrative technique, and plots of Dos Passos’s "The Bitter Drink" and Meridel LeSuer’s "Women on the Breadlines."
*10. Both Anderson’s "Hands" and Yezierska’s "America and I" explore experiences of protagonists who are not accepted by the people around them because of their differences. How do these experiences clash with the notion of the "American Dream," and to what extent do they show that the notion of the "melting pot" depends on erasing or denying differences between people, both cultural and individual differences?
11. As many recent critics (and Miller himself) observe, The Crucible reveals the hypocrisy of the Salem witch-hunts and the repetition of the witch-hunt in the form of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, when people were denied work and reputations were ruined because they were accused of being Communists. The issue of "reality" versus "illusion" is prevalent throughout this story that acts as social critique, and it is often an important issue in post-World War II literature, when the media spreads information with increasing speed and other significant cultural changes arise. Analyze the ways in which The Crucible represents various and conflicting authorities in order to engage in a political critique.
*12. Read Ginsberg’s Howl through the collective experiences of the "Beat Generation." To what elements in culture did they react, and how did they react to them? What kind of world do they see at the time at which they began forming this diverse group of artists, and what sort of world do they envision?
13. Explore the diverse African American writers of the post-WWII era. During and following a time when the Civil Rights Movement grew and entered the consciousness of mainstream America, these writers take very different perspectives. In a thoughtful analysis that considers the environments in which they are writing, explore reasons for their various perspectives. (Be sure to look at common concerns, the cultural climate at the time at which they wrote the pieces that you choose to study, and their differences.) Choose three of any post-1945 African American writers in our text.
14. Rich has had an enormous impact on other feminist writers in the 20th century, and she fits into an American poetic tradition that begins with Walt Whitman’s use of free verse and a flexible poetic line and with Whitman’s and Emily Dickinson’s approach to traditionally "non-poetic" subject matter. This tradition is also evident in poems by Williams and Ginsberg. Use her place in the American literary tradition to examine Piercy’s poems. (Refrain from approaching this paper in a "compare and contrast" mode. Be sure to be clear about techniques and subjects of concern that both poets share but express differently.)
*15. John Barth’s "Lost in the Funhouse" is indicative of a uniquely post-1945 fiction that seeks not only to tell a story but to examine what it means to tell a story, which means exposing and challenging the very forms that 19th century realism. What are the effects of this type of story telling by breaking the form of the story? How can it fit into an understanding of post-WWII American culture?
16. In Walker’s "Nineteen Fifty-Five" the narrator is very intelligent but uneducated, examine this representation in terms of the time that Walker wrote the story, looking back to a moment in recent history. (It might also help to look at "The Gilded Six Bits" to make connections between the representations of characters.)
17. Choose your own topic. (Be sure to consult with me before you begin this one.)
*These topics are clusters of questions and are meant to provided a place for you to begin generating ideas and not a way for you to organize your paper. Link these ideas in your own ways.
