Topics for Paper 2

April 1 Proposal for Paper 2 due (50-100 words).

April 22 Paper 2 due (6-8 typed, double-spaced pages); electronic copy due by 9 p.m.

Your assignment for Paper 2 is to write an analytical essay on the literature we have read. You may use secondary sources, but the texts themselves, and your skills at explication and interpretation, should be the focus. Your paper should address at least one of the works we’ve read, but you can discuss other works as well. Style counts as well as substance, so edit and proofread your paper carefully.

Requirements

Topics

These are broad topics and are only suggestions; you will need to shape and to limit them.  I encourage you to stop in to see me well before the paper is due.

  1. Several of the works we’ve read discuss the experiences of African Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans or Native Americans in nineteenth-century American culture. In what ways do such writers as Chesnutt, Sui-Sin Far, Zitkala-Sa, and Johnson reflect on and criticize nineteenth-century American society? What features such as irony, inverting or reversing conventions and stereotypes, or complex systems of symbolism do they use to convey their message?
  2. Charles Chesnutt’s conjure stories use the motif of magic and conjuring to make telling points about slavery, but are these representations of conjuring based in actual folklore or folktales? Research African American folklore traditions and write a paper in which you examine the roots of Chesnutt’s stories. You might choose instead to look at some plantation fiction and to see the ways in which Chesnutt departs from that tradition.
  3. What images of women are presented in late nineteenth-century American literature?
  4. Look closely at one or more of the formal features of a work or works, such as point of view, structure, contrasting characters, and so forth. Here are some examples:
    1. How does the point of view from which the story or the character of the narrator is told affect the meaning of the story? Is the narrator reliable or unreliable? Can you compare the narrators of several of the local color stories?
    2. How is the work structured? Does it have a frame story? Parallel episodes? Contrasting characters? What effect do these have on the meaning of the work?
    3. How is a feature such as setting used in the story? How does the author use setting symbolically?
  5. Examine one or more of the works in the context in which it originally appeared, such as Harper’s or The Atlantic. Be sure to read other works in the same volume and discuss the ways in which the workyou chose does or does not fit the conventions you see. For example, what other kinds of stories appeared with The Country of the Pointed Firs in The Atlantic in 1896?
  6. The Damnation of Theron Ware is in many ways a novel of ideas in which a naïve minister confronts such turn-of-the-century movements as scientific rationalism, aestheticism, the emancipation of women, anti-immigration and anti-Catholic sentiments, and so on. Research one of these movements and write a paper showing how Frederic uses its ideas in the novel.
  7. Choose a particular theme, symbol, idea, or pattern of imagery that is significant in one or more works and analyze it. Some possibilities would include the following: isolation (or the individual) and community, a clash of cultures and the idea of progress, the use of irony in selected works, the use of nature and the natural world as a symbol, or the use of humor (or satire) as social criticism.
  8. Your own topic.