Fiction Essay

Length: 1250 words (about 5 pp)
Due Date: Oct. 12

This paper will be on some aspect of the novels we have read and especially how these novels tell us something about what fiction is and how it works. Choose one of the following topics for your essay or wait until the end of this week by which time another topic may emerge from our discussion of By the Sword. Be sure to form a well-thought out thesis, narrower in focus than the topic given. Note: you must devise a thesis by limiting the topic.

1. Do male and female heroes have different strengths or is age more of a factor in distinguishing heroes? (Admittedly this question might be argued better in a longer paper, but narrow the thesis to fit the page requirement.) Find 3-4 qualities of one or two female heroes and compare or contrast them and then argue that these make one or both heroes more (un)like each other than (un)like one male hero. For example, Lessa and Lucy might be seen as more unlike each other than Lessa and Edmund.

2. One might argue that popular fantasy stories are closely related to social and cultural anxieties that beset their audience. For example, some argue that Tolkien's stories have their genesis not only in ancient tales of war and romance but in the author's experience of World War I and his audience's experience of World War II. Take any one novel we've read so far (not including Tolkien's or Lewis's) and aruge that its hero(s) battle(s) forces that literally or psychologically represent threats in today's world.

3. If you have studied forms of literary criticism, you might enjoy interpreting one of the stories we've read so far using psychoanalytic (especially suited to stories that invoke archtypes) or feminist or marxist methods.

Format: Papers must be wordprocessed on clean, white, letter-sized pape. You may submit a clean photocopy if you wish, but a draft must always accompany an essay. Please keep an extra copy of each paper that you submit. Use 1-inch margins, double space, and do not leave an extra space between paragraphs. Put my name, the class, and the date at the top of the first page. Print your name on the reverse side of the last page. Please staple the pages of the final copy together and attach these to the draft with a paper clip. Please refer to this format when writing all other out-of-class papers.