Turn in a typed paper of five to seven 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 the Monday before your paper is due. Your paper should consist of a set of close readings of the text(s) with which you are engaging and an argument based on those readings. Your paper is due before you take your final exam on Thursday, 13 September 2012.
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. If your word processor does not conform to the MLA standard by default, it is your job to override your word processor's defaults in order to produce a correctly formatted paper. The degree to which you conform to the conventions of formal academic writing will also be a strong factor in your grade.
Although some of the prompts below invite you to consider novels from the early part of the term, you must ensure that you do not spend a substantial amount of time focusing on a novel on which you focused on your first paper.
It is necessary to write at least five full pages for this assignment — coming close is not good enough. Failing to meet this requirement, even by a small amount, will hurt your grade badly. If you received this penalty on your first paper, then you can remove that penalty by writing at least six full pages on this paper. There will be no opportunity to remove a penalty for not hitting the minimum length on paper two, so be sure that you meet the five-page requirement, not just get close to it.
A more detailed description of my grading criteria can be found at http://is.gd/http://is.gd/qijona, 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.
Trace appearances of the figure of the angel throughout Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. Describe not only when and where it appears, and what it is associated with, but also how it functions as a part of the novel's basic structure and/or as a figure for larger forces in the novel.
One element that has appeared in multiple novels this term has been the cage — you might think of Paul D. on the chain gang in Beloved, Nelson's experience trapped in the Poole Collection in chapter 18 of The Lecturer's Tale (and his assertion on page 22 that literary theory cages him within his own head), and/or Henry's sudden appearance inside The Cage at the Newberry Library in the 37th chapter of The Time Traveler's Wife. Choose one or more examples of the use of the cage as a device in one or more of these novels, and examine how it functions. Is it a symbol for a situation that appears in the novel? Is it a means of controlling plot and action? Or is it something else entirely? Demonstrate what the narrative gains from its use of this element.
Pick a literary allusion (or a series of related literary allusions) in either The Lecturer's Tale or The Time Traveler's Wife, and examine how it functions both in the context of the novel that we have read this quarter and in its original context, to which that novel alludes. What does Hynes or Niffenegger accomplish by including this allusion?
Both the title character in Beloved and Henry in The Time Traveler's Wife have specific anxieties about bodily fragmentation. Examine one or the other of these anxieties as a way of assessing the character who experiences them. What do these anxieties say about the character involved, and how are these anxieties connected to the novel's broader concerns?
The Road has very little in the way of the traditional formal structure that readers tend to expect from novels — there is no division into chapters, no overall numbering, no indication within the text itself of how close "we are" to the end of the novel, or even of what might constitute a fair ending to the narrative. Instead, McCarthy simply divides the novel into a series of sections separated from each other by ellipses at the ends of each episode. Given all of this, what does provide The Road's structure?