Policy on Academic Honesty Your essay will be automatically submitted to Turnitin.com for an evaluation of the originality of your ideas and proper use and attribution of sources. Your essay should be brand new (i.e., you should not submit work you have done for other classes; this is considered plagiarism and will be penalized).
TOPICS:
These are just suggestions; feel free to come up with your own:
•Choose one story and its film adaptation and analyze the shift between the two mediums. In what ways does the film adaptation supplement, enhance, change, or perhaps lose something from the original text? Did the written text feature elements that did not translate well into film? How are the main characters portrayed in the written text versus the film? How is the audience supposed to react or respond to each portrayal? What is the overall mood of the written text? Does the film evoke a similar mood? Would it be more useful to watch the adaptation first and then read the story? Besides“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,”there are short film adaptations for “A Rose for Emily,”“Cathedral,”and “The Lottery”respectively.Let me know if you are interested and I will provide the links.
•Identify common thematic elements in two short stories.
•Identify common thematic elements in two works by the same author or by two distinct authors; the works or authors can be from two different periods or contexts.For instance, select2-3poems from our syllabus by different poets that address the same theme. How does each poet approach this theme? Could the lives of these poets or the historical and cultural context in which they produced their texts have influenced how they manipulated imagery in order to promote a theme? What do we learn from their techniques? Or, you can select a poet from our syllabus and two or three of his/her poems(Depending on who the poet is, you may have to find 2 other poems online). What is similar about these poems? Does the poet address the same theme over and over again? Does he/she apply a recognizable technique that is unmistakably his or her own? Does the historical period in which the poet lived play a major role in the readers’ understanding of his or her poems?
•Focus on a very specific issue in one single work from our syllabus. Just make sure the issue you choose to explore is related to the theme of our course. For instance, you can discuss racist stereotyping in Shakespeare’s Othello.How is Othello portrayed by the Venetian characters (before he makes his first appearance on stage)? How is the “real” Othello? Does he fit the descriptions provided by these characters? In what ways did Iago manipulate the racial stereotypes of his time to make Othello doubt himself? Why did Shakespeare incorporate the racial stereotypes of his time into his play? Or, you could discuss how the play depicts gender roles and gender differences in Elizabethan England. How does Iago view womanhood and a woman’s role in general? How are family relationships (daughter-father in particular) and marriage portrayed in the play?
