American Literature:
- Discuss how any 2 chapters of Barnes’s novel deal with the theme of the myth of certainty—characters who are absolutely certain they know something as true or real but who may possibly be mistaken.
- Does Barnes’s novel tell us anything about the “history of the world?” If so, what does it tell us, and how does it make its points? If not, why not—how did he fail at that mission?
- Does William Carlos Williams’s “The Use of Force” illustrate anything significant about the human condition or human behavior? If so, what does it illustrate and how does it illustrate
- Discuss how Sam Shepard’s play True West deals with the theme of the lack of certainty or stability regarding his characters’ personalities.
- Discuss how Sam Shepard’s play True West deals with the theme of the lack of certainty or stability regarding the nature of authenticity, truth, or reality.
- Discuss how any one of Flannery O’Connor’s stories deal with the theme of a character not having a true understanding of who he or she is as a person.
- If J. Alfred Prufrock was supposed to be T.S. Eliot’s version of a “modern man,” what was the poem saying about modern man?
- Play critic: Discuss the quality of any of the texts we’ve read this semester, explaining whether it was good, bad, a little of both, or something in between, and why you give it that assessment.
- Explain how one short story we read this semester could be called an initiation story.
- Explain how any one text we studied could be said to be a satire.
- Ask a question to any of the authors we’ve studied regarding his or her text, and then attempt to answer that question as the author might have answered it (not necessarily in the voice or style of the writer, but in terms of what the author might say in response to your question).
- Discuss how Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” or Sophocles’s Antigone could be said to offer a glimpse into a time and place.
- Compare and/or contrast any two texts we read in terms of symbols, images, or motifs: What were used as symbols/images/motifs, and how did the use of those contribute to the overall effect(s) and/or theme(s) of the text?
- Imagine that one of the texts we’ve studied is a question. What is it asking, and how does it answer that question?
- Come up with your own mini-essay question about any text we studied this semester, and answer it.
- Choose any poem in our anthology that we did not study this semester, or any poem from our Poems of the Day, and analyze it.