Essay
Short Paper
Please complete 1 of the short paper topics. The short paper is worth 100 points. Short papers should be 2-3 typed pages (500-750 words), contain quotations from the text, and contain properly cited secondary sources if you choose to use any. Your textbook is an excellent source of information; avoid all mainstream Internet “notes” sites. Use MLA-style for your citations. Any plagiarism—accidental or intentional—will result in a zero for the short assignment and possible failure of the course. Please note that you may only write about the authors and texts assigned on our course syllabus.

Topic 1, Modernism
Explain the primary concerns and aspirations of modernism. Then identify and give examples of stylistic techniques and themes shared by three modernist poets that we studied in the LLTs. Compare and contrast one work from each poet by analyzing the structure and meaning of each poem; then explain how modernism is reflected in each work.

Topic 2, Violence
Examine the way that violence is reflected in early-mid 20th Century American literature. Choose two of the following authors—T. Williams, Faulkner, Welty, Hughes, or Stevens—and compare how each uses violence to impact character and theme in their texts. Consider whether violence is shown in an attractive or unattractive light. You may wish to compare relative violence—the intensity of violence experienced by different genders, classes, or races. Draw specific examples from each writer to support your explanations.

Topic 3, Constructing Self
Compare and contrast two works that reveal how an author or character creates his or her identity or constructs themselves. Describe the identity (woman, man, lover, fighter, young, old, artist, politician). Using specific examples, examine how this construction of self relates to a major theme of the text. Explain how the constructed self responds to conflict, character, or other elements of the text.

Topic 4, Writer’s Generation
Choose one of the following authors—Hurston, Hughes, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, or Welty—and read about his or her biographical influences. Be sure to cite ALL sources of information. Closely read one of the writer’s works and identify the work’s style and theme. Explain how the writer reflects the concerns and influences of his or her region along with the social and cultural concerns of the writer’s generation. (This topic has a hidden danger—sometimes students write a book-report/biography of the writer. That is NOT what the question asks for so please do not include the writer’s life story. Biographical influences are not the same thing as “where the writer went to college and how many kids she had” unless the text is about the writer’s college campus or children.)

Source

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, stanzas 1, 6, and 7; “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking;” and “I Sing the Body Electric” WEBSITE: (http://www.bartleby.com/142/19.html)

Emily Dickinson, “There’s a Certain Slant of Light,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” “My life closed twice before its close,” and “I’m ‘wife’ – I’ve finished that –”

Mark Twain, “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”

Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

Booker T. Washington, all excerpts in Up From Slavery

W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folks, “The Forethought,” “I. Of Our Spiritual Savings,” and “III. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

”

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper”

Robert Frost, “Mending Wall,” and “After Apple Picking,”

Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro” and “A Pact”

ee cummings, “next to of course god america I”

T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”

Langston Hughes, all poems (for the exam, you only need to know “I, Too,” “Silhouette,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and “The Weary Blues” but please read the collection)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Babylon Revisited”

William Faulkner, “Barn Burning”

Eudora Welty, “Petrified Man”

Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and “Peter Quince at the Clavier”

William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “The Dead Baby,” “This is Just to Say”

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish”

Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Street in Bronzeville: kitchenette building,” “the mother,” “and “We Real Cool”

Allen Ginsburg, Howl

Jhumpa Lahiri, “Sexy”

Sandra Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek!”

David Foster Wallace, “Incarnations of Burnt Children”