(An initial draft)

The essay may be a pure close reading if you like. Or you may use secondary sources. However, your argument should be your own; secondary sources should be used only for support. If you use them, you must cite them correctly whenever you rely on them. Provide a citation within the text every time you take words, information, or ideas from a secondary source. Your sources should be academic (unless they are pop cultural documents that help you support your points). Wikipedia, SparkNotes, Answers.com and similar sites may not be used. They are terrible. (Note on Wikipedia: if you absolutely must use it, do so for its reference sections and not the contents of its articles. The articles may be informative, but they are also unregulated and sometimes poorly referenced.)

choose from one of the following topics

1) A topic of your own choosing. It must be approved by the professor at least one week prior to the submission deadline.
2) A sense of place is often important in Gothic horror, but it can have equal importance in works belonging to other genres. With reference to ANY TWO course authors, explore how setting contributes to theme. Please note: make sure that you actually deal with theme. “This work is Gothic because of its setting” is not a viable thesis here. You are not proving that the work belongs to a particular genre; you are exploring the thematic implications of the setting’s generic elements. What larger meanings and significance does the setting contribute to?
3) Many of the monsters that have turned up this term have been created by people (sometimes mentally or emotionally, sometimes literally). Compare the role of human characters in the existence of monstrosity in TWO of the following texts: ” The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Shining, Watchmen, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
4) Adaptation is a controversial and sometimes infuriating art; an adapter may attempt to preserve an original work’s theme, deliberately change it, comment ironically upon it, update it to accommodate changes in society, or attempt to remain utterly faithful to it to the exclusion of all else. When the adaptation is in a different medium from the original, the adapter has a whole new set of problems with which to deal. Concentrating on theme, compare the effects of ONE of the following pairs of originals and adaptations: Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and Landfield’s or Fisher’s The Hound of the Baskervilles; Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories and Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes or the British television series Sherlock; Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories and the television series House; King’s The Shining and Kubrick’s The Shining; Moore’s Watchmen and Bird’s The Incredibles; Moore’s Watchmen and Snyder’s Watchmen; Satrapi’s
Persepolis (comic) and Parannaud and Satrapi’s Persepolis (film); Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Alternate: Compare the Star Wars trilogy to its best-known parody, Spaceballs, or Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and/or the rest of the series to the parodic A Very Potter Musical (http://www.youtube.com/user/StarKidPotter). In either case, examine how the parody comments on (and perhaps throws light upon the methods and themes of) the original.
5) Compare the portrayal of otherworldly spaces in TWO of the following: “Dracula’s Guest,” The Shining, Watchmen, Star Wars, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Please note: It is not enough simply to observe that the two works have otherworldly spaces and that they are either similar or different. Make sure that you have a “So what?”
6) Many of our course texts include villainous characters; however, these villains differ a great deal, ranging from the obviously evil Darth Vader and Voldemort to the more morally complex Jack Torrance (and/or the Overlook itself) and a Certain Character or Characters in Watchmen who are not named here because some of you have not finished reading the novel yet. Compare the roles of the villains in at least TWO of the following: “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Dracula’s Guest,” The Hound of the Baskervilles, “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” the first Superman comic, The Shining, Star Wars, Watchmen, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and, if you are daring, Persepolis. If you wish, you may challenge the term “villain,” which is far easier to apply to some texts than it is to others. (Do keep in mind that not every villain counts as a monster, and not every monster counts as a villain, though the two categories can certainly overlap.) Note: You may not write on two texts by the same author.
7) Of the many authors we are studying this term, only two are female, and only one offers us a female protagonist. In some ways, this phenomenon can be seen as the result of the popular perception that “female” is a specialized, non-universal category of interest only to women, whereas “male” is a neutral category of interest to both genders; therefore, protagonists in genres targeting both genders tend to be male by default, whereas even strong female characters exist in secondary roles. Examine the role of women in Persepolis and one other course work in light of this idea. Note: This topic is very broad and does not provide you with a ready-made argument. Please feel free to accept or challenge the idea of the “default male protagonist,” but be aware that you should not simply write a rant on the subject; you must apply the idea analytically to two course works.
8) Though we are examining Persepolis more for its status as a memoir than for its status as a comic, it, like Watchmen, fits into the “graphic novel” category. Compare and contrast the two works as visual texts. In particular, you might examine one or all of the following elements: the effects of the widely differing artistic styles; the interplay of text and image; the means by which the artists use images and/or juxtapositions of images to make certain points; the use of certain types of images to appeal to OR to alienate popular audiences. If you can think of other legitimate bases of comparison, feel free to introduce them as well (as long as you stick to the idea of these works as visual texts). Alternative: stay with the topic above, but frame the work in comic form. It must still include a substantial theme-based analytic argument, but you may use visuals to help you make that argument.
9) Discuss the treatment and representation of the body in any two works. How do you interpret this treatment of the body in the two works (whether similar or different)?10) Several of the works we read portray explicit acts of extraordinary violence and dehumanization. Discuss this tendency in any two of the works we have read and attempt to explain how or why it is significant in these works.

General Note: If you are writing on Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope or Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, you will be expected to stick to the first film or novel of the series; you may not take later works into consideration. The only exception to this rule involves the “parody” variant of topic 3. As Spaceballs parodies the whole of the original Star Wars trilogy (i.e., Star Wars: Episodes IV, V, and VI), and as A Very Potter Musical parodies the whole of the Harry Potter series (books 1 – 7), you may cover all three films or all seven novels if, and only if, you choose this one particular sub-topic.