Category Archives: 3. Final paper topics

1. Lacking the ability to express emotion and connect with one’s surrounding world is possibly the greatest struggle an individual can go through.

2. Man values the ability to assert his own existence more than he values reason.

3. Before the 19th Century women were typically given the standard superficial role and were paid little attention, how do the authors of some of the texts we have read explore the true nature of the women?

One cannot achieve absolute freedom through action that is free-willed; it can only be achieved as a state of mind.

Is the achievement of freedom necessary to a successful slave narrative?

What factors lead slaves to believe that freedom may bring happiness?

In what light do the freed characters portray those that are slaves?

1. Does modernity destroy mankind’s humanity?

2. Does the quality of the nurture one receives in early childhood determine one’s character as an adult?

3. Is it realistic to pursue absolute freedom? At what point would one be absolutely free? Is freedom a state of mind?

4. How is identity shaped by social status and economic means?

5. Which is more true, our inner life or the outer appearance those around us see?

6. Are the male portrayals of women we see in these texts misogynistic? Are women viewed as purely instrumental?

7. The texts we’ve read in the second half of the semester include several characters we might describe as narcissistic.  What do these stories tell us about narcissism?

8. What is the moral relationship between colonizer and colonized?