Write an essay of 8-10 pages on one of the following topics. No research is required. If you nevertheless chose to do research, your use of secondary sources must be fully documented. Remember that when including research, writers must still focus on their own ideas, interpretations, and analysis. Your essay is due Dec. 30th
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1)  Discuss the attitude to nature expressed in one or both of the following poems by Whitman: “A Noiseless Patient Spider” and “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”
2)  Discuss the political implications of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”
3)  What does William Blake think of the English society of his time? Your essay may include commentary on his attitude to religion, government, racism, the burgeoning industrial age, and / or anything else you consider relevant.
4)  Discuss the contrasting states of innocence and experience in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by comparing, among the poems we read in class,  two or three of the Songs of Innocence with two or three of the Songs of Experience. You may want to think about the kinds of people who serve as narrators in the poems you discuss.
5)  The twentieth century has been called the Age of Anxiety, a description justified by a high number of Modernist works. This characterization accurately reflects, as well, the milieu Gogol describes in the nineteenth-century story “The Overcoat.” Beneath the surface, most of his characters suffer from anxiety. What is Gogol saying about human nature and / or the nature of the particular society he is describing?
6)  Akaky Akakievich is a mild-mannered man at the beginning of “The Overcoat” and a man filled with rage at the end of the story. Discuss the reasons for and the significance of his psychological transformation.
7)  Discuss Gogol’s attitude to the hierarchical society of nineteenth-century Russia that is depicted in “The Overcoat.”
8)  Discuss the radical characteristics of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and what led Eliot and other Modernists to break with the past.
9)  The primary subject of Modernist works is not the outer world but consciousness. Show how this is illustrated in Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar.”
10)  As the meaning of his life becomes increasingly confusing to Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis” (Gregory in the Norton anthology 8th edition translation), Kafka’s beliefs about the meaning of life in the modern world become increasingly clear to the reader of the story. Discuss Gregor’s confusion and / or the clarity that develops for the reader.
11)  Speaking of “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka said, “The terror of art [is that] the dream reveals the reality.” What is the significance of this statement about works of fiction in respect to this story?
12)  In "The Metamorphosis," Gregor Samsa feels that he is as insignificant as an insect because he is a very vulnerable man, and because his employer and his family have regarded and treated him as if he were an insect. After years of enduring his unhappiness, he even becomes an insect. This story is, in part, an expression of a weak individual’s response to various forms of authority. Discuss the kinds of authority represented in the story, what they do to him, and how such expressions of authority and his reaction to them relate to the lives of other people living in a crowded, business-oriented world.
13)  There are considerable similarities between the lives of Akaky Akakievich and Gregor Samsa in the stories by Gogol and Kafka. For example, each is regarded as an insignificant man in his society. Compare and contrast these characters. In particular consider how they are alike or differ in their responses to the worlds in which they live.
14)  Gabriel García Márquez’s "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" is an example of metafiction, writing that makes storytelling the subject of a story.  Discuss how this story is about the way stories are written.
15)  What does "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" tell us about the way myths are formed?

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