TOPICS FOR THE FIRST PAPER, ENGLISH 258, SPRING 2013

Choose one of the topics below as the basis for a 1000-word double-spaced essay.  This is not a research paper; rather, a piece of writing in which you consider an issue from your own point of view.  Please do not use resources other than texts for the course (except for factual information, if you need to). 

It will be important to illustrate the points you wish to make by paraphrasing or quoting lines or passages from the texts.  If you are unsure how to cite the source of a quotation, there’s a good simple guide online: http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/DocMLA.html

Papers about literary works follow the format of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Handbook.

Topic #1 offers you a chance to revisit the texts we’ve read so far from a slightly new angle.  One current “hot” theoretical approach to literary works seeks to examine how they represent the natural world and human interaction with it.  In the guidelines of one critic, a work that is environmentally conscious will exhibit some or all of the following four characteristics:

A) The non-human environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history a part of natural history.

B) The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.

C) Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical framework.

D) Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.

If the question interests you of how humans have been taught by great literary works to think about the non-human, take a close look at two (or more) of the works we’ve studied to date.  Find passages that deal with the non-human environment or with the relationship between humans and the environment.  Using the criteria above, analyze what the works say about how humans relate, or should relate, to their surroundings.

Topic #2: Another kind of investigation could involve exploring what these works teach us about the distinctions between official life and life outside the rules.  We introduced this distinction on the first day of class with a quote from Mikhail Bakhtin:

It could be said (with certain reservations, of course) that a person of the Middle Ages lived, as it were, two lives: one that was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence and piety; the other was the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar contact with everyone and everything. Both these lives were legitimate, but separated by strict temporal boundaries.

You might enjoy looking at the course’s texts so far to see how our authors represent both of these two distinct “legitimate” lives.  All works will represent both lives, even though different authors will possibly give heavier weight to one or the other.  Choose at least two works to study using this lens.

Due in class on March 7.

Grading criteria:

                Essay exhibits good understanding of the texts it analyzes.

                Essay clearly and seriously addresses one of the topics.

                Essay is well organized and engagingly written.

                Essay exhibits correct use of grammatical, usage, and citation conventions