Choose four topics and develop them into essays of AT LEAST 350 words each. Double-space your essay and use 12pt Times or Times New Roman.
Topics:
1. The twin myths of the U.S. as “the promised land” for “God’s chosen people” are often perceived as the driving forces behind how Euro-America, predominately its men, conceptualizes America’s exceptional history. Accordingly, this history of American exceptionalism, built on myths of privilege reserved for Americans of European descent, has resulted in the creation of caste systems based on class, race, and gender. Using at least three of the following writers Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Melville, Hughes, Steinbeck, Ginsberg, MLK, Baraka, Millett, Rich, or Friedan, discuss how each of the chosen writers represents the ravaging effects of caste systems on the social, economic, gendered, sexual, and/or racial “Other,” and, in the process, responds to and/or challenges social definitions created by the Euro-American patriarchal understanding of their inherent superiority.
2. The relationship between Man and Nature has always been intrinsically linked with the American Experience. For instance, American writers have sometimes used the American landscape as a way to understand God. At other times, writers have portrayed Nature as the agency via which Man (or woman) could understand the meaning of his existence. Choose two of the following writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, H.D., Langston Hughes, or John Steinbeck. Explain how each of the two writers you chose represents the evocative relationship between mankind (or womankind) and Nature.
3. The Puritan theocracy of 17th century New England left an indelible mark on U.S. societal norms, especially as regards its system of values and morals. Accordingly, Horton and Edwards, in Backgrounds of American Literary Thoughts, contend that the divine mission of the Puritans, based primarily on “Idealism and Opportunism,” would go on to dictate the ideological and political history of the U.S. Discuss.
4. The American Dream can be summarized as a cult of self-sufficiency and financial success. Discuss the ways in which Manifest Destiny and Frontier theory have historically been seen as the main doctrinal vehicles for the realization of the “Dream.” (You can also use literary texts to supplement your argumentation)
5. Many writers analyzed this semester have attempted to “write” their version of the United States of America, especially its core values of freedom, democracy, and independence. In the same vein, their work often tries to define how the American identity is affected, positively or negatively, by these values of self-determination and self-reliance. Choose three of the following writers: Franklin, Douglass, Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Eliot, Hughes, Steinbeck, Ginsberg, MLK, Baraka, or Rich. Explain how each of the three writers you chose conceptualize and thus champions and/or criticizes these core values.
6. Capitalism has been a recurrent theme this semester. Capitalist aspirations have affected how the United States has negotiated its history, how the nation implemented its Constitution and how it defined its identity. Concordantly, American writers reacted passionately to events, institutions and movements such as slavery, the Gilded Age, the Depression and World Wars that may illustrate the wrongs of capitalist aspirations to some. Choose two writers among the following: Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Eliot, Robinson, Steinbeck, and Ginsberg. Then, discuss how the chosen writers engage these events, institutions, and movements in ways that shows their opposition to the nation’s ever-expanding capitalist empire.
