Paper Topics, paper #2

As promised, here are the prompts for the second essay. The essay should be 5-6 pages long (minimum 5, maximum 6), standard formatting.

Paper Topics:

In our three-week investigation of W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, we’ve noticed a number of important themes and strategies that operate either throughout or at different moments in the text. A list of them would probably include the following:

- the notion of “double consciousness,” both on the level of philosophical or psychological description and as a mode of textual performance (as in the epigraphs before each chapter, or the story of the two Johns, e.g.)
- the idea of and problem with the color line
- the invocation of “Africa” as an important yet inaccessible past
- the role of music in the text, “music” as both figure and as textual fragment
- Du Bois’ criticisms of Booker T. Washington
- the figure of the “Black Belt” as sacred or ancestral ground; relation between North and South
- the history of emancipation as a new version of slavery
- the relationship between history and culture; different forms of cultural transmission
- the relation between personal story and historical or sociological analysis
- the employment of a certain textual “silence”; the invocation of an experience for which language may be inadequate
- Souls as a whole conceived as a sort of textual journey
- the importance of the Sorrow Songs for all of the above

With these as your starting point, write a 5-6 page paper using one of the following prompts. Your paper should include a clear, strong thesis and should aim to develop an idea that moves past mere explication and into textual analysis:

1) Take a smaller part of Souls, hopefully but not necessarily one that we didn’t cover thoroughly in class, and perform a close reading of it with the aim of demonstrating how the piece you’ve chosen works to assist, complicate, deepen, modify or otherwise work with what you take to be one of the important goals or strategies of the book as a whole. Feel free to interpret “smaller part” as you like – you can look at a particular chapter or set of chapters, a particular paragraph or passage, one of the Sorrow Songs that head each of book’s chapters (this option may involve a little bit of research, especially if you choose to write about the song’s unpresented lyrics), one of the musical/poetic pairings at the beginning of each chapter, one of the stories Du Bois tells, one of the characters about whom he writes, or any other detail you deem significant. The choice is up to you. Whatever you choose, your goal should be to show both how the detail you’ve selected works as a piece of the larger text and why it matters to the book. What does your analysis of this “smaller part” show us about the book that may not be apparent on the surface? Feel free to use (or not!) any of the themes listed above as starting points.

2) Take either William Pope L.’s piece “The Black Factory” or any one or two of the poems from our second set of poetry and read it through, with, in light of, against or otherwise paired with Du Bois’ book. As with the last paper, you don’t want to provide a mere compare-and-contrast, but want to use the pairing to reveal something interesting and important about both of the works in question. Does the work you’re analyzing take Du Bois’ work a step further? Demonstrate a problem with Du Bois’ premises (or vice versa)? Recontextualize Souls for a more modern audience? Bring Souls into dialogue with a different aesthetic mode? Again, feel free to use any of the above themes as points of focus.