STUDENT: HELP PLEASE! All time favorite Author..

[artsylover]

So, I'm new to this community and figured I'd start off by asking for a wee bit of help for my upcoming (1 month from now) Research/Thesis idea for my ENC1104 class. The prompt basically asks to discuss an aspect of literature and/or author's work. It's pretty broad...any piece of literature or the collective work of a favorite writer. My problem is deciding who to choose this 14 page paper on…Any suggestions?? :idea:

[Dori]

Go Russian. A paper on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov would be interesting. A paper on Anton Chekhov's short stories would also prove to be interesting, I think. :)

[JBI]

It is an English class, so I assume they want English, so why not go with Blake's Poetry, or a nice Faulkner novel.

[islandclimber]

A powerful Thomas Hardy tragedy... How about Tess of the D'urbevilles

or Jude the Obscure... both great stories and so tragic and sad... Hardy also has that poetic touch and poetic imagery to his prose writing that so few writers have, he turns the english language into something beautiful...

cheers

[stlukesguild]

Artsylover... the possibilities open to this thesis... even given the limitation of English-language literature... are immense. The obvious route would be to select one of the giant figures of British/American literature (Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Dickens, etc...). Such a choice will guarantee you a wealth of critical writings upon which you might structure your own thesis. The problem here, however, is that your teachers are certain to have read endless essays on these authors and I somewhat wonder how much you will get out of such. Personally I would choose someone a bit less obvious... perhaps a writer not assuredly part of every English 101 course. Suggestions? Look into Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy, Thomas Traherne, Robert Herrick, John Clare, or Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetry, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Walter Pater's or Emerson's Essays, Boswell's Journals... or DeQuincy's Journal of an English Opium Eater. There are any number of fascinating writers in the English language that are easily worth further exploration.

[Sir Bartholomew]

That's hard and it's all pretty up to you. But if I were you I'd go for Austen, I'm having an Austen fever as of now actually.

[Whifflingpin]

How about a "compare & contrast" between Kipling's "Kim" and "Sacred Games" by Vikram Chandra?

[Nossa]

I'd choose Jane Austen at any given time.

[moose gurl]

I agree with JBI. Faulkner's novels are incredibly interesting and complex. You could use Sanctuary, which is really weird and thrilling, and write about how he openly admitted that this was the only book he ever wrote for money, and maybe compare it's depth to one of his other, "greater" novels. You could also write about how even though Sanctuary was technically a "cash-in," it's still a damn good novel, and incredibly well-written and how this attests to his ability as a writer. There's a lot of stuff about Faulkner himself that you could tie in to the paper, such as his alcoholism, but his staunch refusal to drink when he wrote. Faulkner is the man. You could get a lengthy paper pretty easily out of him.

P.S. My initials are "ENC" and when I saw the first line of this post I had to giggle a little.

[PeterL]

If you want to have some fun, then you might do something on the use of metaphor in Finnegans Wake. There are many interesting possibilities, and you have a month to do it.

[mayneverhave]

Write a paper illustrating the Biblical and Shakespearian allusions in The Sound and the Fury, by Faulkner.

Plus I'm sure you'd get bonus points for doing anything by Faulkner, just given his reputation for "difficulty".