English 336 Paper Topics #2
Due Date: Friday, April 13 in class. Absolutely no late papers.
1.
Compare and contrast the use of history, mythology and folklore in the works of T.S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound.
2.
Provide a working definition of Eliot’s objective correlative and discuss its use in one of his
poems.
3.
Like Whitman, both Langston Hughes and William Carlos Williams attempted to write poetry
about American life in language based on an American idiom. Research the poetry of both poets
and compare and contrast their attempts.
4.
Read more deeply in Langston Hughes poems and write a paper analyzing his use of jazz, blues,
or the spiritual. Choose one and discuss how it contributes to a poem or a handful of poems.
5.
Experimentation with literary conventions mark many of the texts that we've read or will read
this semester. Choose one of the texts that we've read and analyze this experimentation and
discuss its impact on the text.
6.
A number of the works we've read or will read deal with the impact of race or ethnicity. Choose
two texts and compare their authors' vision of either racial or ethnic relations in America. Or,
racial stereotyping and specifically its effects on creativity have been analyzed by Alice Walker
in an essay entitled "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" and by Margaret Walker in "On Being
Female, Black, and Free" as well as by political activists (for example Malcolm X in his
Autobiography) and other literary figures (see essays by Baldwin and Wright). Compare the
analysis of racism in such a work with that provided in one of the novels, short stories, or poems
by one of the other authors we've read this semester.
7. Discuss female self-empowerment and self-actualization in one of the works we’ve read or will
read in the second half of the course.
8. In the film on Langston Hughes, Hughes’ poem “Let America be America Again” was used to
explore the ideas of America and the dreams of Americans and to contrast these ideas and
dreams with reality. Examine the use of dreams (or the American Dream) in one of more of the
texts we’ve read.
8.
Analyze some aspect of Toni Morrison’s Beloved:
a.
In what ways does the novel explore one or more ideas relating to history, memory,
storytelling, identity, the body
b. Discuss magical realism and it’s function in the telling of this story.
c. How is Beloved a postmodern ghost story? What does it tell us about the relationship
between the living and the dead?
d. How does the blending of illusion and reality function in the novel?
e. Analyze Morrison’ s narrative technique and discuss how it contributes to the themes
in the work.
f.
Discuss the importance of the past on the present in the novel.