Paper Topics
English 3950: Suggested Paper Topics
Due October 5. 4-6 pages, double spaced.
Feel free to respond any part or parts of the question that you find interesting. Or invent your own topic.
1. Consider the experimental staging techniques that Tony Kushner deploys in Angels in America: the parallels scenes juxtaposed, the impossible occurrences, the appearance of angels, whose wires are exposed. All of these, he would call “the magic of theater.” What purposes do these strategies serve? What do reaction might they provoke? What do they allow Kushner to communicate?
2. Articulate Kushner’s political philosophy. The Soviet Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarinov declares at the beginning of Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika, “show me the Theory, and I will be at the barricades, show me the book of the next Beautiful Theory, and I promise you these blind eyes will see again, just to read it, to devour that text. Show me the words that will reorder the world, or else keep silent.” Does Kushner have a beautiful Theory to offer? If so, what is it? If not, why not?
3. The mode of art that epitomizes the postmodern age, according to the critic Fredric Jameson is “pastiche.” “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs.” Is this good description of Pelevin’s technique in Homo Zapiens? Does he use “blank parody”? How? And for what purpose?
4. What is Pelevin trying to reveal about post-Communist Russia in his novel Homo Zapiens? Are his insights only about Russia or are they about the experience of capitalism everywhere? And what particular stylistic or narrative strategies does he use to capture that experience?
5. According to the great American poet Robert Frost, a successful poem ends in “a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.” Does it make sense to read Marie Howe’s poems as “momentary stay[s] against confusion”? What clarity does she offer? If reality, in her depiction of it, is confusing, painful, and terrifying, what forms of solace, what means of coping, does she suggest? If her poems are about unbearable traumas—sexual abuse, AIDS, death—then what relationship do her poems imagine between such traumas and everyday life?