Writing Assignments I

Modern World Fiction

Winter Term, 2016-2017
Write a short essay on each of the following topics. Though these are take-home test essays, they still need to be
organized around a central, guiding idea (a thesis), and developed in a logical sequence, using specific pieces of
textual evidence. Assume that you are writing for a general audience that is educated, but which may not be familiar
with the works that you are discussing.
Essays will be due on Thursday, December 15, at 10:30 p.m. Essays will be accepted without penalty until 5 p.m. on
December 16. This is a very generous deadline. Do not ask to extend it.
You will need a letter-size manila envelope, and you will need to put the last four digits of your PID on the outside
of it. Be sure to put your NAME AND YOUR PID on the paper. There is no system for cross-referencing your PIDs,
which means that you MUST identify your essay and envelope with care.
All essays should be printed on one side of the paper only, and should be presented in standard, academic format--that is, with 11-or 12-point Times Roman font, and with standard margins. You should double-space your essays,
and you should staple them. I am not responsible for stapling your work and will not read essays that do not follow
these simple guidelines.

I.

Like Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Darwin, Kafka was troubled by questions about the nature of the
human in the modern world. He first read Darwin as a high-school student, and never got over the
impact that reading Darwin had had on him. He was also profoundly affected by his reading of
Nietzsche, who had proclaimed the death of God and the discontinuous nature of history. Like many
people of his generation, Kafka was aware that man might devolve into a lower creatureespecially in a
randomly ordered universe, where history, in the absence of God, had no purpose, and no meaning. Even
in Marxs more rational theory of history, man had been reduced to his function and lived in a state of
perpetual alienation from both self and world. Writing in 1907, Henry Adams sought to show in his
Education of Henry Adams (printed 1918) that the individual had been reduced to a manikina
simulacrum of a human rather than a real one.

II.

Topic: Drawing on your reading of Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx, show how the transformation of
Kafkas Gregor Samsa into a giant vermin echoes and extends late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury debates over the plight of human beings in the modern world. (3 pages, minimum)

Both Bram Stoker and Joseph Conrad deal with the darkness that lies at the heart of Nature and in the
nature of human beings, butarticulating the nineteenth-centurys fear that man might devolve as well as
evolveStoker seems to use the figure of the vampire as an emblem of the otherness within man
something that fascinated Freudand as a site for exploring the anxieties over gender that accompanied
the Woman Question which had been discussed in England and America for a half century by the time
Stoker wrote. Conrad, similarly, presents us with a vision where the nature of human begins and the
nature of Nature is deeply mysterious. As he is at pains to show, all places are places of darkness, and all
humans harbor darkness within themselves.
Topic; Drawing on your reading of Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin, and other writers, show how Conrads Heart
of Darkness and Bram Stokers Dracula embody the anxieties of the fin de sicle about civilization, Nature,
and the Otherness that lies within and outside us. (3 pages, minimum