|
English III |
||||
| Home |
Research Paper: Topics
Your research paper should center around either an American literary work, an American author, or an American literary time period. You may choose almost any topic dealing with American history, culture, society, or literature (within reason and upon approval) as long as you can relate that topic to literature. This means that you must have a piece of literature that your topic centers around. You may choose from the following topics or come up with your own.
1. Historical review of social and political protest during the sixties. Discuss the issues, the participants and the results. Novels written as a result.
2. Tradition in American life. Discuss customs and life-styles that are uniquely American. Be sure to include novels that discusses these traditions.
3. Cultural diversity in the United States. (Could use To Kill a Mockingbird or numerous short stories to show the diversity within the literature and reflected in the characters.)
4. American prejudices: their origins and implications.
5. The Horatio Alger success story in modern America: Myth or reality?
6. Sporting events and activities as a social institution in America.
7. The "Jazz Age" of the 1920's. How did literature reflect the culture of the times. See The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise.
8. The traditional South: myths and realities.
9. Why America needs heroes. Find stories with characters who could be called "heroic."
10. The treatment and punishment of slaves before the Civil War.
11. The status of the "United States" directly after the Civil War.
12. Conformity in American society vs. Noncomformists. See Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis and the work of Henry David Thoreau.
13. Compare and contrast the social connotations of the terms "Negro," "colored," "black," "nigger," and others that are relevant. To Kill a Mockingbird
14. Common practices of early American slave traders.
15. The image of the alienated black man in American literature, 1950-1990. See The Invisible Man.
16. Characterisitics of small midwestern towns. See Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, the works of Willa Cather and Mark Twain.
17. Life aboard a Mississippi riverboat. See Mark Twain.
18. The role of women in colonial society.
19. The role of women in the early twentieth century. What novels portray this?
20. Compare and contrast the cowboy of the movies and western fiction with the American cowboy of the nineteenth century.
21. The Puritans: their beliefs, attitudes and lasting effects of the American character. See Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, etc.
22. Evaluate the "counterculture" of the 1960's. Has it had a lasting effect on the American culture? On women? On education?
23. Mark Twain has been accused of racism in his novel Huckleberry Finn. Analyze these charges and consider the advisability of its inclusion for study in a high school literature class.
24. Literature of the World War I or II; focus on one or two selections.
25. Narrative techniques of Edgar Allan Poe. What made his stories unique?
26. Nathaniel Hawthorne's perspective on the Puritans. Examine his ancestry and the themes of his novels and short stories. See The Scarlet Letter, Young Goodman Brown, The Minister's Black Veil etc.
27. How the civil war affected citizens and soldiers. See The Clod, or Red Badge of Courage.
28. Literature used to symbolize the American Dream. See Death of a Salesman or The Great Gatsby.
29. The literary style of a favorite American author. (This author must have been published prior to 1960.)
30. Compare and contrast the works of two American poets.
31. Compare and contrast the attitudes towards nature and society in Henry David Thoreau's works (Walden) and Walt Whitman's works.
32. The theme of death in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, or the themes used by Dark Romantic writers: secret sin, potential evil, gothic storylines etc.
33. The origin and development of the detective story. See The Maltese Falcon.
34. The characterization of Indians in American literature (fiction and non-fiction.)
35. Trace the roots of the American Transcendental movement.
36. Gothic elements in the fiction of Washington Irving. (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow or The Devil and Tom Walker)
37. Works of literature banned in schools. What's the controversy all about? See Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, The Chocolate War.
38. Family relationships and unreal expectations in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
39. Voices of African-American Southern women. See Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry, Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, etc.
40. Alienation from society in The Scarlet Letter or The Chocolate War.
41. Dealing with the abuse of power in American society. See 1984, The Chocolate War.
42. Naturalism: The Red Badge of Courage.
43. Women seeking self-identity. The Awakening, Story of an Hour, The Yellow Wallpaper.
44. The development of science fiction as a genre. Focus on historical events, and
developments in other media such as comics and film.
45. Compare and Contrast the McCarthy Hearings (Red Scare) to the Salem Witch Trials. See The Crucible.
46. One meaning of the term Romanticism is "truth beyond reason and experience." Using one or two selections from American Literature explain "the spirit of individuality," and what it means to be an individual.
47. Immigration in the 1800's and early 1900's. The effect on the country, especially in urban areas, and the survival of these immigrants. See The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
48. Music and Literature. Relate American music to the literature of the times.
Authors, Poets, Etc..... Choose one to write an in-depth study of their work, or choose two and write a comparison/contrast paper.
Emily Dickinson
William Carlos Williams
Sylvia Plath
Edward Arlington Robinson
Anne Bradstreet
Robert Frost
T.S. Eliot
Willa Cather
Jonathan Edwards
Kate Chopin
Arthur Miller
Gertrude Stein
James Fenimore Cooper
Eudora Welty
William Faulkner
Flannery O'Conner
Stephen Crane
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Herman Melville
Edgar Allan Poe
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Henry David Thoreau
Zora Neale Hurston
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lorraine Hansberry
Walt Whitman
Maya Angelou
Ralph Ellison
Literary Periods/Genres:
Native American Literature
Puritan Literature
Colonial Lit.
Rationalism
Romanticism
Modernism
Naturalism
Local Color Lit.
The Jazz Age
This list is just a small number of suggestions, authors, and poets. You can also choose something else. Have Fun!!!!
|
|||
|
Last update: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 at 11:39:52 AM. This site is using the Vanilla Manila 1999 theme. |
||||