Choose one (1) of the following topics and write four page essay (that's four or more full pages) in standard MLA format which is thoughtful and supported with several specific examples from the work(s) you are analyzing. For this class the last topic will be the same for all of the essay assignments (it just seems like such a natural topic with lots of choice available). The other topics will offer you some variety. Your essay will be evaluated on both form and content. Do your best, and good luck!

  1. Expand on any of the discussion questions we've had so far turning your answer into a focused, fully-developed essay with an introduction, a clear thesis, loads of concrete examples (quoted/documented; in the case of films you can summarize scenes) that support and illustrate the claims you make throughout your essay.

    You are not required to write about the same question or same work(s) you discussed on the class message board.

    Note: if you choose to expand on Discussion 1, beware of writing a simple book or movie review; your paper needs to be an analysis with a central idea that you develop and support with examples, not opinions.

  2. OK, here's a variation of a variation (this is a creative option that relates to Discussion 2): if you watched episodes of Shelly Duvall's Fairy Tale Theatre or episodes of Fractured Fairy Tales, then you've seen how simple tales can be updated, given humor (satirized), made more relevant to adult audiences, while drawing on ideas suggested by the original tales. Basing your story on a popular folk or fairy tale write your own satire (your own Fractured Fairy Tale) that maintains some of the basic story and character bits from the original while translating the story to a more adult audience.

    Warning: DO NOT write an X-Rated version of the fairy tale. I'm old and sensitive! You can certainly imply (and put in some gags) about "suggestiveness" in the folk tale, but please keep it relatively clean. For example, you might have the Frog Princess saying, "What? You want me to sleep with a frog? What kind of parent are you?" But please don't actually have the princess sleeping with the frog, taking wild drugs, etc. Fractured Fairy Tales may be suggestive, but they aren't graphic.

  3. Compare and contrast a classic work of literature with its improbable film mate. OK, this needs a bit of explanation. If you were to compare, say, the book and the movie versions of True Grit, you would have a fair amount to say, but the pairing is obvious, predictable. If, however, you were to pair Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with the musical West Side Story, you'd have some more dramatic comparison/contrast. For this topic do not pick obvious comparisons; look for a film that is somehow based on a work of literature without being just a copy of it. Here are a few (of many) possibilities:

    • Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale" (from The Canterbury Tales) and John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
    • Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now
    • Victor Fleming's film The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Gregory Maguire's The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West or the musical Wicked of the original novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
    • Beowulf (author unknown) and John Gardiner's Grendel (yes, this is comparing a book with a book) or any of a number of unusual film versions (there is a sci-fi version of Beowulf and an interesting film version of Michael Chrichton's The Thirteenth Warrior; stay away from the simple CGI film; it's really a fairly literal re-make)
    • Jane Austen's Emma and the Amy Heckerling's 1995 comedy Clueless
    • Homer's The Odyssey and William Saroyan's The Human Comedy
    • T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita
    • George Orwell's 1984 and Terry Gilliam's Brazil
    • loads of Shakespeare:
      • The Tempest and the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet or Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Book
      • Hamlet and Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well
      • Macbeth and Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood
      • King Lear and Akira Kurosawa's (do we see a pattern here?) Ran
      • A Midsummer Night's Dream and the teen comedy Get Over it! or Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
      • Twelfth Night and the teen comedy She's the Man
      • of course the topic mentions Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, but Baz Luhrmann's updated version of the play (reviewed poorly by film critics Siskel and Ebert who said, "In one grand but doomed gesture, writer-director Baz Luhrmann has made a film that (a) will dismay any lover of Shakespeare, and (b) bore anyone lured into the theater by promise of gang wars, MTV-style" (how can you resist?); however, you will not get much mileage out of Franco Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet because it's too literal a translation of the original play

    There are tons of other options for this topic; I don't pretend to know them all, so if you have an idea that you think will work, you might want to run it by me first.

For some tips on writing about literature, go to

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