Paper 2

Length: 750-1000 words

Deadline: Must be uploaded to Canvas by 11:55 p.m. on the date listed in the syllabus.

Guidelines

  1. The first paper does not require research, although secondary sources may be helpful. Rather, its purpose is to demonstrate your ability to choose a significant, appropriately limited topic in 1920s American literature; to investigate and support a thesis of your own devising; to analyze with skill and insight the evidence from specific literary works; and to present the whole in a clearly organized, well-written fashion.
  2. Content is very important, but good organization, sentence structure, and editing skills are also important. Papers with comma splices, agreement errors, and other problems will be penalized accordingly. Citations and the Works Cited page should follow MLA format.
  3. The essay should incorporate at least one work read or viewed in class, although you may useother works as well. For example, I do NOT want to see a standard image-analysis paper on The Great Gatsby of the sort you may have written in other classes or in high school, but if you want to discuss The Great Gatsby in terms of Fitzgerald’s other stories or The Beautiful and Damned, that’s permissible. You may choose your own topic for the paper if you consult with me ahead of time. 
  4. Your paper should be limited enough to provide a specific thesis and a close analysis of the texts; repeating broad, obvious generalities or ideas we have discussed in class will not be sufficient.

Topics

These topics are broad and are meant to suggest ideas to you; you should think about developing your own ideas using these as guidelines. These topics don’t have an implicit thesis; you’ll need to develop your own.

  1. Take a character, a scene, a place, or an episode of one of the works we've read and write an in-depth analysis of it, including looking at specific words, repetition, the dynamics of power between the characters, and so on as we did in class for the Hemingway stories.
  2. Contrast a character or scene from Fitzgerald and one from Hemingway--Gloria Gilbert and Brett Ashley, for example.
  3. Publicity, a concern for appearances, and the importance of status all figure prominently in works of this era. Choosing one or two works, explore this idea. How does the author’s use of these ideas or references affect the work? You might choose, for example, to investigate Fitzgerald’s use of popular music and the movies.
  4. Fitzgerald is often credited with inventing the idea of the flapper, but Gloria Gilbert isn’t the only example in his body of work. Using short stories (and perhaps films as well), examine the idea of the flapper in the 1920s. Did she really exist? What makes her unique in the history of female heroines? This is a very broad topic, so you’ll have to narrow it down to a few works and provide a strong thesis. OR Explore another 1920s character type in the same way.
  5. Is the 1920s an era of toxic masculinity, toxic femininity, uncertainty over gender roles, or other clashes of values between the past and the present? Who are its heroes or heroines? What implicit values are present in Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and are they the same for each author?
  6. In what ways do these authors use humor to convey their message?
  7. Prominent themes in the works we’ve read include cynicism, loss, and a sense of disillusionment or the failure of an ideal, yet the “Jazz Age” reputation of the 1920s as one long party would seem to negate this idea. Explore the ways in which these ideas operate in the works we’ve read. Why does this contradiction exist?
  8. Your own topic.