English 314: Paper #3 Topics (Paper #2)

You are welcome to choose one of the topics suggested below. Remember: these are just springboards for developing a paper; it is your responsibility to create a sustained, coherent argument and make clear the implications of your reading.  You are also welcome to come up with your own topic.  If you choose the latter option, you might find it useful to run your idea by me before beginning.

1. Explore the representations of women in Heart of Darkness.  Is Marlow (and Kurtz) correct in his characterization of women?  Is he complicit in keeping women "in the dark"? You might examine Kurtz's painting; you might compare the woman who appears at the shore in Africa with the Intended; you might consider whether Marlow's (and other men's) relationship to the truth is any different from that of women.  
2. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow asks his listeners on the ship: "Do you see him?  Do you see the story?  Do you see anything?" (1778).  Do they?  Do we?  What does the novella seem to suggest about vision (literally and/or metaphorically)? You might be able to combine elements of question #1 with this one.
3. How might one read Eliot's "The Hollow Men" as an extension of the ideas presented in Heart of Darkness?  Base your argument on close reading of both texts.
4. Compare Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" with one of the Romantic poet's poems about aging or about art.  Focus not only on the content of the poems but also on how they achieve their ends; incorporate the latter into your argument.
5. Time is an important element of Mrs. Dalloway. Consider the places in which time is invoked, how different characters deal with time, how time passes in the novel. What might Woolf be saying about time and how it shapes human experience (or how human experience shapes it)?
6. Septimus Warren Smith, in Mrs. Dalloway, at one point says "beauty, that was the truth now" (69). How does Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" help us to understand Septimus?