Paper #2

For your second paper assignment, you will compose a 4-6 page essay responding to one of the following prompts. If you have another idea for the essay you are welcome to propose it to me.

1. As I noted in class, post-modern authors love referencing the conventions of detective fiction, as detective stories often foreground issues related to cognition, narrative, and filter that post-modern authors focus on. Choose one of the more recent works we’ve read in class and write about how the author engages with the conventions of detective fiction. What conventions does she or he adopt, discard, or adapt? How do these conventions help underscore the author’s “point?”

2. Chatman noted early on that readers should pay special attention any time the act of writing or creating art is mentioned in a story, as the author is often implicitly commenting on what s/he is trying to do. Choose a work that features art or an artist (broadly conceived… we’ve seen sculptors, writers, actors, etc.) and note how the story comments on the artistic process itself. Is the attitude toward art portrayed in the text consistent with the way the story itself is constructed?

3. Another concept introduced during the second part of the course is the unreliable narrator or distorted filter. Choose one of the distorted filters from one of these works and examine how the author manages it. How does the author signal what is and isn’t reliable information? What is the point of creating this distorted filter?

4. Many of the stories we’ve examined in the second part of the class are especially attuned to differences in race, gender, nationality, etc. Examine one of these stories that seems to foreground one of these issues, and write about what the author has to say. How does the author go beyond simple, cliche statements about equality or pluralism?