Paper Topics | Spring 2020 | Paper 6
Due: Saturday, March 14 at 5:00 p.m., in your conference leader’s Eliot Hall mailbox
Target length: 1,800–2,000 words
- How does the "Sacrifice of Isaac" play adapt the story in Genesis to the context of Nahua Christianization? Why might this particular story from Genesis have been selected? Support your argument with specific evidence comparing the version in Genesis, chapter 22, to the version in the play.
- Taking Sor Juana's “Loa” to be written for a European audience, analyze how Sor Juana presents indigenous Mexican culture to that audience, bearing in mind that the Loa's genre belongs to a European tradition (Eucharistic theater), while its content represents a non-European world.
- Pick one sentence from “First I Dream,” and discuss what the syntax, the variety and nature of the images, and the way meaning is conveyed reveal about Sor Juana’s theological, aesthetic, and/or political stances.
- Compare how two of the following sources represent who constitutes “the Mexican people”: casta paintings, Morelos’s “Sentiments of the Nation,” Iturbide’s “Plan of Iguala,” El Tiempo’s “A Conservative Profession of Faith,” Otero’s “Considerations,” the constitutions of 1857 and/or 1917, the Plan of Ayala, Rivera’s National Palace mural, Rivera’s Secretariat of Education mural, Siqueiros’s Electricians’ Union mural. Who is included in the body politic, and who is excluded from it? How does each source attempt to create a sense of Mexican nationhood? In comparing your two sources, be sure to consider how context, genre or medium, and audience or setting might help you understand the differences between them.
- Compare the representations of femininity and/or womanhood in two of the following sources: Sor Juana’s “Response to Sor Filotea,” “First I Dream,” or short poems; a painting by Frida Kahlo or Maria Izquierdo; Elena Poniatowska’s Massacre in Mexico, or the art of Monica Mayer. Be sure to justify your pairing of the two sources: that is, why does looking at these sources in conjunction with each other reveal more than we might see in them on their own? In comparing the two sources you choose, you might consider how the author or artist links the personal and the political, how the form of the work reinforces its content, and/or how gender intersects with other categories of identity in the work.
- Looking at either Buñuel’s Los Olvidados or Poniatowska’s Massacre in Mexico, discuss how film or testimonio is used to launch a critique of the modern state, paying particular attention to how the formal features of the work’s genre help make its argument.
- In consultation with your conference leader, develop your own topic.