Topics for Paper Two

English 165EW
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Due Wednesday 13 March 2013 at 3:30 p.m.

Turn in a physical copy of a typed paper of five to seven 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. It is not necessary to have a fully formed outline in order to propose an alternate topic — I am happy to provide guidance and make suggestions based on general ideas. 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.

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, 13 March 2013. This paper is worth 35% 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.

You should be aware that, although I did not fully enforce the grammar and formatting limitations on paper one, I will do so on this paper. Note, too, that the minimum paper length is a bright line that you either do or do not cross — coming close is not good enough. Falling short of the five-page minimum — even by one line — will seriously hurt your grade on this assignment.

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.

Although some of the topics below invite you to consider texts from across the entire term, you must ensure that you do not expend substantial analytical space on a text to which you paid substantial attention in paper one.

One of the themes to which we have returned repeatedly this quarter is hybridism — you might think of the bioforms produced through genetic engineering in Oryx and Crake, the horror that Arthur Jermyn feels in Lovecraft's story on uncovering the hidden facts behind his own ancestry, and/or the breeding of the triffids in Wyndham's novel. Choosing the name of one of the four units from the syllabus, explain how one or more of these texts sees hybridism as an intervention in the term you have chosen. You might find it helpful to consider such related questions as: How does hybridism subvert expectations implicit in our normal understanding of this term? What new understandings of this term emerges as the phenomenon of hybridism becomes integrated into networks of meaning and reference in the text(s) which you are examining? How is hybridism related to the apocalypse(s) in the text(s) you are considering, and what light does this shed on the basic expectations of the post-apocalyptic genre (see, for instance, lecture 3)?
Both Blindness and Oryx and Crake exhibit specific concerns with resource distribution during times when demand is not matched by supply. Focusing on one of these novels (and perhaps comparing it with the other), examine ways in which resource distribution is tied to social status and/or economic class. To what extent (and in what ways) are these distribution methodologies holdovers from the pre-apocalyptic world? To what extent (and how) are they new, post-apocalyptic systems of organization?
In his initial conversation with Mark and Selena in 28 Days Later, Jim insists, Of course there's a government! There's always a government! How is this assertion emblematic of Jim's sudden return to consciousness after the (zombie) apocalypse, and how does this abrupt return to consciousness constitute an eruption of pre-apocalyptic thinking into the relationships and social structures of the post-apocalyptic world? How is Jim's experience of post-apocalyptic England different from, say, Selena's, or Frank's, and to what extent is this motivated by his sudden transition? Ultimately, what changes in Jim's understanding (or network of signification, or psychic construction, or phenomenological experience, or …) with the disappearance of traditional structures of governance? How does Jim's understanding of the post-apocalyptic world compare to Major West's assertion that what I've seen in the four weeks since infection [is] people killing people. Which is much what I saw in the four weeks before infection, and the four weeks before that, and before that. As far back as I care to remember: people killing people … which in my mind puts us in a state of normality right now, or with Sergeant Ferrell's assertion that [i]f you look at the whole life of the planet, we, you know, man, has only been around for a few blinks of an eye. So if the infection wipes us all out, that is a return to normality?
In 28 Days Later, Major West dissembles his plans for Selena and Hannah by asserting that women mean a future. Compare West's actual intentions for Selena and Hannah to any of the the following: Crake's assertion that female artists are biologically confused (168; ch. 7), or Crake's other attitudes toward and beliefs about women; the third ward's women for food trade in Blindness; or the implications of your close reading of the man's conversation with his wife immediately before her suicide in The Road (55-58), with a specific eye toward gender roles in the post-nuclear world. What options are left for survival and meaning in women's lives after these various apocalypses, and what does this have to say about ;meaning in general in these situations?
Examine the 35 subjects of the speeches that the doctor's wife's group encounters on page 298 of Blindness (ch. 16: the end of the world, redemption through penitence, […] the weakening of the vocal cords, the death of the word) and/or the 49 subjects of the speeches that the group encounters the next day, on pages 310-311 (ch. 17: the fundamental principles of the great organized systems, private property, […] the fraying of the vocal cords, the death of the word). Choosing any number that you believe to be appropriate of these subjects, discuss how the world is being rebuilt in the wake of the epidemic of blindness. How do the topics that you have selected constitute a new way of relating to the world using what what the doctor's wife calls your four senses (242; ch. 14)? (You may also wish to consider whether there is a significance to the order in which these terms appear in the novel. If so, what does the sequence tell us about the nature of the society that is developing?)
How is Jimmy's recycling of language and ideas in his advertising career similar to (and/or different from) Crake's recycling of snippets of deoxyribonucleic acid in his construction of his new humans (and perhaps to other instances of genetic engineering in Oryx and Crake)? Is the structure of genes (and possibly of biological life itself) analogous to other texts — novels, poems, plays, films, computer programs, musical scores? (You may — or may not — find it helpful to focus on a specific text or set of texts to help focalize your discussion — I am of course happy to assist you in making good selections, if you'd like.)
The Road, 28 Days Later, Blindness, and Oryx and Crake all exhibit specific concerns with sleep and with dreaming. Basing your argument on a very close reading of the texts involved, explain what functions dreams perform in any (one or more) of these works. You may (or may not) find it helpful to take an explicit theoretical perspective on dreams and dreaming, but (regardless) should relate the individual dreams you discuss to the larger narrative structure of the work(s) in which they occur. (Note that this prompt does not explicitly ask you to interpret the dreams in question — though this is one way of approaching your topic, and it may very well be a profitable interpretive maneuver to make — but rather to explain how they function in the larger system of meaning constructed by the text[s] that you examine.)
One of the features that both the narrator and the characters notice repeatedly in the post-apocalyptic world of Blindness is the prevalence of feces. What function (symbolic or otherwise) does the presence and prevalence of feces serve in the novel? How does it contribute to the characterization of the world after the epidemic of blindness strikes? (You may find it helpful to note when and under what circumstances in the novel this concern becomes submerged beneath other concerns and disappears.)
In chapter 8 of Oryx and Crake, Crake claims, I don't believe in Nature […]. Or at least not with a capital N (206). Given the alterations that humans make to the biological structure of life, what view of nature do Crake and/or the novel as a whole take? If we tend to see nature as that which occurs without human intervention (and perhaps in terms of the Greek φύσις, physis), what is left of nature (and/or Nature) when humans intervene in the structure of life itself? (You may also wish to consider how these eruptions of human interests into the natural are structured by large-scale — political, economic, aesthetic, philosophical — interests in the novel, though there are certainly other good ways of approaching this question.)
Topic on optional material. Choosing any one specific end to the world (or the universe) in one or more of the Douglas Adams novels, examine how this apocalypse differs from another that we have examined in one of the mandatory reading assignments, and how these two apocalypses differently interpret one or more of the basic characteristics of post-apocalyptic literature explored in lecture 3. (If you wish to examine Life, the Universe, and Everything, it would probably be profitable to direct your attention instead to the near-apocalypse and the way that it is averted.)
Topic on optional material. Examine Barry Popkess's The Nuclear Survival Handbook and/or Max Brooks's The Zombie Survival Guide (either as a whole or based on the optional selections) as representative of the survival manual genre. Based on your reading, what are the typical features of this genre, and what does the genre presuppose about what realism and reality are?
Topic on optional material. Choosing any one of the apocalyptic songs posted to the course Twitter stream this quarter (or, with my approval at least one week in advance, another thematically appropriate song), provide a very close reading of the song's lyrics and discuss its relationship to the generic conventions of (post)apocalyptic narratives. (You may also wish, but are not required, to consider such elements as the musical composition or the filmic characteristics of the band's official music video[s] — on the other hand, you can, theoretically, get an excellent grade simply by considering the song as a piece of poetry.) N.B.: I think that this is a very difficult option to do well — if you have questions, please discuss your plans with me, and I will be as helpful as possible.