Essays: 6-8 pages
Topics
1) Most of our work intersects with American policy and examines the effects of
imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism.
Examine the effects of American policies on the characters in the works we’ve read, and how do American perceptions and values view the people affected and their various plights?
2. How do literary portrayals reflect society’s collective needs/fears/desires about historical events represented in the text(s) of your choice?
3. Violent postcolonial conflict/resolution are major themes that we see in American
Literature: write an essay examining how the literature deepens our understandings of
these issues in a variety of ways.
4. How do authors use personal experiences as a means of providing social critique about the way our culture stigmatized people according to race, class, sex, particular illness (physical or mental)?
How can narrative be used as a way of critiquing the government or social structures?
5. Choose a broad theme and write close analysis about how it’s portrayed in literature?
For example, you might do something like “The narratives of magic and spirituality in Romantic Literature”
How do authors use literary techniques and narrative structure plot, character, setting, point of view, figurative language, metaphor to represent or comment on the experience of mental illness and/or give it more symbolic meaning?
6. Analyze the racist and white supremacist foundation of the United States through your choice of literature.
7. Explore gender conditions in your choice of literature.
8. Analyze the role of literature in resistance through the resistance literature of natives, enslaved people, and/or women.
9. You are not limited to these topics: you are free to explore anything you connect to the literature in an essay.
