PAPER 1: Due in section the week of April 29.
PAPER 2: Due in section the week of June 3.

You may consider the following paper topics or choose your own. However, if you pursue your own topic, you are strongly encouraged to discuss the idea with me beforehand.

The following ten paper topics are suggestions only. You may pursue your own topic, but are encouraged to discuss the idea with me beforehand.

1. Adam Smith discusses "sympathy" as something that all people can experience and that therefore binds individuals together in society. Examine an example of "sympathy" in one of the literary texts of sensibility: what role does it play in the narrative (whether novelistic or poetic)——or in a poetic speaker’s relation to his object of sympathy. (Make sure you clarify how you are using the term "sympathy" as derived from Smith.)
2. One of the problems with sensibility is that the senses themselves can be unreliable: the tree one person sees may not be the same tree as viewed by another. Discuss an example of the problem of perception in one of the texts of sensibility: how is meaning ultimately resolved?
3. In her early short-story, "Love and Friendship," Jane Austen challenges some of the main premises of sentimentalism——its tendency to privilege feeling over reason, its romancing of "abnormal" states of mind. Discuss either challenge as it plays out in Austen’s narrative: how does the narrative voice undercut, overdetermine, or otherwise affect the unfolding of events?
4. What is madness? (Please focus on a single author and a specific moment or two from a text.)
5. Bodies can tell a story, often via blushes, facial expressions, or tears. Discuss an example of how a character’s physiology plays into the culture of sensibility in one of the texts we have read.
6. The ending of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey breaks off in mid-sentence. How does this seemingly fragmentary ending suit or not suit the novel’s purposes? Can you imagine an alternative ending?
7. One literary critic has written that "No era in the history of literature displays so much mental suffering among poets as The Age of Sensibility." Choose one of the Sensibility Bards (Gray, Smith, Cowper, Smart) and discuss how they channel feeling and/or heightened mental anxiety into the formal devices of the poem——its metaphors, structural repetitions, disruptions, diction, bathos, etc.
8. Discuss Blake’s challenge to the tyranny of Reason in one of his The Songs of Innocence and Experience or in one of the plates from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Try to consider how the poem’s visual apparatus supports the claim you are making.

NB: Because these papers are extremely short (5 — 7 pp.) papers, please make your claim as sharp and as focused as possible. You should consider the above as topics, not as thesis statements, which require you to argue something specific. It is usually best to do this by sticking as closely to the text as possible——a single episode or a few specific moments should probably suffice.

PAPER TOPICS FOR ENGLISH 153 (SENSIBILITY AND MADNESS)

PAPER 2: Due in section the week of June 3.

The following ten paper topics are suggestions only. You may pursue your own topic, but are strongly encouraged to discuss the idea with me beforehand.

1. How do narrative strategies within texts——stories within stories——function within the novel of sensibility to elicit sympathy? Alternately, you might apply this question to one of the Lyrical Ballads.
2. We’ve read several fragmented texts: Sentimental Journey, Maria, Jubilate Agno. Write an essay that considers one of these as a problem of sensibility.
3. Sensibility and sentimentalism can play funny tricks with gender. Discuss an example of how the literature of sensibility unsettles received notions of gender.
4. Against the expectations set up by his own title, Godwin organizes his Memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft around her sorrows, sufferings, and feelings. What are the implications of this for his narrative? Discuss with reference to a particular scene or episode.
5. Choose a scene from The Madness of King George that demonstrates the thin line between sensibility and madness. Make sure to treat the film rigorously as a text. (You might also consider relating it to one of the philosophical texts we have read.)
6. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge theorize a kind of poetry that falls somewhere between sentimental absorption and detached, ironic self-consciousness. Choose one of the sentimental situations portrayed in the Lyrical Ballads and interpret how the speaker positions himself relative to the affective demands of sensibility ——is the poem didactic? critical? sympathetic?
7. Jane Austen’s novels are known for overturning clichés of sentimental fiction. Discuss her critique of sensibility in Sense and Sensibility——or her critique of sense. As an alternative, you may discuss how the film critiques the novel.
8. The opposite of the "man of feeling" is of course the rake. Discuss the role of this anti-sentimental figure (or the very idea of him) in The Man of Feeling, the Memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft, or in one of the Lyrical Ballads.

NB: Because these papers are extremely short (5 — 7 pp.) papers, please make your claim as sharp and as focused as possible. You should consider the above as topics, not as thesis statements, which require you to argue something specific. It is usually best to do this by sticking as closely to the text as possible——a single episode or a few specific moments should probably suffice.