Topics for Paper One

English 165EW
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Due Wednesday 6 February 2013 at 3:30 p.m.

Turn in a typed paper of three to five pages on one of the topics below. You are also welcome to write on another topic that you develop, provided that you discuss the topic with me and that I approve it at least one week before the paper due date. If you write on one of the topics below, you do not need to seek my approval before doing so, but are (of course!) still welcome to discuss your paper with me. It is not necessary to have a fully formed outline in order to propose an alternate topic — I am happy to make suggestions based on general ideas.

Your paper should consist of a close reading of the text(s) with which you are engaging and an argument based on that reading. Your paper is due at the beginning of lecture on Wednesday, 6 February 2013. This paper is worth 25% of your total grade for the term.

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. A more detailed description of my grading criteria can be found at http://is.gd/navazo, 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.

I take my pedagogical responsibilities seriously, and want to help each and every one of you to be successful in all course-related tasks. You are welcome to discuss your ideas for your paper at any stage in conceptualizing or writing it; to ask for assistance in evaluating your own rhetorical, analytical, or expository strategies; or to think through difficulties in your analysis during my office hours. If my office hours are at inconvenient or impossible times for you, let me know and we will arrange another time to meet.

Those stricken blind in Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids relate to the world in a different manner than the sighted do. How is sight a basic metaphor for knowledge and understanding in the novel? How is the way that the characters in the novel relate to their world fundamentally conditioned by the capacity for (or lack of capacity for) sight? How do the blind adapt to varying roles in the new society that is gradually being built at the end of the novel?
What are the various changes (you may prefer to think of them as "failures") in The Day of the Triffids that contribute to the collapse of society, and what needs to be done in order to rebuild "civilization"? What do the specifics of what is lost say about how Wyndham understands "civilization"? Taking into account Bill Masen's arguments about "human nature" as inherently oriented toward groups (e.g., "To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature," p. 170, ch. 13), what is the value of "civilization" itself?
Both The Day of the Triffids and The Road depict survivors of a catastrophe surviving on the remnants of a civilization that has collapsed. Focusing on the role of canned and/or otherwise packaged food in both novels, describe how the remaining resources from the society that has passed structure the lives of the survivors. What possibilities are open for the building of a new world in each text, and how are these possibilities tied to the structure of what McCarthy calls the vanished world (187)?
One of Dawn of the Dead's television scientists asserts, from the safety of the television studio, that [t]hese creatures [the zombies] are nothing but pure, motorized instinct. Their only drive is for food. And yet the party in the shopping mall sees the zombies engaging in a number of activities that do not directly contribute to their hunt for food, but instead seem to be repetitive performances of aspects of their previous lives. Basing your argument on a close, nuanced "reading" of the film, explain whether these activities are best explained as (some understanding of) "instinct." If so, what does "instinct" mean in this context? If not, what does motivate the undead in Romero's movie?
Consider the relationship between the process of naming and the text of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. You might profitably consider such things as the man's assertion that [t]he names of things [are] slowly following those things into oblivion (88) or that beauty and goodness are [t]hings that he'd no longer any way to think about at all (129-30); "Ely's" assertion that he couldn't trust the father and son with his name, because without anyone knowing his name I could be anybody (171) and that I don't know […] what luck would look like (174); the necessity for the man to explain to his son the meanings of such now-meaningless phrases as as the crow flies (156) or state roads (43) — though there are many other very good pieces of evidence in the novel that you might consider. What is this relationship between naming, the world as it is in itself (whatever that might mean), and our understanding of the world? (You might profitably think about this in terms of Eugene Thacker's distinction between "the World," "the Earth," and "the Planet," though you are by no means obligated to do so, nor is it necessary to do so in order to do an excellent job with this option.)
The idea that life (human, and perhaps otherwise) has intrinsic value is deeply interwoven with many of our current political discussions and has deep roots in the structure of Western thought. However, many characters in The Road express fundamental doubts about the inherent value of life: consider the boy's mother, who kills herself after the apocalypse, or "Ely," who "might wish that [he] had died" or "that [he]'d never been born" (169). What has changed in the structure of the world, and how is this related to the philosophical problems of value that provide a framework for our ethical decisions?