Mid-Term Essay Topics

Here are three topics to chose from for the mid-term paper, twenty-five hundred words, due in lecture July 11th.

1.] There is a degree of attention in the modernist novels that we are studying in our course to the class system in England that, insofar as the general understanding of the literary movement is concerned, seems surprising. Using the many insights provided in lecture, present your argument for a unitary explanation of the prominent treatment that the English class structure receives from any three of our writers of modernism.

2.] Address yourself in your essay to two related paradoxes – one vexing, the other humourous – which must necessarily confound – or, at least, should confound – any honest and competently knowledgeable modernist scholarship. One is that a coherent, rational and tidy academic understanding is being pursued of a movement founded on an attitude deprecatory toward tidy resolution and closed systems by a disparate membership having contradictory designs, principles and practices. Two is the multifareous metaphysic asserted by modernists on one hand and the unprecedented Titanarchy that its creators formed themselves into on the other. (From the standpoint of years, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the most important concern of Freud, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, & many far lesser, & more local Modernists was inescapably .... Freud, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, &c.)

3.] Your course Instructor argues -- persuasively and with exceptional elegance -- that World War One is the defining event of Modernism. Using a minimum of any two course authors, support or rebut this argument by means of a comparison between representations of pre-War Edwardianism and the Great War.