English 104B: Instructions for the Second Essay

Due Date: December 4, to your TA's mailbox by 4PM.

General Instructions: Write a eight- to ten-page (2400-3000 word) essay on a topic related to any of the works we have read in the course, excluding Eliot, Yeats, Auden, and the War Poets. This essay should have a clear topic, an arguable thesis statement, and close critical reading and represent significant research. Your personal response to the literature can guide your thoughts, but you must establish your claims using evidence and argumentation considered valid within the discipline of literary criticism. When you use secondary sources, make sure they are of reasonable quality (no personal web sites, Wikipedia, or Cliff Notes), cite them properly, using MLA or CMS style, and blend them into your argument with adequate discussion. Following are some specific suggestions for topics. Please keep in mind that they represent a starting point, not a formula—your paper must be in your own language with a clear sense of direction.

Suggestions:

1. Outsiders: Many of the works we have read represent the voices of those excluded from power in British society by class, gender, and status as present or former colonial subjects. Choose one or two authors who write about issues related to this status, and explain how this affects their concepts of identity, the poetic tradition, and language. What insights does being an outsider bring to literature?

2. After the Wars: The high modernists, such as Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce, had much in common with the post-World War II generation, including a sense of disillusionment with traditional institutions, a sharply modified idea of the objectives of literature, and a re-evaluation of ordinary life, but what are the differences, and what do they mean? Conduct either a comparative analysis of a high modernist and post-World War II writer or simply discuss the work of a post-World War II writer alone in order to discover the central concerns, aesthetic principles, and/or artistic mission of the post-World Wars generation. Larkin, Hughes, and Harrison are all fine examples—take a look at poems and prose pieces, interviews, and critical writing about them to find both evidence and competing interpretations.

3. Comparative Context: Joyce, Beckett, Lessing, Heaney, and Thiong’o, among others, had both an international audience and a multilingual, multicultural background, extending their influence and the influences on them across national borders. Examine a work—or two—by an author we have read in comparative context, adding to our understanding of it by showing us how it is part of something larger than a single national tradition.

4. Your own topic having to do with the literature we have read so far. Keep your focus narrow; use one or two works at most, and cite them judiciously. Be wary of over- and under- quotation, and use MLA citation style properly.