Debra Bronstein
English 44B
Essay 3: Prose Writing
Essay Due: Friday December 14th in my mailbox by 3:00pm
If you want your papers returned to you with comments in the spring, please state
so at the beginning of your essay. I will leave them for you on my door at the
beginning of the semester (which starts Jan 7th). If you don’t state that you want
your paper back, I won’t put comments on it.
Congrats to everyone for getting through the semester! You were a great class, with a lot
of positive energy! I had a blast working with y’all! 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Papers should be 6+ pages long, typed, double-spaced, Times New Roman 12 point font,
1-inch margins.
Please choose one of the following topics:
1. Swift: Gulliver’s Travels:
In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift uses satire in order to offer constructive social
criticism and push for the reform of eighteenth-century manners and morals.
In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally
with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement. Swift
specifically uses Juvenalian satire, named after the Roman satirist Juvenal, as he
addresses social evil through scorn, outrage, and savage ridicule. This form is
often pessimistic, characterized by irony, sarcasm, moral indignation and personal
invective, with less emphasis on humor. By combining the genres of travel
narrative and satire throughout the text, Swift pushes us to align with Gulliver as
he negotiates his place in both the physical and philosophical world. His name,
meaning gullible, puts the readers in an awkward position: are we to be as gullible
as he is in order for the satire to work effectively? In his 4th and final voyage, to
the land of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver loses what little objectivity he ever
possessed and becomes convinced that the godlike, rational horses that populate
the island are indeed superior beings, and that the despicable, apelike Yahoos are
indistinguishable from humans. He becomes horribly confused as to which group
he should identify himself with. On the one hand, he is drawn to the ideas of
absolute rationality in which all problems may be solved through the use of pure
reason since human emotion and physicality are dangerous and disturbing
distraction. However, on the other hand, he experiences an aversion to the
extreme rationality that the Houyhnhnms represent.
In your essay, show how and why Swift intermixes the genres of travel narrative
and satire in order to argue for social and philosophical reform by concentrating
on the interaction between the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos. In order to do this,
focus on his use of inversion. With which argument does he ultimately side? What
is Swift’s ultimate commentary on the nature of mankind?
2. Voltaire, Candide:
In Candide, Voltaire satirizes the Leibnizian optimism espoused by Pangloss and
ends up endorsing Enlightenment ideology. Leibniz tries to justify the apparent
imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible
worlds. It must be the best possible and most balanced world, because it was
created by an all powerful and all knowing God, who would not choose to create
an imperfect world if a better world could be known to him or possible to exist.
Realizing that Leibniz’s ideas do not correspond to reality, Voltaire instead turns
to Kant’s understanding of the Enlightenment which emphasized the importance
of the individual’s freedom to reform society by using reason, challenge ideas
grounded in tradition and faith, and advance knowledge through the scientific
method. It promoted science, skepticism and intellectual interchange and opposed
superstition, intolerance and some abuses by church and state. Using the
background material in the anthology on the Enlightenment and using Kant as a
source, show how Voltaire’s satire is working. How does he arrive at the final
conclusion of “cultivate your garden” and how does this epitomize
Enlightenment values?
3. A noted 18th century scholar, Toni Bowers in her book Force or Fraud suggests
that the eighteenth century novel was known for its “collusive resistance” (4). She
defines this as, “an effort to maintain virtue in coercive situations by exercising
submission and refusal simultaneously, a newly nuanced model for virtuous
subjecthood that emerged in a time of severe constraint” (20). She suggests that
novelists such as Behn, Manley, Haywood, and Richardson were fascinated by an
endlessly repeated narrative situation in which a virtuous ingénue is pursued by a
more-knowing, partially desirable seducer in a position of authority over her. The
problem for the heroine was how (and how far) to resist the demands of authority
figures—figures both dangerous and desirable, to whom submission, while due,
was problematic or even transgressive—without forfeiting Christian virtue. (23)
Haywood, in Fantomina, turns this situation around; therefore, could one argue
that she creates a proto-feminist novel? Does the fact that Haywood turns the
ingénue character into the libertine or rake and allows her freedoms that she
wouldn’t normally have make this a proto-feminist novel? Or is Haywood
allowing for a space for a proto-feminist reaction but then backtracks and places
her novel into the confines of Christian virtue (reward for virtue/punishment for
transgression)? How does Fantomina use self-conscious performance and disguise
as a way to negotiate her position within society and does this disguise cancel out
a potential proto-feminist agendas?
4. Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone:
One of the prevailing arguments of the Story of the Stone comes from the couplet, “Truth
becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;/Real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real.”
What does this mean in the context of the novel?
In order to answer this, you may want to consider some of the following points:
 The narrative frame: how the first chapter of the story contains the entire
narrative. What does it mean for the story of the stone to be written on the stone
itself and for the story to unfold in the way that it does?
 Taoist philosophy and the role of balance (yin/yang)
 The interpolation of poetry within the narrative frame
 The role of nature
 The role of stones/jades and the stories that accompany them
 Male and female roles
 What does this novel tell us about late imperial Chinese society and culture?
5. Montague, Turkish Letters
Montague presents a view of the Turkish Other that was not available to men at that
time. How is the Turkish Other presented and how and why does that representation
differ from the other representations in the other male authored texts that you read? Does
her identity as a woman produce a proto-feminist reading of the Other? Is it a more
generous reading than the male-authored texts?