Humanities 110

Introduction to the Humanities

Paper Topics | Spring 2019 | Paper 3

Due: Saturday, April 20th at 5:00 P.M. in your conference leader’s Eliot Hall mailbox

Target length: 2000–2300 words

1. Explain Garvey’s case for people of African descent uniting as a self-governing nation. Discuss the ways Du Bois might object, and explain how Garvey would respond to these objections. Whose position regarding self-government do you find more persuasive and why?

2. What constitutes Harlem as a community in Survey Graphic? How do Locke, Domingo, or McDougald address and reconcile differences within the community? (Discuss no more than two of the authors.)

3. Explain how Ellington’s music functions as the main character in Black and Tan Fantasy. Trace the path of its evolving connotations and contexts in relation to the thematics of the Harlem Renaissance.

4. In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” (The Souls of Black Folk), Du Bois describes “double consciousness” as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (8). Carefully analyze Du Bois’s conception of double consciousness. Does he think double consciousness is something that can, or should, be overcome? (Be sure not simply to reproduce what was said about these issues in lecture.)

5. Du Bois vociferously critiques Washington’s arguments for vocational education. What, for Du Bois, is education’s proper role, both in the formation of the self and the progress of society? Topics you might want to address include the specific type of education he advocates, the relationship between education and politics, and/or the role of the talented tenth. 

6. In her essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey argues that cinema often forces the audience to view through a male gaze in which female characters are “isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised.” This gaze reflects and creates “a world ordered by sexual imbalance, [in which] pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form, which is styled accordingly” (Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other Pleasures [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009], 19). Do the narrators in Cane consistently present women through a male gaze or do other relationships emerge? To support your argument, discuss 1–2 passages that were not analyzed in lecture.

7. Lawrence’s “Migration Series” is characterized by repetition and variation (visual, formal, thematic) across the panels. Describe a pair of panels that appear to be connected in one or more of these ways. How does our sense of the “Series” change as we move away from considering it as a sequentially ordered set of images?

8. Do a close reading of Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel” or Claude McKay’s “The White House.” Pay careful attention to the relationship between formal features and content, particularly the author’s use of the sonnet form.

9. In consultation with your conference leader, develop your own topic.