Journeys to America

Bruce Harvey

Spring 2010

TOPICS FOR TERM PAPER (IF YOU ELECT TO WRITE ON EQUIANO YOU MAY HAVE AN EXTRA WEEK, MAKING THE PAPER DUE MARCH 8)

If you choose one of the topics below, please don’t address it as a “question” that has a “right” answer.  When I assess papers, I don’t think in terms of right, especially right, poor, & especially poor interpretations.  I look for a reasonably tight focus (a paper that doesn’t ramble), thoughtfulness (not just a recitation of what we went over in class), and a polished technique (good grammar and punctuation, a non-pompous but not overly informal/breezy style, and so on).  In general, a paper that tries to figure out something from an unusual but profound angle and yet doesn’t quite pull it off will make me as happy, indeed happier, than an essay that sounds like SparksNotes.  To put this more simply: work hard, but don’t be afraid of taking risks, and try to get in the zone of your own creative thoughtfulness.  The best thing you can do to get a topic, or to develop one of the topics below, is to stare hard, as it were, at the object of your attention.  Just as with a hobby that you have an interest in, whether football, hip-hop music, video gaming, musing about traveling, whatever … you want to be attentive to nuance.  With hobbies, such comes naturally, because you are naturally interested; but you can learn to be so with analysis, also! It sounds cute, but there really is a Zen art to writing and thinking.

Here are some topics, which you can tweak, twist, and etc.  Topics more or less the same as our Response paper cue get an * next to them.

1--Read (portions of) Columbus’s journal (not just the brief letter we read) and focus on the issue of value, exchange, and native materials (we came up with this topic in class discussion).

2--*Take either Caliban’s first major passage or the scene of Prospero’s odd forgetting of Caliban’s conspiracy against him as a brainstorming cue, and construct an argument/analysis that uses a full range of passages from the The Tempest yet also makes one of the former passages or scenes central.

3--*Ditto in method as above, but consider the concluding radiant/Cross light in Black Robe (several of you had very good response papers on this topic, and I would welcome expansion!).

4--Miranda doesn’t get a lot of stage time, but in some ways she is crucial to the play’s overall plot or theme—her purity and devotion to her father is a foil for the carnality of the of Caliban and conspiracies against Prospero, but perhaps she is overly naïve and such is, in fact, a dubious foil against the “realpolitik” of the play?  Discuss (be sure to have a reasonably focused thesis).

5--Analyze the theme of resentment and/or anger in the play.

6--*Black Robe is based on a novel, based in turn on some degree of accurate historical research.  Analyze the issue of how native American “otherness” is represented in the film.  The film isn’t an anthropological treatise, but it does try at points to almost get us to the “other” side and not just be preoccupied with the priest’s perspective.  Or, perhaps, in order to make the priest’s story rich and complex--the story of his mission of conversion—it needs to somewhat present the native cultural/psychological perspective?

7--Although comparative topics I generally discourage, it would be useful to compare the treatment of sacrifice in Black Robe to the film (with DeNiro et al) The Mission.

8--*“Younger Brother”—well, here necessarily interpretation is going to require a lot of cultural guess-work and speculation.   Why not, then, write a “meta” paper on the issue of the difficulty of interpretation itself; perhaps construct a web-page on how such a story could be taught in, say, a senior level highschool myth/religion or literature class?  If you wish, imitate one of the websites in the right hand column of the syllabus that are, in effect, teacher-to-teacher.  (This would be useful if you plan to teach Highschool, perhaps.)

9--*Rowlandson: see Response cue#3.

10--Rowlandson: would you say that Rowlandson ever gets to know the Indians?  Or does she use them only for rhetorical/theological purposes?

11--Rowlandson: what is the relation between the many scriptural passages Rowlandson quotes and her own (self)-narrative?

12--Equiano: read carefully the key passage in which Equiano gets a new “blue” suit or the passage in which he speaks of managing some slaves.  Use one or the other as a central part of an argument about Equiano’s potentially compromised identity and allegiances.

13--Equiano: do you think Equiano’s traumatic separation from his family and African village/homeland defines or determines his subsequent mindset?  Is his entrepreneurial spirit a response to this initial psychical wound?  Or perhaps the initial African chapters serve only a rhetorical purpose in his autobiography?