ENGLISH H590.06:  Topics for Paper II

Due Wednesday, February 14, your second essay should be 1000 words +/- 10% (from 900 to 1100 words). Please remember to type in the word count at the end of your paper and to adhere to the formatting guidelines that can be linked to here:

http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/herman145/papertemplate.html

Option A: As Moretti discusses in his account of the "late Bildungsroman" (Moretti's critical study was assigned for January 22), "impersonal institutions" play a key role in the portrayal of late-Bildungsroman protagonists. According to Moretti, educational institutions are an especially important aspect of a world that is now "thoroughly indifferent" to the personal development of the hero or protagonist, whose agency is curtailed and who encounters traumas rather than undergoing experiences that spur continual growth and maturation. For this option, reread Moretti's article and then compare and contrast the function of educational institutions in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. Since you'll only have 1000 words to work with, I would recommend that you focus on one especially significant scene or situation from each novel and use that as the basis for your comparison/contrast. Do both of the novels bear out Moretti's argument about the role of schools or educational institutions in the late Bildungsroman? Or does one of the texts support Moretti's account better than the other, and if so why?

Option B: Compare and contrast the role of Amory Blaine's and Stephen Dedalus' family backgrounds in This Side of Paradise and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, respectively. Some brainstorming questions: To what extent are the two protagonists similarly shaped by their family experiences (or relationships with particular family members), and to what extent do they differ in their responses to their family backgrounds and relationships? Does one of the texts portray family background as more determinative (or character-shaping) than the other text? If so, how? What factors contribute to the fragmentation of family in the two texts, and how is each protagonist affected by those factors?

Option C: Compare and contrast the representation of female characters in Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Since you'll only have 1000 words to work with, I would recommend that you focus on only one or at most two female characters from each novel as the basis for your comparison/contrast. Some brainstorming questions: In what ways do the female characters affect the development of the two protagonists? What are the protagonists' attitudes toward women, and to what extent do their attitudes change over time? What techniques do Joyce and Fitzgerald use to portray their main characters' relationships with women (for example, does one author use more internalized views than the other), and what do those techniques reveal about the male characters' attitudes toward women?