26 Jan 2. Consider points of connection,

American Literature

Week 10 Discussion

Instructions

Select two of the topics below and write an essay, 300 words or more, by Friday at 11:55 pm EST. Then respond to one classmate by Sunday at 11:55 pm EST. Please state which number you are writing about in your post.

1. Demonstrate how concepts of African American identity influence prose forms in works by the following writers: Douglass, Jacobs, Chesnutt, Hurston, Toomer, Ellison, and Walker.

2. Consider points of connection, useful contrasts, or central themes in each of several works that may be considered focal points for their respective literary traditions: Douglass’s Narrative, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chopin’s The Awakening, and Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain.

3. Choose an important writer in an American minority tradition, or in the tradition of American women authors. Write an essay in which you compare the perspective a reader achieves in examining a particular text within the context of the writer’s literary tradition with the perspective he or she might have in placing the text within the context of the writer’s white male contemporaries. Useful writers for this assignment include Jewett, Cather, or Welty; Hurston, Brooks, or Walker; Chesnutt, Sterling Brown, Hughes, or Richard Wright; or Zitkala Sa, Momaday, or Erdrich.

4. Examine characters who have been created by writers of the opposite gender. Compare a male protagonist created by a woman writer, such as Mr. Shiftlet in O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” with a female protagonist in a male writer’s fiction, such as Hawthorne’s Beatrice Rappaccini, James’s Daisy Miller, or O’Neill’s Mary Tyrone.

5. Study the Jewish writers represented in the text: Lazarus, Cahan, Malamud, Miller, Bellow, Roth, Ginsberg, and Spiegelman. Choose a representative text for close analysis and view it either within the context of other works in the tradition with works by the writer’s contemporaries.