Final Paper Assignment

For your final paper assignment, I will be asking you to write a 5-7 page essay on one of the texts we have read so far in class. As with your first essay, this paper should seek to develop a strong, unique argument about one or more of the text’s central themes by paying close attention to the text’s use of language, imagery, literary techniques, and formal structures. These essays should also contain all of the standard features of a literature essay: strong, debatable claims in its topic sentences; close readings of specific passages; and a complex thesis that evolves over the course of the essay. After having written (and perhaps revised) your first essays, this is a form that should now be somewhat familiar, but if you have any questions you can always look at the Essay Writing Guide and sample essay on Blackboard.

In terms of the content of these essays, you are free – and, indeed, encouraged! – to investigate a topic of your own choosing. I have included four sample topics at the end of this assignment prompt for those of you who would like further guidance, but by no means do you have to write on any of these topics. (And, in fact, sometimes choosing one’s own topic makes it easier to formulate an original argument, since you are not bound by the topics I have suggested.) Similarly, one good way to develop an original argument is to apply an idea we have looked at in one text to another, seemingly unrelated one. For example, we talked quite a bit at the beginning of the semester about how Yeats uses the image of martyrdom as a means for turning individual people into symbols. Do any other texts employ images of martyrdom? If so, do they treat this theme in the same way as Yeats does? If they do not, in what way is their use of images of martyrdom different from Yeats’s?

You are also welcome to write on any text that we have read throughout the semester. However, if you choose to write on the same text that you wrote on for the first essay, you must choose a new topic and develop a new argument that is completely different from your first essay. (The purpose of this assignment is to write new essays, not to revise an old one.)

Finally, as always, your paper should be formatted according to MLA standards: 12-point Times New Roman font, 1-inch margins, double-spaced.

* Essays are due on Wednesday, May 20^th at 11:59pm. NO EXCEPTIONS. (Extensions are not available for this assignment. Any late submission will result in a loss of points and may cause your grad to be submitted late.)

Sample Topics:

For those of you who would like some guidance on what to write about, here are four sample topics you might consider:

1) Choose one of our class texts, and explain how it represents the relationship between religion and the human world. One of the topics we have returned to more and more as the semester has gone on is that of religion. Chinua Achebe and Gabriel García Márquez, for example, both devote large sections of their novels to religious topics and religious symbolism, and even Heart of Darkness and Watchmen contain passing references to religious imagery.

But representing religion and religious belief within is far from a simple exercise. Novels typically focus on a modern, secular world that is “realistic” rather than supernatural, and this can make it difficult for an author to represent religion in his or her text. Using one text, explain how your author characterizes the relationship between religion and the human world. What role does religion play in one or more specific culture(s) in the text? Does it have any particular effect on law, social hierarchies, gender relations, and so on? How do religious symbols and stories help characters to understand their place in their culture and in the world at large? How does your text deal with religion’s supernatural elements? What sorts of truth value does it give to these elements?

2) Explain how one of our texts envisions political activism. Many, if not all, of the texts that we have looked at this semester contain an underlying political message. Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island ends with a plea for socialism, Neruda and García Márquez were ardent defenders of the working class, Achebe and Conrad’s novels expressed different types of anti-imperial messages, Yeats directly confronted Irish nationalism in “Easter 1916,” and Watchmen presents a full panorama of political perspectives.

For this essay, choose one text and explain how it describes the possibilities for political action. On what scale must people act in order for their efforts to change the system? Is personal action enough? What about collective political movements, such as working-class militantism? Or nationalist movements? International ones? What are the strengths and limitations to any of these approaches? Do characters themselves change in one way or another when they move between these different scales? If so, how? And why?

3) Explain how one or our class texts represents violence. Many of the texts that we have examined this semester feature violent episodes: the massacre of the strikers in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Okonkwo’s killing of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart, Kurtz’s raids on Congolese villages, and a spectacularly violent end to Watchmen that I won’t give away. Choose one of our class texts, and explain how that text represents the role of violence in its fictional world. Does violence possess a definite logic here? Does the culture seen in this text “need” violence for one reason or another? If so, why? How does violence help to hold this culture together, or to make sense of this culture’s views about the world? Can violence be eventually prevented here, or is violence inevitable? What social, cultural, or economic systems does your text associate violence with, and why? [Note: Don’t simply say that human are “naturally” violent. Try to assess what it is about the culture that they live in that cause the characters in your text to act violently.]

4) Choose one of our class texts, and explain how it represents the natural world. Nature has played a key role in many of our texts, from Yeats’s poems about rural communities to García Márquez’s magical descriptions of the nature in and around Macondo before the coming of modern technology. Nature is not simply a setting in these texts; rather, it is an object that authors endow with different meanings, depending on their own viewpoints and literary aims. Using one of our class texts, describe how your author represents nature. What do the images we see of nature in this text reveal about the author’s beliefs and/or literary project? Is nature contrasted to the human world? If so, through what images and ideas does the author develop this contrast? Or is the natural world connected to the human world—and, if so, what images and ideas does your author use to make these connections? Are different people, cultures, or behaviors regarded as “closer” to nature than others? If so, why?

5) You may also consider the essay topics that I distributed along with the first assignment. Some of those issues might be particularly interesting to examine within the texts that we have investigated in the second half of the semester (e.g., Watchmen and gender roles).