Whichever option you pick, you cannot write about the same novel that you wrote about for your first major paper. If you wrote about A Room with A View for the first major paper, you cannot focus on that for this project; the same goes for Mrs. Dalloway.
Option 1: Write a short story or the first chapter of a novel with a contemporary version of Lucy, Clarissa, or Janie as the main character. What kind of setting or context would they find themselves in? What challenges would they confront? How would their personality take shape in response to our contemporary social and political context? If you choose this option, please try to use a similar narrative perspective to the one employed by Forster, Woolf, or Hurston, and focus on depicting just a few carefully described situations or scenes.
Option 2: Pick one novel from the course and consider how it resonates with your experiences as a twenty-first century New Yorker. Have you been in a situation similar to the one described by the author? Have you faced the same kinds of challenges? Have you found yourself viewing the world in the same way as one of the characters or the narrator? How have your own life experiences allowed you to achieve a fuller understanding of the text? How has reading the work affected your way of thinking about the problems that you have confronted in your own life? Has it offered you a new understanding or attitude, a new way of addressing particular obstacles? Has it influenced the way you feel about a particular situation? If so, how? Please try to come up with a specific concrete example from your life. You will need to offer a first-person account of your own experience so as to explore how the text is relevant to that experience. Your paper, in other words, should combine an analysis of the text with a personal narrative and explore the connections between the two. 3-5 pgs., double-spaced.
Option 3: Pick 2-3 key scenes from one of the novels and imagine what songs you would play if you were including those scenes in a film. Create a soundtrack. Justify your choice of songs by explaining how you understand the mood of the particular scenes you are focusing on. How would these particular songs help bring out and reinforce the feelings that the author is either depicting or seeking to evoke in readers? You can pick anywhere from 2-5 songs. Make sure you include links to them. You should write an introductory paragraph identifying which scenes from the text you are focusing on, why you have chosen those scenes, and what overall emotional effect you are seeking to capture. Then you should offer a paragraph or two for each song explaining why you have chosen it. 3-5 pages, double-spaced.
Option 4: Record yourself reading a passage or several passages from one of the novels. You may accompany your reading with music or visuals of any kind. You can perform the scene, acting out the parts if you’d like. You can find or create other multi-modal materials, including images, video clips, songs, etc. If you pick this option, you’ll need to submit a recording of your reading with all of the visuals and sounds included, in the form of a podcast or short film. You will also need to include a 1-2 page discussion of the choices you made and why you made them, with an emphasis on the particular ideas or feelings (conveyed by the text) that you were seeking to underscore.
Option 5: Write a traditional (3-5 page, double-spaced) academic essay about one of the novels from the course. Choose one of the following prompts:
1. The literary critic Lionel Trilling said the following about E.M. Forster:
Forster’s plots are always sharp and definite for he expresses difference by means of struggle and struggle by means of open conflict so intense as to flare into melodrama and even physical violence. Across each of his novels runs a barricade: the opposed forces on each side are Good and Evil in the forms of Life and Death, Light and Darkness, Fertility and Sterility, Courage and Respectability, Intelligence and Stupidity—all the great absolutes that are so dull when discussed in themselves. The comic manner, however, will not tolerate absolutes; it stands on the barricades and casts doubt on both sides. The fierce plots move forward to grand simplicities but the comic manner confuses the issue, forcing upon us the difficulties and complications of the moral fact (“E.M. Forster” Kenyon Review 164).
Do you agree with this assessment? Does Forster’s “comic manner” challenge moral absolutes? What “difficulties and complications” does A Room with a View force upon us? In what ways does Forster qualify or call into question the seemingly simple message of the text? Please pick one or two scenes or passages to support your argument.
2. A Room with a View seems to offer a challenge to many traditions and attitudes leftover from the Victorian era: church doctrine, class hierarchies, social conventions. But does it offer a possible vision to replace the world that it rejects? How would you characterize the politics of the book? What kind of society does it imagine? How does Forster suggest we should treat each other? How should we behave? On what basis should we decide how to live? What is wrong with the way society is structured and the way people like Lucy are asked to lead their lives and what alternative does Forster propose? Please support your argument with specific passages from the text.
3. Time is obviously a central preoccupation for Virginia Woolf. What is she trying to suggest about the way we experience the passage of time, and how do her stylistic or narrative strategies allow her to capture that experience?
4. According to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, the central problem of Woolf’s fiction is how we can ever have knowledge of another person’s inner thoughts—how we can escape the isolation of our own minds. Speaking about the novel To the Lighthouse, she writes: “by working patiently to defeat shame, selfish anxiety, and the desire for power, it is sometimes possible for some people to get knowledge of one thing or another thing about some other people; and they can sometimes allow one thing or another thing about themselves to be known.” Does Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, in your view, teach us how we might better know each other? Does she give us access to the minds of other people? How so? If Woolf offers a more complete picture of subjective experience than other novels, what is unique about her techniques? Please give some concrete examples from the book.
5. About Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, fellow African American novelist Richard Wright, commented:
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.
Would you agree with this evaluation? Why or why not? Wright also stated that Hurston’s novel lacks a basic idea or theme. Does this strike you as a fair response? If you disagree with Wright and believe that Their Eyes Were Watching God is a serious novel, what makes it serious?
6. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, does Janie, the protagonist, gain freedom and agency by the end of the book? If so, how is she able to gain these things? What obstacles does she face as a black woman living in the United States in the early 20th century and how is she able to overcome these obstacles? Does Hurston offer a recipe for black female empowerment in this novel? If so, what is she advocating?What allows Janie to achieve fulfillment? What does that fulfillment consist of?
7. Focusing on any one of the novels from the course, explain whether you think his/her work espouses a feminist or an anti-feminist stance. Does the text appear to celebrate those actions which further independence and empowerment for women? What kind of depiction does it offer of its female characters?
8. Again, focusing on any one of the novels, what makes that author’s text modern? How does the text demonstrate an awareness of the newness, the novelty, of its historical moment? Does the text break with tradition? How so? In answering this question, please consider both the themes explored and the styles employed by the author in question.
3-5 pgs, double-spaced
Final projects are due August 11 at 11:59 PM in your personal Google drive folder.