Any topic (writer’s choice)

Your task is to select one piece of literature from the reading list that you’d like to investigate further. In your email, you must indicate what particularly interests you about the piece. You may need to read ahead to find the piece that’s right for you. Your choice should meet the following criteria:

You can summarize the topic for others fairly easily.
You can identify its main argument and purpose.
It’s intricate or detailed enough that different readers may have different perspectives.
It’s a choice you enjoyed reading.
I received topics from FOUR of you. It’s too late to send a topic now; we are moving on. But here are some things to keep in mind: 1. Choose a literary text that was assigned reading in one of our modules/chapters. 2. If you choose a poem, keep in mind that you may need to find an additional literary text from our assigned readings that is similar in subject since poems are very short and might not provide enough substantive material for an entire paper.

Everyone needs to remember that this is a research paper. Thus, in addition to the literary text you selected from our assigned readings, you will also need to have several scholarly sources to bolster your claims. There will be no first person or personal anecdotes in these papers because this is a research paper. So consider the text you chose and ask yourself WHY you chose it? Some of you told me in your email why you chose it (thank you; that was the assignment), but your reasons were very personal. While “personal” is a great place to start, and often what draws us to literature, you will need to move from personal to academic in order to write the paper.

To help you do that, ask yourself, What is the overall topic of the piece? What are some of the problems/issues it addresses? Start thinking now of these issues so that you can use the library’s academic journal databases to find credible sources on these subjects.

Pick one of these:

Flannery O’Conner, ” A Good Man is Hard to Find”

7.16: Etheridge Knight, “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane”

7.24: Edward Abbey, Eco-Defense

Robert Frost, “Mending Wall