For this essay, you should focus on texts we have read in the course since The Metamorphosis. You may also write a compare/contrast essay that incorporates a text from earlier in the course, but you may not write solely about an earlier text in the course. You also need to write on a new text, but you may incorporate a text you have already written about as a comparison. The following are not questions that you should address one by one, but rather guides for developing your own argument.  You may also write about a combination of topics, but do make sure that your argument is suitable for the scope of a short paper. You may also use one of your discussion board posts or blogs as a springboard for or as part of the content of your essay.

You should read this carefully to make sure your essay FULFILLS ALL REQUIREMENTS ESTABLISHED BY THE ASSIGNMENT. All students must submit a draft or they will receive zero points for the assignment.

Requirements:  I expect to see a focused argumentative thesis with supporting points based on textual analysis.  Use the text as support, meaning, you must build your argument through close reading and explanation of actual passages in the text.  Fully develop your analysis.  A quotation from the text will not illustrate your thesis on its own.  You must teach the reader, through close reading and elaboration upon details in the passages, how it relates to your thesis.  It is also better to elaborate in detail upon one example than to bring in too many undeveloped examples.  

• The page length should be FIVE TO SEVEN PAGES of writing in a reasonably sized font, 12 point times new roman, for example. This will also be a research essay.  You must incorporate two outside academic sources—either books or scholarly articles (not reviews)–into your argument, using MLA style, with a complete works cited list.  You must quote from each source in the paper at least twice.  Essays that do not include a MLA style works cited list will receive a failing grade.  Papers that do not incorporate research will receive a failing grade.

1.  How do any of the texts we have read complicate conventional notions of morality?  Books: Persepolis, Marjane Satrape and Nervous Conditions By:  Tsitsi Dangarembga. In an article in The Guardian, for example, Chris Powers writes that for Borowski, “despair itself is moral.”  Do the texts offer any sort of coherent ethical vision or are they marked by complete nihilism? 

For this you will need to explain, either through your research or your own thought what a conventional notion of morality is.  Be specific.  It’s possible that this notion is explored also through particular scenes in the text.

2.  Borowski writes in “The People Who Walked On” that the memory of the camp surviver “retains only images.”  Explain.  How might this be relevant to Resnais’ Night and Fog? What do you think is the relationship between memory, time and identity in these texts? May also be useful for discussing Hiroshima Mon Amour.

3.  What sort of problems does Hiroshima Mon Amour address? How does the film, as Rivette has claimed “underline the horror of contemporary society” and what is the role of the love story in doing this?  

4.  Kevin Sweeney argues that the Metamorphosis leaves “unresolved questions about the limits of responsibility towards those whose personhood is in doubt” (152).  In other words, our de-humanization can become a way of limiting our responsibility toward others.  Explain this argument in relation to one or two texts we have read in class.

5.  Better Homes and Gardens:  What role does the home play in the texts we have read? Nervous Conditions also examines this theme, as the “homestead” becomes something one must leave or escape in order to emancipate oneself..How in general, does the home, houses, and housekeeping become a “center” in these texts?  How are these homes related in particular to the role of women? 

6.  Education: For this essay, examine how education (or lack of) affects the lives of the characters in the texts we have read.  For example, in texts such as Nervous Conditions, what is the relationship between education and emancipation and/or the relationship between education and the systems that oppress these characters?  Is education necessary? Is education in the text a rejection of culture? How is education related to the characters’ “coming of age?” This should be an essay that analyzes the text primarily.  Please do not write a general essay about education of women in Africa. Where does Persepolis fit in here?

7.  Kinship and Family Structure:  As with the texts we read earlier in the semester, several of the texts we have read more recently also engage the issue of kinship and family structure.  How do these texts continue this theme?  One way to focus your essay might be on the idea of the maternal, or the mother figure, as the center of family life.  How, for example, does the desire to mother get reproduced or, conversely, halted, in the texts we have read?  How does the role of “mothering” structure family life, or how is affected by unfathomable catastrophe?  You might also consider other ways to focus on other figures in the family, such as fathers, sisters, or brothers or the notion of childhood in general. 

8.  In the final texts we have read, how do characters negotiate their identities in the midst of political and economic turmoil? Pick two texts we have read and explain how you see the protagonists’ developmental narratives playing out against each other? What aspects of their identity—gender, race, relationship to community—make them different or similar?