Suggested Paper Topics
First Essay:
1. Compare The Man Who
Would Be King with Heart of Darkness, centering your argument on the theme of imperialism.
2. Conrad's narrators or Kipling's or Ford’s.
3. The role of a minor or secondary character
in Conrad, Kipling, Ford. Some
possibilities: Kurtz's Intended,
Kurtz's harlequin, Captain Giles, Billy Fish
or the journalist in Kipling, Nancy or Maisie Madan in The Good Soldier.
4. Setting -- the place of "place" --
in Conrad or Kipling.
5. The theme of the double in Conrad.
6. Heroism in Conrad and/or Kipling.
7. Conrad's prose
style: a close reading of one or two representative paragraphs from Heart of
Darkness.
Or: the same topic for
Kipling or D.H. Lawrence or Ford Madox Ford.
8. The natives in Heart of Darkness and/or
The
Man Who Would Be King.
9. Narrative structure in Heart of Darkness or
The
Good Soldier.
10. Heart of
Darkness and/or The Shadow Line as confessions or autobiography: the
psychological adventure story.
11. The idea of
community or solidarity in The Shadow Line.
12. Elders and
mentors in Conrad.
13. The ending of Heart
of Darkness or The Shadow Line.
14. Self-deception
in The Good Soldier.
15. Sexuality in The Good Soldier.
16. Figurative language in Conrad or Ford.
Second Essay:
1.
Ford's drama of the telling in The
Good Soldier
2.
Joyce's stream of consciousness: a close description and analysis of one
or two representative passages in
chapter 4 or chapter 18 of Ulysses.
3.
Bloom's heroism.
4.
Attitudes toward the body in one or more chapters of Ulysses.
5. Bloom through Molly's eyes: a close reading of some passages
from the final chapter.
6.
Recurring imagery in Molly's soliloquy.
7. Bloom and
Molly: their relationship and their attitudes toward each other as revealed in
chapters 4, 6 and 18.
8.
Family relations in The Metamorphosis.
9.
Recurring themes and/or images in a story or stories from Dubliners.
10.
Priests in Dubliners.
11.
Song and/or drink in Joyce.
12.
Parents in selected stories or chapters in Joyce.
13.
Physical spaces: write an essay about one or two of Joyce's characteristic
settings--the pub, the dinner table,
the bedroom, for instance. How do people use and inhabit these settings, what kind of
drama occurs in such spaces?
14.
Lawrence's style in "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter."
15.
The theme of rebirth in "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter."
16.
Point of view in Kafka.
17.
Attitudes toward sexuality in The Good
Soldier.
18.
The structure of “The Metamorphosis.”
19. Psychological denial in “The Metamorphosis."
Third Essay:
1.
Woolf's handling of consciousness compared with that of Joyce.
2.
Ideas of male and female in To The
Lighthouse.
3.
Lily Briscoe: her role in Lighthouse.
6.
Benya Krik and/or Lyubka the Cossack: "heroism" in Babel's Odessa
tales.
7.
Grammatical (and other) transitions in Woolf.
8.
"Nature" in Old Man.
9.
Ideas of history and the past in Faulkner or in Babel.
10.
Family relations in Woolf and/or Faulkner.
11.
Style as meaning: a systematic description and analysis of the opening
paragraph from Joyce or Faulkner.
12.
Puns and wordplay in Pale Fire.
13.
Mirrors, reflections, resemblances in Pale
Fire.
14.
Nabokov's drama of the telling.