Paper topics

This paper is due Monday, February 16 at 4 p.m. to my office, Cushing-Martin 134. It should be approximately 5 pages long.

Irving’s male characters are often the town gossips, the storytellers, and the repositories of community history. Why? What role do women play in the production of stories? Discuss the connection between gender and storytelling in his tales.

Analyze images of consumption in “Rip Van Winkle” or “Sleepy Hollow.” Why are Irving’s stories so filled with eating, drinking, smoking, and “consuming” stories?

Analyze the role of sleep, dreams, and trance states in one or two of the following tales: “Rip Van Winkle,” “Sleepy Hollow,” “The Birth-Mark,” “Ligeia,” or “House of Usher.” Why is everyone so sleepy? How do Poe, Hawthorne, and/or Irving contrast the world of sleep and dreams with the workaday world, and to what end?

Compare the conversations that Everell has with Digby and that Everell has with Magawisca in chapter four of Hope Leslie. How do the characters’ different class, race, and gender statuses affect their competing claims? How does Everell relate to each character differently?

Emerson famously imagined himself as “transparent eyeball” and privileges those with an “attentive eye” (1115). Discuss Emerson’s use of visual metaphors. Why is sight such a key symbol for him? In what sense does it allow him to access both the physical world and the spiritual world? If you prefer, you may choose to analyze a different sense instead (hearing, touch, etc.).

Both William Apess in “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” and Abraham Lincoln in “The House Divided” speech, use religious imagery and Biblical references to make a case against racial inequality. Compare their use of such imagery: how does it give their arguments structure? What kind of claims do they make on the reader/listener?

Windows, thresholds, doorways, staircases, enclosed chambers, walled gardens: examine the role of architecture in Hawthorne or Poe. Why do these writers place so much emphasis on the structures their characters inhabit, and especially on liminal (borderline) spaces? What is the connection between architecture and the psychological states of their characters? Between the structure of their dwellings and the structure of their stories?

Wombs, tombs, and bridal chambers: Discuss the relationship between sexuality, birth, and death in Poe. What is the relationship between reproduction (childbearing) and Poe's obsessive doubling and repetition? Why do none of the male-female pairs produce children, and why do the children seem to be parentless?