Topics for Paper Two

English 104A
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney, M.A.
Spring 2012

Turn in a typed paper of four to six pages on one of the topics below. You may also write on another topic of your own choosing, provided that you discuss the topic with me and that I approve it at least one week before the paper due date. Your paper is due at the beginning of lecture on Wednesday, June 6. Unless you have genuinely extraordinary circumstances, I will not grant extensions beyond, nor will I accept any papers after, the final exam.

Although some of the paper topics below invite you to make comparisons across novels assigned throughout the quarter, you should assure that your paper does not spend any substantial amount of focus on a novel you paid close attention to in paper one.

Your paper should be double-spaced, have one-inch margins, properly attribute words and ideas belonging to others, and in all other ways conform to the MLA standard for academic papers in the humanities. The degree to which you conform to the conventions of formal academic writing will also be a strong factor in your grade.

A more detailed description of my grading criteria can be found at http://is.gd/loveda, or from the course website.

Any instance of plagiarism will result in removal from the course and referral to the University's student conduct committee.

  1. Pick a profession that we have seen in multiple novels throughout the quarter: banker, businessman, artist, teacher, housewife, etc. Trace salient features of this profession, as the novels characterize it, through at least two of the novels that we have read. How have these figures been portrayed in these novels, and where are the reader's sympathies meant to lie? (To answer this question well, you should talk not just about your own experience reading the texts in question, but rather how the text supposes, constructs, and/or imagines its reader.)
  2. Or, pick a profession that we have seen multiple times this quarter and perform a reading of that profession across multiple novels, as described above. What implications does your reading have for a broader understanding of the novels in question, or for changing conditions in American society? (Make sure to be specific in your thesis and to pay close attention to the texts of any of the novels with which you work.)
  3. Speaking of Barlow's decision to come to 'Salem's Lot, Parkins Gilespie says, it [the town] ain't alive. That's why he came here. It's dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more. (611; ch. 14, sec. 45) Basing your argument on a close reading of the text itself, what killed 'Salem's Lot before Barlow got there?
  4. Coleman Silk spends his life instantiating a very specific racial project. Describe the ways in this project is performed in The Human Stain, and what implications Silk's project has for (some specific aspect of) a broader understanding of race in American life.
  5. Choose a specific character other than Eula in The Town whose life is explicitly valued in some way, either by the town as a whole or in some individual transaction. How is that value assessed, and what implications does this value have for the town of Jefferson as a whole, or for some specific social circle within it?
  6. Pick an instance in one of the novels we have read in which "everyone knows" something. (This may be Eula's affair with de Spain, I.O. Snopes's mule-compensation business, the knowledge that Babbitt's business associates have about his misbehavior, the ideology against which Biff Brannon rails, some piece of gossip in the town of 'Salem's Lot, the situation to which Delphine Roux alludes in her anonymous note beginning with those words, or any of a number of other situations in the novels we have examined this quarter.) Examine who the "everyone" is in the "everyone knows" situation, and how their knowledge informs and creates the actual social situation that it claims to describe.

If you have any questions as you write your paper, please see me! I am happy to discuss how your paper can succeed in elucidating your thoughts on the subject on which you are writing.