Major Essay Prompt
Here are some questions you might consider as you approach your major paper. In your essay you should answer only one of these questions, and you should focus on only one author. If you would like, you can devise your own question, but please email it to me ahead of time so I can make sure you’re on the right track.
1. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn can be read as an elaborate critique of the values promoted by civilization. But what exactly is civilization, and what, in Twain’s view, is wrong with it? Does Twain describe any kind of alternative perspective, any legitimate mode of being outside of civilization? Does Huck embody an effective mode of resistance to civilization and what form does that resistance take?
2. Assuming that we are seduced by Huck Finn’s narrative voice so that we feel compelled to trust, indeed even to like and admire Huck, how does that seduction work? What rhetorical tactics does Huck employ to win our sympathy? Is there a difference between his agenda in relation to the reader and Twain’s?
3. Would you call Emily Dickinson a religious poet? Do you notice any Christian imagery in her poetry? Does she seem to embrace or does she question traditional religious views? What are the objects of her faith? What inspires her awe?
4. Do you think that the odd use of language in Dickinson’s poetry promotes intimacy or alienation between the speaker and the reader? Why? And what is her agenda? What kind of emotional or intellectual response does she aim to elicit? Please focus on one or two poems at most.
5. Would you call Mary E. Wilkins Freeman a feminist writer? In what sense? Is she attempting to expose the subordinate position of women in society in order to inspire change? If so, what strategies does she endorse for challenging the status quo? And how does she convey her critical attitude to the reader?
6. What is Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s attitude toward the Puritan value system that characterizes nineteenth-century New England? Does she satirize it? Does she embrace it? Does she anticipate its demise, and, if so, does she see this as a positive development?
7. How does Charles Chesnutt’s short story, “The Wife of his Youth” dramatize the condition of “double-consciousness,” which W.E.B. Du Bois describes as the central predicament of African Americans at the turn of the century? What strategies does Ryder employ for understanding or managing the conflicting components of his identity? Does Chesnutt, in your view, offer a strong position on how African Americans ought to conceive of their history and their race in their efforts to achieve power and equality within the United States?
8. Several authors depict characters who occupy ethnic categories that are treated by society as marginal in relation to a dominant ethnic group, i.e. white Americans. How does their fiction serve to complicate this division or challenge what we think we know about the meaning of these identity categories?
9. What sort of philosophical position does Stephen Crane offer in “The Blue Hotel”? In what way does this position exemplify the basic tenets of Naturalism? How do the narrative and descriptive strategies that Crane employs help to convey his philosophy?
10. A central subject of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country is how the growth of capitalism in the early 20th century has influenced a variety of different spheres, both public and private. What are some of the signs of this influence in the novel? Does Wharton present capitalism only as a negative force or does it, in her depiction, have any positive effects?
11. In Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton portrays the leisure class in America as consisting of two increasingly intermingled elements: one that has inherited its privilege and wealth and subscribes to traditional, conservative values, and the other, “new money,” untraditional, exhibitionist, permissive, consisting of individuals who have acquired wealth through business and industry. Does Wharton or does the text take sides in this conflict? Does she prefer the practices, beliefs, and priorities of one group or the other? Does she represent the advent of modernity as an unfortunate, even tragic development? Or does she applaud the new liberties that this shift has unleashed? Or is she ambivalent?
12. Several of the authors we have read for the course, including Edith Wharton, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway, and Allen Ginsberg, attempted to capture modernity—to identify certain conditions, practices, or ways of thinking specific to the historical era in which they wrote. Explain what one of these authors has to say about modernity. What, in that author’s view, does it mean to be modern? What kinds of experiences does modernity produce? And what particular literary techniques does the author use to represent these experiences?
13. Richard Wright writes of Zora Neale Hurston: “Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.” Richard Wright’s comment serves as a reminder that black artists during the Harlem Renaissance frequently produced work that was consumed by white audiences. But is he right about Hurston? Consider how she deals with the complexities of the artist-audience relationship. In what ways does the writer satisfy white expectations, as understood by Wright, and in what ways does the writer challenge white expectations?
14. Choose any poem by William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes or Allen Ginsberg and explain what is strange, experimental, unconventional, or modernist about it. What emotional or intellectual effect do the poem’s techniques produce?
15. Several of the writers we have considered, including Wharton, Hemingway, Hughes, Williams, Stevens, Hurston, and Ginsberg focus on the way in which societal pressures and social structures shape and in some case constrict individual experience. Explore one particular author’s response to this predicament. What social formation does that author focus on, and what literary techniques does the author use to explore its effects on the individual? Finally, does the author suggest that liberation from that particular social formation is possible and/or desirable? If so, how?
16. William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Consider how Morrison’s Beloved dramatizes Faulkner’s paradoxical insight. Why is the past so inescapable for her characters? What narrative techniques does Morrison use to capture its inescapability? And does she offer any insight as to what might represent a healthy way of relating to the past?
17. In Beloved, Morrison has plenty to say about the physical brutality of slavery. But she also devotes a good portion of the novel to exploring its psychological impact. What is she suggesting about the emotional effects of slavery? And what narrative strategies does she use to capture these effects?
6-8 Pages, double spaced. Due May 1