English 314: Paper #4 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.  "Modern Period (1914-1965). As designated by critics, the period began when World War I blasted the past and history into apparent oblivion.  As Matthew Arnold sensed a half a century earlier ("Dover Beach," 1867), the darkling plain was here, in mud and barbed wire, with no joy, love, light, certitude, peace, nor help for pain, where ignorant armies clashed by night.  Only a bleak solipsism survived, each sole self projecting its own reality, unsure of its match with any other.  The past was dead.  God was dead.  People were alienated from all community.  One could create one's self only by existing, by moving one's existential reality up from the black wall of terror and nothing, acting and choosing, as Sartre said somewhat illogically, as if for all humanity.  Individual consciousness reigned, though the unconscious, as Freud and Jung suggested, outweighed the conscious.  Emotion and self-will superseded reason and virtue, in this dire extension of the anti-intellectual but optimistic Romantic ethos."

Harper Handbook to Literature, ed. Northrip Frye, Sheridan Baker, George Perkins (New York:  Harper and Row, 1985) 295.

Challenge, however subtly, any part of this definition of the Modern Period (and, by extension, Modernism) with one (or two at the most) works we have read and discussed this semester.  By the end of the essay, it should be clear what you think is at stake in challenging this definition.
 
2.  "The snow, which falls indifferently upon all things, covering them with a neutral whiteness and erasing all their differentiating details, is the symbol of Gabriel's new sense of identity with the world, of the breakdown of the circle of his egotism to allow him to become for the moment not a man different from all other men living in a world of which he alone is the center but a willing part of the general flux of things."

David Daiches, "Dubliners," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Dubliners: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968) 36.

Do you agree with Daiches' evaluation of the end of Joyce's "The Dead"?

3.  Compare one of the Modernist or contemporary poems we have (or will soon be reading) either to a Romantic poem or to one of the defenses/definitions of poetry we have read (Wordsworth, Shelley, and Arnold spring to mind).  How does this  20th-century poet support or challenge the tenets of Romanticism (or, in the case of Arnold, the function of poetry as distinct from criticism)?  Particularly appropriate for this examination might be Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Thomas, Heaney, or Walcott.

4.  Examine one or two metaphors from Mrs. Dalloway.  How do they illuminate some of the themes with which the text deals?  Is the metaphor consistent, and if not, what is the significance of the different manifestations of the metaphor?  As you think about this topic, you might also examine the relationship between the theme and the form of the novel.
Some possibilities:  waves; veil/screen/pane of glass; thread; knife/scissors; sewing; flowers and trees.

5.  What is the relationship between land and writing/language in Heaney's or Walcott's poetry?  Pick one or two poems with which to examine this theme.