ENG 590.07:  Topics for Paper III

Due Wednesday, December 1, your second essay should be 1,400-1,600 words long (please type in the word count at the end of your paper); the essay should also adhere to the formatting guidelines that can be linked to here:

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

Please note that for this third essay, you are free (but not required) to use secondary sources in developing your analysis. If you do draw on any outside scholarship, be sure to provide a Works Cited page listing all the sources you've consulted. (N.B. The Works Cited page does not have to be factored into your overall word count.)

Option A: Compare and contrast representations of violence in Amis's Time's Arrow and Sebold's The Lovely Bones. How does violence relate to other issues being explored in these works--in particular, the issue of identity or selfhood? Conversely, how does the authors' use of first-person narration affect their portrayal of violence? How does the contrast between Amis's focus on the mass violence of the Holocaust and Sebold's focus on an individual murder shape the authors' treatment of questions of identity?

Option B:  Discuss the nature and functions of memory as it is portrayed in at least two (but no more than three) of the four texts we're focusing on in the final part of the class: My Life, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, Time's Arrow, The Lovely Bones. How reliable is memory in each case? What techniques do the authors use to suggest the possibilities as well as the limitations of memory? Do the texts distinguish between collective (or cultural) memory and personal memory? If so, what is the relation between these kinds of memory in the works that you discuss?

Option C:  Go back to the Marie-Laure Ryan article on "Narrative" that we read at the very beginning of the quarter.  (You can find it at http://lamar.colostate.edu/%7Epwryan/narrentry.htm). Reread the essay and then use Ryan's discussion of narrative to compare and contrast Hejinian's and Berryman's poems. Do these poems tell a story, in Ryan's sense, or not? Does Ryan's account suggest that one of the texts can be more legitimately classified as a narrative than the other? If so, why? Alternatively, do the two works seem to you to be "narrative" in a way not accounted for by Ryan's article? If so, how might Ryan's account have to be modified to handle the kind(s) of storytelling involved in these two texts?