Essay Requirements: 3-5 pages double-spaced, 12 point font (Times New Roman), 1 inch margins, stapled, paginated

Please submit TWO copies of the essay: one hard copy is due in class, and one electronic copy must be turned in on Blackboard. Late papers will be marked down one third of a grade for each day of tardiness (e.g., A to A-).

Essay 2 Description

Essay 2 will ask you to engage with some of the broader themes encountered in the course.

Your essay should have an introduction with a thesis statement, a middle that demonstrates evidence from the poem in support of your reading, and a conclusion. This is your chance to present your ideas: support them with fact-based statements instead of emotion-based generalizations. With each of your main points, make a claim or introduce an idea, back it up with evidence from the text, and analyze your evidence.

While you will have more freedom to select the texts you will consider from the syllabus, make sure you answer the question posed. Make use of your knowledge of literary terminology.

Essay 2 Options (SELECT ONE)

1. Discuss the ways in which two or more of the Modernist writers (or artists) on the syllabus convey a sense of cultural fragmentation and/or interrogate former cultural certainties through the thematic, structural, and stylistic elements of their work.

2. From A Doll's House to Rilke's "The Swan," several of the texts included in the Realism and Modernism weeks of the course contain images of or references to birds. Write an essay that analyzes the appearance of bird imagery in at least two texts, comparing and contrasting similarities and differences in the use of this motif. Explain the connections you see, and the significance of these connections.

3. Compare and contrast one of the texts from the Realism weeks (Ibsen, Chekhov) with one of the texts from the Modernism weeks (Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Rilke, Neruda, Woolf) to discuss the overlapping themes and distinguishing features of nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century modernism. (Think about the common themes we discussed in the introductory sessions on Realism and Modernism.)

4. Many Modernist writers engage with the effects of World War I: both the overall sense of chaos and loss felt in society at large and the direct effects of the war upon soldiers who returned home. Discuss characters (or voices) from at least two texts on the course written during or after WWI who are somehow impacted by war, with attention to similarities and differences in the characters/voices.