For your Final Paper, you can choose to write at least one of the eight reading assignments you had this semester. Here are a few essay questions that you might choose to address in your essay or you can come up with one on your own:
Reply Questions
1. In the Reply, how does Sor Juana reinterpret Christian doctrine to support her arguments?
2. What is Sor Juana’s opinion of beauty? Do you agree or disagree with her views?
The Interesting Narrative Questions
1. Olaudah Equiano describes a variety of ways in which he is treated as a slave within Africa. Explain what advantages there might be for Equiano to provide a detailed account of slavery within Africa to eighteenth-century European readers.
2. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative works with two different consciousnesses: the younger Equiano as he first encounters European culture and the older Equiano who has a commanding grasp of European thought and manners. Examine one of the moments when there is a significant difference between these two consciousnesses, such as the younger Equiano’s youthful belief that the firs white men he sees are spirits and not human beings versus his mature understanding that they were ordinary men. Detail how the older Equiano presents the younger Equiano, whether that presentation of himself is naive, comical, wise, or some other mode.
Metamorphosis Questions
1. Explain the inverse ratio of Gregor’s suffering and his family’s happiness. How does this explain the ending?
2. Explore the scene in which Gregor reacts to his sister playing the violin. What does this scene imply for the story’s position on beauty and art?
3. Research Franz Kafka’s life in Prague, paying particular attention to the city’s anti-Semitism and Kafka’s relationship to his Judaism. How might this aspect of his biography have influenced “The Metamorphosis”?
This Way To The Gas Questions
1. Analyze the girl who “appears” in the story “above the teeming crown” (704). What makes her seem different from the other prisoners? Why does Tadeusz Borowski include her as a figure of dignity alongside his portraits of ugliness and degradation?
2. Analyze the use of different languages in this piece. The story was written in Polish; fragments of German and French appear as well. How does the author, as well as the character, use foreign language fragments?
3. “[T]he gallows humor of Borowski’s grim tales represents a reaction to atrocity, both existential and literary, that is unique” (Ziolkowski, 140). Discuss Tadeusz Borowski’s use of humor.
4. “Below us, naked, sweat-drenched men crowd the narrow barracks aisles” (696). Discuss the imagery of physical bodies in this story.
Man of La Mancha Question
1. Research how colonization and globalization have affected Taiwan, and then explain the effect of these forces on the narrator’s life.
Drown Questions
1. Analyze the following excerpt to determine Yunior’s relationship with Beto and his own Latino identity: “I sit near the sign that runs the pool during the day: No Horseplay, No Running, No Defecting, No Urinating, No expectorating . . .Beto hadn’t known what expectorating meant though he was the one leaving for college . . . Even then I didn’t tell him; he thought I didn’t read, not even dictionaries (1243, emphasis in original). Is he ashamed of his ability to read?
2. Why is the story told in a combination of Spanish and English? Consider the epigraph to Drown, the short story collection in which “Drown” appeared, by Cuban writer Gustavo Perez-Firmat: “The fact that I / am writing to you / in English / already falsifies what I / wanted to tell you.”
