So far this semester, you have honed your close reading skills and you have practiced how to use a non-literary text to interpret a literary one. Now you will be putting all you’ve learned to work in your most challenging writing project of the semester: a five page research essay. This assignment requires you to select an option from the prompts below, and compose a paper that will analyze one to two literary works in detail. As part of this process, you will be required to locate three outside, non-literary sources to help you better understand and interpret the literary piece(s) you have chosen to focus on (one of these sources may be the chapter by Horwitz). The goal here is to demonstrate that you can integrate non-literary sources into your discussion in order to support and strengthen your analysis, resulting in a unique and thoughtful interpretation of the literary text(s) in question.
In this paper, you may not write about a literary text that you have written about in a previous essay.
1) In the texts we have encountered this semester, madness has often served as a metaphor. That is, the authors have used depictions of madness to turn a critical lens on the world around them—a lens through which they are able to meaningfully engage with certain pressing concerns, such as men’s historical oppression of women, the profound and lingering effects of racism, the tension that arises between the individual and society, the psychological scars that trauma can leave, and so on. Select one or two of the literary works we have read and discussed, and offer your interpretation as to what social, cultural, or political concerns the author is grappling with. How is the author using a depiction of madness to comment on these issues, and what is s/he telling us?
