English 5000: Topics for Term Paper

Choose your topics from the list given below. Refer to at least two theoretical works. Do not write on a subject on which you already wrote for either of your two short papers.

Please note that these are very broad topic areas and that you need to formulate some particular argument within these general topic areas.

The term paper should be between 2,400 words and 3,200 words in length.

You may agree or disagree with any of the theorists listed (including me). The reasoned character of your arguments will be the primary criterion for assessing the quality of your essay. The quality of reasoned discussion, not agreement or disagreement, is what will count.

The topics are the sentences in bold-face. The subsequent comments in each topic are meant only to stimulate your thinking and suggest possible aspects. They are not meant as an outline or guide to your essay. It would NOT be a good idea merely to answer each question posed, in sequence. You need to formulate the topic in your own way, formulate a set of propositions (thesis) about the topic, and construct a coherent essay.

You may illustrate your ideas with reference to any literary texts you like, including those we have read for this class, but be sure not to slip into an extended interpretation or exposition of any literary text. The main focus for these essays must be on the theoretical topics designated here.

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1. What is the relation of any ONE of the following schools to literature or literary theory: Marxist social theory, Foucauldian cultural theory, New Historicism, deconstructive philosophy, and Feminist social critique? You might want to consider some of the following issues. What are the basic principles at work in these disciplines? Is there a coherent body of accepted scientific principles in the discipline? Are there fundamental differences in the way different people or different schools conceive of their activity? What bearing does the discipline have on literature or criticism? What are the connections between the subject-matter of the discipline and the subject matter of literature or criticism? What similarities of method or principle are there? Can criticism be subordinated to any of the disciplines, or can the principles at work in the disciplines be adapted to literary study but contained within principles peculiar to literary study?

2. Compare the value of any TWO schools of theory. You could consider those listed in question # 1 and add to them evolutionary biology and Freudian psychoanalytic theory. For example, you could consider the relations of psychoanalysis and Marxism, feminism and deconstruction, or evolutionary biology and Foucauldian cultural critique. You would need to examine the basic principles in each discipline, determine what fundamental forces and causal relations each would identify, how these forces and relations would be correlated, and what kind of implications they would have for practical criticism.

3. Evaluate any one theorist, or compare two or more theorists. You might, for example, wish to consider Freud, Derrida, Foucault, or Kolodny. What are their basic positions, their operative principles and purposes? How can these adapted to literary texts? Are they right or wrong? Right in what way? Wrong in what way? How would you situate them in relation to your own fundamental assumptions about life, reality, culture, and literature?

5. What is deconstruction? What are its operative principles and procedures? What are its characteristic strategies? What is their specifically literary character? What according to deconstructionist tenets is the nature of language and its relation to life, reality, experience, literature? What about determinacy of meaning? Where do categories like God, archetypal teleology, structure, difference, and "play" fit in? How would you situate all these categories or presuppositions in relation to your own basic conceptions about literature?

6. What are the fundamental assumptions and purposes of feminism? Is there a feminist consensus? That is, are most people who would identify themselves as feminists in agreement on certain basic principles? If so, what are these principles? What limitations to consensus, if any, would you identify? That is, are there basic ways in which some feminists disagree with other feminists? In what way would you situate any specifically feminist principle in relation to your own basic conceptions about the nature of men, women, culture, and literature? Is history a basic dimension here? If so, how? Are there any facts or conditions that transcend specific historical conditions? If so, what are they? If not, is there any limitation on the flexibility of cultural identity? What does all of this have to do with literary theory? with the canon? with critical practice? How can it be situated in relation to other areas of concern? Does this issue subsume all others, or not?

7. Does contemporary critical theory form a coherent, unified complex of assumptions and procedures, or is it constituted by a heterogeneous group of doctrines with conflicting or unrelated assumptions and procedures? In other words, is there a "paradigm" currently available? If so, what are its basic principles and how would they apply to specific schools such as deconstruction, Marxism, New Historicism or cultural Criticism, psychoanalysis, and feminism? What are the relations among these disciplines? In what ways, if any, are they distinct in focus or approach? If you do not think there is a paradigm, can you identify the basic differences among competing doctrines or methods? Would you argue that it is in the nature of literary study that there could never be a unified set of principles and methods accepted by all rational participants in the professional interpretive community? If not, why not? Would pluralism or eclecticism itself then constitute a "paradigm"? Whether or not you think there is or could be a paradigm in critical theory, how would you situate currently available doctrines in relation to your own basic assumptions about literary study?

8. Formulate what you yourself think is the whole scope, character, and purpose of literature and/or literary criticism and literary theory. You must refer to the formulations of at least two other theorists. Be as specific as possible about the character of literature and the content of literary theory. That is, what are the central, elementary characteristics of literature, and what, accordingly, are the central principles of literary theory? Some of the issues you might wish to consider are the relation of literature to life, to nature, to any spiritual order (if you think there is one), to the personality of the individual writer, to the culture in which the writer writes, and to science or philosophy or religion. You might wish to consider the issue of whether criticism is or can be a systematic, objective ("scientific") study, or whether it is, rather, one of the fine arts, a matter of taste and intuition and spontaneous, ad hoc description and evocation. You might want to consider the relation of objective knowledge and subjective response or evaluation.

Remember, while you are required here to formulate your own distinct views, you must also refer to the formulations of at least two other theorists.

9. Is there a paradigm in literary theory at the present time? If so, what is it? What are its common features? What are its elementary assumptions and characteristic attitudes? What is its relation to other forms of mental activity or other academic disciplines? What are its motives or purposes? What is its rationale or justification? If there is not a paradigm, what set of dispersed, heterogeneous practices and doctrines does exist? Is this heterogeneity right or at least necessary and inevitable? Is it a peculiarity of the historical moment? Is it a reflex of the incomplete or indeterminate character of all knowledge?

10. Compare all of the critical essays in either of the two casebooks--on Hamlet or Heart of Darkness. Formulate a comprehensive analytic and comparative thesis. Don’t just take up one essay after another, giving discrete, unconnected summaries of each essay. You will need some comprehensive interpretive/analytic framework of your own within which to assess the essays. That is, you will need to have your own distinct sense of what the novel or play means and how it achieves this meaning. And you will need a considered set of criteria for assessing critical merit. That is, are the essays good or bad, helpful or unhelpful, incisive or beside the point? And in what respects? Do they get at some substantive emotional concern? Do they delineate the point of view? Do they provide a comprehensively adequate explanatory structure? Do they make meaningful connections among style, tone, point of view, and various substantive aspects such as individual identity, gender, family, society, life, and nature? Or do they miss something vital in the work? Are some of the essays complementary? Do they overlap or supplement one another? Or are they mutually exclusive? Can one put them together to make a more complete sense of the work, or must one choose between or among them? Is any of them hampered by fundamentally inadequate or misleading conceptions about the nature of literature or criticism? Or do some of them formulate fundamentally right and usable conceptions?