More mid-term paper ideas

Some of you may not understand just how insanely open this paper topic is. Pick something that interests you! Close reading applies to everything, but the trick is: use a topic that gives you a question. Close reading is not an end in itself. It's a tool to answer questions that are i) worth asking; and which ii) do not have an obvious answer.

1. In the 1930s the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Walter Duranty went to the Soviet Union and wrote a series of articles about how great life was under Stalin. In historical retrospect, he probably knew about the famines, political assassinations, etc. His articles are available on the web. The writing should yield insights into how he dealt with this awkward subject.

2. In the 1700s a journal called The Spectator was published in England. It's famous among literary scholars. The whole thing was an example of 18th century wit; it was a joke. It had fake articles, fake letters... It was a satire. This would be good material for a close reading of 18th century rhetoric, considered the ultimate in elegance and wit.

3. Speaking of the New York Times and fake stuff, a variety of fabricated texts have emerged in recent years. Jayson Blair's Times articles, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, and, well, perhaps some fabricated reports of weapons of mass destruction. Is there a writing style peculiar to people who aren't telling the whole truth?

4. In the '90s an interesting school of literature called "Avant-pop" popped up. Writers like William Vollmann and Mark Leyner had a striking experimental style. How did they create this style? What does it express or signify as literature?

Other ideas: Recently we've seen the public apologies of a number of libidinous celebrities. Is this a literary form? What are some of its typical stylistic traits? William James, the philosopher, and Henry James, the novelist, had a sister, Alice, who spent most of her life in mental institutions. I wonder if her diaries contain the literary genius shown by her close relatives. Richard M. Nixon delivered some of the most famous political speeches of the previous century, particularly the "Checkers" speech and the "I am not a crook" speech. What made these speeches work? The nonfiction bestseller list is currently dominated by conservative political works, particularly Mark Levin's Tyranny and Liberty and Michelle Malkin's Culture of Corruption. And books by Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter have been hugely successful. Do works in this genre share a literary style? How do they use voice? Many famous works have been written under the influence of "substances," works by Aldous Huxley, de Quincey, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, etc. Literary style in this case is probably a function of the drug being used. Huxley used hallucinogens, Kerouac speed, but de Quincey and Burroughs used opiates. A literary analysis of Puritan hellfire sermons, such as the famous "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Jonathan Edwards is sure to be fruitful. What about the famous 18th century work The Compleat Angler - which is about fishing? And there are other famous sports books: The Inner Game of Tennis; Running and Being (by George Sheehan); Pumping Iron by the Governor of California; The Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee. Do they share a literary style? Certain inspiration books have been on the bestseller list for, like, a millennium. I'm thinking of Robert Fulghum's Kindergarten book; The Road Less Traveled; Seven Habits of Highly Successful People; Chicken Soup for the Soul; The Secret; The Power of Now. These books vary - some are about business success, some spirituality, some are devotional (religious). But I'm guessing that they, along with works like Think and Grow Rich or The Power of Positive Thinking, have something in common stylistically. What accounts for the unbelievable popularity of such books? What kind of words do they use? What tone? It is nice to see that the Nobel committee has given the Nobel Peace Prize to an American, in light of their explicit aversion to, at least, American authors. Nobel acceptance speeches should make an interesting study. Doris Lessing was particularly cranky a year or two ago, as was V.S. Naipaul. What did Bellow say? How about Hemingway? It would be nice to know what Joyce, Roth, Proust, and Nabokov would have said, but, sadly, they never got the chance.