Topics: Paper #2 on Fiction

● Use MLA style.

This paper must:

Discuss ONE or TWO novels that we have read: Jane Austen’s Emma, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and/ or Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman.

● Make sure to quote from your novel(s) several times and to interpret those quotes substantially.
● Creative projects must follow these guidelines in their “critical analysis” section: see 5-b below.
● If you choose to compare and contrast two novels, you must form a single cohesive and original argument about both novels.

Choose ONE option from the topics below:

1.) Form an argument about how one or more novels portray and understand theory of mind. How does your chosen text (or texts) address narrators’ and characters’ knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of others? Make sure to discuss narration, whether reliable or unreliable, omniscient or limited, first person or third person, direct discourse or free indirect discourse. If you wish, you may address these questions by exploring tensions between external physical traits/gestures and internal mental states—what Lisa Zunshine has termed “embodied transparency.” Or you may consider your own role as a reader seeking to understand theory of mind.

2.) In one or more novels, explore family, romantic/erotic, or other relations among different characters and/or narrators. How does your chosen work portray these relationships: through what distinctive forms of imagery, language, and narrative form? If you wish, you may focus specifically upon how novels use these relationships to comment upon social expectations surrounding marriage, heterosexuality, parenthood, or friendship. Or you may explore how these issues intersect with others such as gender, race, class, humanness, etc.

3.) Analyze how one or more novels explore what it means to be human or nonhuman. You may consider how characters follow or depart from “normal” human behavior or emotion. Or, you may explore how these texts use imagery or metaphors of nonhuman animals (wild or domestic), ghosts, dreams, death, objects, magic, or dehumanization.

While writing, keep in mind:
● Narrator or narrators; modes of narration (first person, third person, unreliable, omniscient, free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, interpolated narrative)
● Tone (attitude and point of view)
● Style and diction: word choice, repetition, sound, syntax, grammar.
● Setting and situation
● Imagery
● Figures of speech (metaphor, simile, personification, etc.)
● Irony
● Plot and narrative form (foreshadowing, climax, resolution, literary genre, frame narratives, relation between plot and story)
● Character and character development
● For more, see “Reading Fiction” questions supplied for this class.