ENG 561: Topics for Paper 2
Due the last day of class (Wednesday, March 9), your second essay
should be 1,400 - 1,600 words long
and adhere to the formatting guidelines that can be linked to here:
http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/herman145/papertemplate.html
Option A: William Wordsworth's
narrative poem The Ruined Cottage
can be considered a more or less "classic" example of a framed
narrative. It involves a narrator telling a retrospective story about
his own encounter with a storyteller, Armytage, who unfolds the tale of
Margaret, Robert, and the decline that led to the current, ruined state
of their cottage. For this option, compare and contrast Wordsworth's
classic framed narrative with one of the two "avant-garde" framed
narratives that we'll be reading in the second half of the course:
either
André Gide's The
Counterfeiters or Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.
(Note: your paper should compare and contrast Wordsworth and just ONE
of these other writers, not all three.) Focusing specifically on issues
of narrative framing, describe ways in which either Gide or Calvino
departs from or challenges the classic structure used by Wordsworth in
his poem. In what ways does the later, avant-garde text depend on the
classic structure as a kind of backdrop for experimentation? How do the
later text's departures from Wordsworth's mode of framing affect your
interpretation of the avant-garde narrative? What sorts of issues does
the non- or post-classical framed narrative foreground that are not
foregrounded in The Ruined Cottage?
Or, do you dispute the very premise of this prompt? Do you disagree
that there are any really fundamental differences between Wordsworth's
use of framing and Gide's or Calvino's? If so, be sure to argue your
case and draw on specific textual evidence in support of that
counter-argument.
If you choose to do this option, feel free to draw
on any of the secondary sources that we've read this quarter in order
to compare and contrast (or alternatively to deny any real contrast
between) framing in Wordsworth versus framing in Gide or Calvino.
However, you are not required to draw on any of the critical sources.
Option B: Use ideas
discussed
in Marie-Laure Ryan's article on "Stacks, Frames, and Boundaries" to
develop an interesting interpretation of narrative
framing in any of the works that we've read since the first
essay--other than Calvino's If on a
Winter's Night a Traveller. Thus, the works you might discuss
include James's The Turn of the Screw,
Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
and Gide's The Counterfeiters.
(Note: you can also use Ryan's article to compare and contrast the way
framing works in any two of the works just listed.) Again, the point of
this assignment is for you to "test out" the validity or productiveness
of the Ryan's ideas by bringing them to bear on the text(s) you
consider. To what
extent do Ryan's ideas ideas
help you understand narrative framing in the text or texts with which
you are concerned? By contrast, does the framing work in ways that her
ideas do
not help illuminate, or only partially illuminate?
Option C: For this option,
and focusing on issues of narrative framing in particular, compare and
contrast Conrad's Heart of Darkness with Francis Ford
Coppola's 1979 movie Apocalypse Now
(see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/)--a
film that draws heavily on Conrad's novel even though it is not,
strictly speaking, an adaptation of the novel. To what extent does the
film borrow the frame structure used in Conrad's novel? Likewise, to
the extent that it departs from that frame structure, how do those
departures affect our understanding of the story told in the film
versus the story told in the novel? (Note: here, I'm referring not to
plot differences between the novel and the film, but rather to
differences in the way they handle narrative framing--even though
framing of course affects our understanding of plot.) Does Heart of Darkness itself
constitute, in a sense, a "frame" for Apocalypse
Now? If so, how?
Furthermore, note that for both Conrad's and
Coppola's works, the outermost interpretive frame (or situational
context) is a problematic, deeply disturbing sociopolitical reality: in
Heart of Darkness, economic
exploitation and brutal mistreatment of the indigenous populations of
the Congo region of Africa; in Apocalypse
Now, the horrors of the Vietnam war. Discuss how the use of
narrative frames in both novel and film pertains to these larger
sociopolitical problems--in other words, how Conrad and Coppola use
framing to explore pressing questions about broader social ills. Does
the use of narrative frames enable the novel and film to get at social
questions and problems in ways that would have been impossible without
a frame structure?