William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare Order Description As the question asked, please please identify clearly in title or heading the question number you have chosen. Possible Texts (you will choose two of these) William Shakespeare, The Tempest Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” Joe Sacco, from Journalism Alison Bechdel, Fun Home Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile” Mahmoud Darwish, “Diary of a Palestinian Wound,” “Bread,” “From: Beirut,” “After Beiruit” Bertolt Brecht, from Svendberger Poems lê thi diem thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For Please choose one of the following questions to respond to. You should choose a question to which you can respond with an original idea and develop an argument using two of the above texts. In your essay, you should present a unique and arguable thesis statement and develop your idea and argument with textual evidence, making use of interpretive claims and passage analysis (evidence + warrants). The Argument These essay questions require you to establish a connection between two texts. Your thesis statement should make a claim about how the texts you are drawing into correspondence are related (i.e. you should say something more concrete or specific than that they are similar, or do the same thing: you should tell your reader how they do something similar or different or what this relation is). The two texts should be from different authors. If you are dealing with some of the poetry, you can decide whether the “text” would be a single poem or would include more than one of an author’s poems. Developing Your Argument In the development of your idea and argument throughout the course of the essay, you are expected to integrate passages (evidence), make interpretive claims about these passages, and provide analysis (warrants) of these passages. In your development of claims, evidence, and warrants, please continue to pay attention to details of literary genre, form, and language. Please choose ONE of the following questions. 1.! In the “Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes claims that we can approach texts without regard for the biographical or historical information about an author. Yet, in all of the texts we looked at, the author’s biographical story is important, and in many of these texts, the main character is him/herself an “author-figure” (Bartleby is a scrivener; the lawyer is a narrator; Alison Bechdel is “herself,” an emerging comic book author; Brecht and Darwish are poets and write about poets). Choose two texts from the list above that depict a prominent author-figure and develop an argument about the role or function or work of the author. What is the task of the author? 2.! Many of the texts we have looked at rely on depictions of difficult or traumatic moments in the past, and part of the narrative effort is then to recover these experiences or to bring them into words. Choose two of the texts from the list above that ultimately present a reconciliation with the past, with one’s parents, or with a loss (of homeland, loved one, etc,…) and develop an argument about how the texts present a way of working through past trauma or loss. What is represented? What cannot be? 3.! The experience of exile is famously described by Edward Said as “a condition of terminal loss.” Choose two of the texts from the list above that offer ideas or images or metaphors about exile and develop an argument about how you understand exile or the estrangement of one from his/her homeland. What kind of perspective does the experience of exile bring about? 4.! Bertolt Brecht’s idea of the “dark times” describes not just Hitler’s rise to power and the atrocity that accompanied it, but the repression of public opinion and the restriction of the freedom of expression. In Men in Dark Times, political theorist Hannah Arendt took up Brecht’s phrase, stating that the dark times refer to a period “where there was only wrong and no outrage.” Arendt then goes on to describe how the difficulty of speaking out in such times leads to the inability to bring things to light in “the public realm.” Instead, she says, the speech of the day “does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding all old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality.” Arendt believes that artists and intellectuals can keep alive some light during these times. How does literature keep alive this light? How does it enlarge this “public realm” and what can be brought to light there? Does literature provide an alternative to nationalism’s dangerous aspects while also offering some form of “roots”? Choose two of the texts from the list above and develop an argument about how you see literature either expanding ideas or combatting assumptions in the public sphere. 5.! Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a story about identity, about accepting or coming to terms with one’s sexual identity, or sexuality, and about what happens when one’s identity is oppressed or repressed. In earlier texts this semester, we also considered some of the negative aspects of racialized identity, and this issue continues to be important in lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Choose two of the texts from the list above that describe how the oppression or repression of one’s identity has to be overcome and develop an argument about what leads to having an empowering experience of human identity. How does this dynamic of destruction/creation give rise to a new, contemporary “hero” or “heroine”? 6.! Read Joe Sacco’s “The Unwanted” (uploaded on Moodle), which depicts the current European/Syrian refugee crisis, and evaluate Edward Said’s claim that literature can’t deal with mass politics. Is it true that “literature” cannot present stories (narratives) that capture or depict the “scale” of contemporary displacement? Choose one other text (it could be Said’s) and develop an argument about how Sacco either does or does not succeed in representing the scale and complexity of the problem of displaced peoples. 7.! Develop your own question. This is an option for people who have an idea they would like to pursue that does not follow one of the above questions. In order to take up this option, you must write out a question following the form of those presented here and meet with me before the last day of class to discuss your proposed idea.