Select 1 prompt below to write your essay on 1 text: Fun Home, We the Animals, or Giovanni’s Room
- EXILE—Consider characters we’ve encountered who might be identified as outcasts, misfits, or eccentrics. Discuss the condition of exile by focusing on 1 character in 1 text whose geographic dislocation in some way relates to their social or psychological alienation (or in some way impacts their sense of belonging), or feel free to take another angle altogether on some idea of the exile.
- IDENTITY—Each of these texts represents characters whose condition of liminality (across, between, and within borders of place or culture) marks their struggle to define the self. Consider race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity. How are identities shaped by the boundaries of place, and how does 1 character in 1 text defy social norms through mobility (crossing, migrating, journeying, passing) or, conversely, immobility? How does bodily belonging or displacement relate to social or psychological definitions of home? How do patterns of movement (or stasis) mirror internal patterns of thought/memory/emotion? How is narrative style connected to the geography of the text, as a product of place, idea of place, or response to place?
- TIME & FORM—Discuss how 1 text disrupts the novelistic chronology of linear time? How does this affect narrative style and structure? What thematic concerns does this disruption relate to or accentuate? How does a break with conventional chronology affect our reading of the story’s/novel’s social commentary? Discuss the function and dynamics of temporality in 1 text in relation to narrative elements, especially through ideas of the border. Or, consider focusing on the shape of a narrative, on the story’s form, even if irrespective of time, arguing for why it is absolutely essential in relation to the text’s themes, characters, perspectives, plot, etc.
- METAMORPHOSIS—Select 1 character that undergoes metamorphosis, transformation, or epiphany. If it is a moment of physical metamorphosis, how does it illuminate, destabilize, or align with the psychology of the character? If it is a moment of internal transition, what does it open up or reconcile with the exterior (body or world)? What are the effects of this shift? How does narrative arc (if at all) reflect the change? What is the textual commentary inherent in the development of a character in this way?
- FREEDOM—Discuss how freedom is defined in 1 text with as specific a lens as possible; perhaps through a single image, motif, or metaphor if needed. Do not write about something obvious here.
- SACRIFICE—What is the role of self- (or other) sacrifice in the development of a character, narrative structure, theme, or resolution?
- HUMOR—What is the relationship between the comical and the representation of border-identity? How does humor relieve the conflicted conditions of self? How does an author use comedy to undermine, redirect, or heighten a sense of the tragic as it relates to the liminal condition of identity?
- NATURE VS. CIVILIZATION—Discuss how the human as a category is represented, defined, undermined, or challenged in 1 text, in relation to ideas of race, gender, sexuality, or animality, etc. Or, discuss how ideas of nature, the natural, the wild, barbarism contrast those of civilization, the artificial, the cultured, civility. There are several directions this theme could take, and an entire non-binaristic grey area between.
- ILLUSION VS. REAL—How does 1 text represent the tension between appearance and reality, or illusion and truth. Consider the relationship between narrative strategies and character silences, masks, personae. Select 1 character that challenges notions of “self,” as well as our own reading processes, through the play of imagined and/or performed identities or social roles. How is the act of seeing – like the act of reading – challenged, complicated, expanded by the blurs between the real/façade, the seen/unseen? How does the character read their self, and does this reflection conflict with the perception(s) of others? How does the narrative itself (via the narrator or specific stylistic choices, dramatic symbolism, etc.) engage in the act of tampering with our ideas of appearance VS truth, seeing VS blindness, visibility VS invisibility, material VS immaterial, external VS internal, fantasy VS mundane? How do forms of narrative mirror forms of body, self, language, or identity being played out and examined in the text?
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NOTE: You are NOT required to answer all questions within a prompt (that would be ineffective); these are instead meant to help generate some possible lines of inquiry, to enable your own brainstorming and centering on what matters to you within these texts. Please do not be restricted by the questions as you formulate your own original scholarly question. Also, please be aware of the tendency to generalize within these prompted categories and steer away from overly simplified, reductive, cliché, or obvious paths.
Reminder: Once you select a prompt, construct a question that you will convert into an argument, and consider thematic approaches as you also ask how the text itself (structurally, formally, temporally, poetically, etc.) embodies/reinforces the central ideas of the text – the relationship between content & form is absolutely important. Also, consider the broader commentary the text is making (the underlying social, political, ethical significance, if any), and the role of literature in opening these ideas (the relationship between aesthetics and cultural ideas). Do not treat characters as real people; address them as representations/constructs of the author’s doing—please understand this distinction. (For example, even though Fun Home is a memoir, Alison Bechdel must be considered as a character within the storyline which author Alison Bechdel is constructing.)
Guidelines: 5-7 pages, double-spaced. You MUST include a writer’s memo. Please also review general paper guidelines under FYS; incomplete papers will not be accepted.