EN 12                                                                                                                              Prof. Petrino

                                                    EN 12: RESEARCH PAPER OPTIONS

         The research paper requires you to develop your skill in writing a sustained argument on a literary issue and ensures that you have mastered conventions of academic research.  You may develop a topic of your own or you may use one of the topics listed below.  All topics must be entered into your research journal and approved on an assigned date.
        The topics for research papers should revolve around a central major theme that arises from your reading this term.  From the research topics listed below, you need to ask a question that is manageable and appropriate for developing in a 5 pp. paper.  Remember to choose a particular work or writer around which your discussion will center.  Try to ask a significant question about one of the following possible topics:

Music and society
Gender and literature
Women’s roles in society
African-Americans in fiction and poetry
Becoming an American
Nature and setting in literature
Ethnic identity
Drama and its social or political purpose

For example, one essay topic could examine the role of politics or history in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, 1.  Why is politics and war important to his conception of the world?  What is the role of a king and his relationship to his people?  What are the roles of women in the play?  What social or political function do his plays have?

From this research topic, you can begin to read about the life and time of Shakespeare. You can investigate the history and major events of his life, or you can investigate social pressures on people’s lives.  Biographies and narrative histories are useful for this information.  Criticism of the play will also illuminate the individual roles of characters or the language of the period.  Here are examples of sources you might turn to for information:

Biographies
Narrative histories
Case books (collections of articles, chronologies, and contemporary reviews of literary works)
Articles
Interviews (especially for contemporary authors)
Videos (films providing information or interpretations of plays)
Literary criticism

I have listed below more examples of Research Paper Options.  You may choose your own, but need to have your topic approved.  Remember to discuss in detail one of the works we have read in class.

Option #1: Gender Issues
         Adolescence tends to be the time when people confront basic issues about how they define themselves and their identities.  As part of a required eleventh grade English class, Mr. Holcombe wishes to teach writers to whom his students can relate.  He also needs to make sure the stories he teaches are technically superb and intellectually challenging.  Finally, he would like to raise issues that many of his students are confronting in their own lives.
        Choosing one or more of the stories we read, write a paper persuading Mr. Holcombe and others in his department which author would be best to teach his students.  Several of the stories we have read discuss issues about how men and women relate to larger social pressures concerning gender.  You might consider Faulkner, Hawthorne, Chopin, and Cather as examples.  In the course of your defense, try to explain how these authors are technically excellent and why they are still relevant today, despite their having been written in other eras.

Option #2: Women in Society
         Women confront many issues in their everyday lives as a result of the social roles they assume—as mothers, wives, caretakers, and moral exemplars.  Why do women in literature so often commit suicide?  Even if they don’t, how do they live out their lives in diminished ways?  What particular conflicts do you see arising in fiction or drama that explain why female characters live tragic or severely compromised lives?  Considering the female characters we have studied, explore the reasons behind the tragic choices they make.  You might extend this discussion to the larger issues women face in society.  Among the stories and plays we have read, Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Chopin’s The Awakening, and Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Antigone would be good choices.

Option #3: Naturalism
         Chopin’s The Awakening might be described as “a naturalistic tragedy.”  Naturalism has been defined as a literary movement that depicts characters who are motivated by physical or biological needs for hunger, money, or sex.  These literary works tend to uncover and examine almost clinically the mechanistic behaviors of their characters.  Explore the topic of naturalism and explain how or why one or several of the works we have studied are considered naturalist texts.

Option #4: Whitman and Ginsberg
         Among the poets we have examined, Walt Whitman and Allan Ginsberg are among the most closely related, thematically and formally.  Their politics, literary styles, social lives, and philosophies are parallel in many ways.  At the same time, their visions of America differ and suggest how important their eras were to shaping the issues of their art.  Explore the similarities and dissimilarities between these two fascinating poets.

Option #5: A Sense of Place
         Many writers evoke a strong sense of place in their literary works.  Sometimes these authors have been referred to as “regionalist” or “local color” writers, since they evoke a particular locale, as does Kate Chopin of Creole life in her fiction.  Consider this treatment of place in one or more of the writers we have read.  For instance, you might look at how writers such as Hawthorne and Frost use their New England heritage and settings.  Alternatively, you might look at portrayals of the South in Faulkner and Chopin.
         How do the writers evoke their landscapes in their literary works?  What relationship is there between the setting and the characters or the dilemmas that the characters face?

Option #6: The Idea of Fate
         The Greeks thought that everyone’s life was predestined, and each person must stoically accept his lot in life.  At the end of Oedipus the King, the chorus contends, “You shall call no man happy, till he has passed life’s borders, free from pain.”  Explore the idea of fate in Sophocles’s plays and how the lives of the characters reflect their struggles with and working out of their fates.  Given our desire today in America to strive for success and self-advancement, do you find the classical idea of fate inadequate or still relevant?

Option #7: Gender in Antigone
         Is Creon a politician concerned with imposing and maintaining order?  Is Antigone an anarchist whose action will destroy that order?  Or is she a private citizen determined to follow the dictates of her personal beliefs?  Write an essay following the lines of the question on p. 644 in Literature and the Writing Process.  You should address the struggle between public policy and private conscience, and explain which character you believe takes a moral stand and why.
         Another option would be to discuss gender in Antigone.  How important is gender in the struggle between Antigone and Creon?  Analyze the play along the liens of male-female conflict.  You might consider Ismene, Haemon, and Eurydice in examining the opposing values of the play.

Option #8: Topic of Your Choice
         Puruse some question of interest to you that emerges from our reading in the course.