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, May 2.
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.
Both Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again portray the 1920s bubble in real estate prices. How do their portrayals differ? How do these portrayals explain the 1929 Wall Street Crash? How do they connect to the author's larger economic concerns?
As we discussed in lecture, George Babbitt finds a sense of identity in his group memberships, in his relationships with women, and in his possessions. How does Myra Babbitt (or Tanis Judique) define her identity?
Choose a character in Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again or Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter who in some way instantiates a racial project, in the sense that Omi and Winant use the term. In what way does this individual character's project connect to the author's larger race-related concerns in the novel?
George Babbitt's camping trips and George Webber's journey to meet Rickenbach Reade both show evidence of particularly modern views of "nature" that are specifically constructed from a city-dweller's perspective. For either or both of these characters, what is "nature"? What does it mean to them, and how do they construct this meaning? How is it tied to their own background? (You are perfectly welcome to pull other attitudes about nature from other places in the text(s) in order to construct your answer.)
How does George Webber's trip to Europe in books five and six of You Can't Go Home Again alter his understanding of his own country? What does he come to realize about himself as an American, and how does this alter his understanding of his artistic project?
What are the causes and nature of the loneliness in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter? In what ways do the characters fail to communicate with each other? Is this a result of their lives in a small town, of some basic component of what it means to be human, of some other factor?