Courses:

WRITING REQUIREMENTS

One short summary (1-2 double-spaced typed pages), three interpretive essays (4-7 pages) due on the dates specified in the calendar. Students may revise and resubmit the first two essays for a new grade within one week of the date on which essays are returned. Late papers will be graded without penalty if they are submitted within seven days of the due date, but such papers will be ineligible for revision and may not receive written commentary. No papers will be accepted beyond the seven-day grace period.

Suggested Paper Topics: First Essay

1. Compare The Man Who Would Be King with Heart of Darkness, centering your argument on the theme of imperialism.
   
   
2. Conrad's narrators or Kipling's or Ford's.
   
   
3. The role of a minor or secondary character in Conrad, Kipling, Ford. Some possibilities: Kurtz's Intended, Kurtz's harlequin, Captain Giles, Billy Fish or the journalist in Kipling, Nancy or Maisie Madan in The Good Soldier.
   
   
4. Setting -- the place of "place" -- in Conrad or Kipling.
   
   
5. The theme of the double in Conrad.
   
   
6. Heroism in Conrad and/or Kipling.
   
   
7. Conrad's prose style: a close reading of one or two representative paragraphs from Heart of Darkness. Or: the same topic for Kipling or D.H. Lawrence or Ford Madox Ford.
   
   
8. The natives in Heart of Darkness and/or The Man Who Would Be King.
   
   
9. Narrative structure in Heart of Darkness or The Good Soldier.
   
   
10. Heart of Darkness and/or The Shadow Line as confessions or autobiography: the psychological adventure story.
    
    
11. The idea of community or solidarity in The Shadow Line.
    
    
12. Elders and mentors in Conrad.
    
    
13. The ending of Heart of Darkness or The Shadow Line.
    
    Self-deception in The Good Soldier.
    
    Sexuality in The Good Soldier.
    
    Figurative language in Conrad or Ford.

Suggested Paper Topics: Second Essay

1. Ford's drama of the telling in The Good Soldier.
   
   
2. Joyce's stream of consciousness: a close description and analysis of one or two representative passages in chapter 4 or chapter 18 of Ulysses.
   
   
3. Bloom's heroism.
   
   
4. Attitudes toward the body in one or more chapters of Ulysses.
   
   
5. Bloom through Molly's eyes: a close reading of some passages from the final chapter.
   
   
6. Recurring imagery in Molly's soliloquy.
   
   
7. Bloom and Molly: their relationship and their attitudes toward each other as revealed in chapters 4, 6 and 18.
   
   
8. Joycean elements in the Barth or Marquez stories in Initiation.
   
   
9. Recurring themes and/or images in a story or stories from Dubliners.
   
   
10. Priests in Dubliners.
    
    
11. Song and/or drink in Joyce.
    
    
12. Parents in selected stories or chapters in Joyce.
    
    
13. Physical spaces: write an essay about one or two of Joyce's characteristic settings--the pub, the dinner table, the bedroom, for instance. How do people use and inhabit these settings, what kind of drama occurs in such spaces?
    
    
14. Lawrence's style in "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter."
    
    
15. The theme of rebirth in "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter."
    
    
16. Point of view in Kafka.
    
    
17. Compare Kafka's surrealism--his use of non-realistic strategies and materials--with that of Garcia Marquez, whose story "The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship" is in Initiation.
    
    
18. Read Philip Roth's fictional meditation on Kafka, "I Always Wanted You To Admire My Fasting . . ." (in Initiation) and write an essay centering on a topic or topics raised in the questions devoted to that story on pp. 432-33.
    
    
19. Woolf's handling of consciousness compared with that of Joyce.
    
    
20. Ideas of male and female in To the Lighthouse.
    
    
21. Lily Briscoe: her role in To the Lighthouse.
    
    
22. The dinner party in To the Lighthouse.
    
    
23. Family life in Woolf and/or Kafka.

Suggested Paper Topics: Third Essay

1. Woolf's handling of consciousness compared with that of Joyce.
   
   
2. Ideas of male and female in To the Lighthouse.
   
   
3. Lily Briscoe: her role in To the Lighthouse.
   
   
4. The dinner party in To the Lighthouse.
   
   
5. The theme of art in selected stories by Isaac Babel.
   
   
6. Benya Krik and/or Lyubka the Cossack: "heroism" in Babel's Odessa tales.
   
   
7. Grammatical (and other) transitions in Woolf.
   
   
8. "Nature" in "Old Man."
   
   
9. Ideas of history and the past in Faulkner or in Babel.
   
   
10. Family relations in Woolf and/or Faulkner.
    
    
11. Style as meaning: a systematic description and analysis of the opening pages of To the Lighthouse, or of a single paragraph from Joyce or Faulkner.
    
    
12. Puns and wordplay in Pale Fire.
    
    
13. Mirrors, reflections, resemblances in Pale Fire.
    
    
14. Nabokov's drama of the telling.
    
    
15. Kinbote's "friendship" with Shade in Pale Fire.