Paper Topics | Spring 2021 | Paper 6
Due Friday, March 26, 5:00 p.m. Ask your conference leader where and how to submit your paper.
Target length: 1,800-2.000 words
1. Do a close reading of one sentence from Sor Juana’s “First Dream,” focusing on how the form and content are interrelated. You may want to consider the grammar, particularly the ordering of the phrases and clauses, as well as the metaphysical conceits, sensory imagery, and other rhetorical elements. How do these features of the sentence inform its significance for the larger meaning of the poem?
2. Compare the relationship between the painted panels and their captions in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series with the relationship between the photographs and their captions in Elena Poniatowska’s Massacre in Mexico. For each work, you will probably want to concentrate on no more than two or three pictures. Is it clear in each case that the verbal media are supplemental to the visual media? If the words help us read the images, is there some sense in which the images assist us in reading the words?
3. Luis Buñuel insisted that Los Olvidados was not so much a realist film as a documentary and that he had witnessed in person or found evidence for everything it depicts. “If it’s hard to watch,” he said, “that’s not my fault. I haven’t shown anything I didn’t see, and I’ve actually held back a lot.”1 Compare the ways in which Buñuel’s film and one of the following works claims to represent empirical circumstances or events: Elena Poniatowska’s Massacre in Mexico, Diego Rivera’s National Palace mural, Davíd Alfaro Siqueiros’ Electricians’ Union mural, or Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. What advantages or disadvantages does each medium have when it comes to imparting information about the past or the present?
4. Drawing on the chapter “On Spiritual Strivings” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, explicate the meaning of the terms the “veil” and “double consciousness.” Then, discuss the importance of these terms either in Ch. XIII, “Of the Coming of John” or in Ch. XIV, “The Sorrow Songs.” How are the psychological and/or cultural aspects of African American lives shaped by the “veil” and “double consciousness”? In addition to the content of the chapter, pay attention to its form and structure, including the role of the epigraphs.
5. Compare the representations of the self with respect to femininity, gender, and Mexican identity in self-portraits by Frida Kahlo and Maria Izquierdo. Through a careful visual analysis of one painting by each artist, discuss how they use color, space, and composition in conjunction with indigenous iconography and symbolism to link the personal to the political. Take into consideration how the context of Mexican artistic and national discourses discussed by Nancy Deffebach would inform your reading of the paintings.
6. Compare the representation of violence in Elena Poniatowska’s Massacre in Mexico and Ida B. Wells’ Southern Horrors. How do the authors use evidence and testimony to expose the injustices perpetrated by the state in complicity with white supremacist violence in the US South and the massacre of student protestors in Mexico City? Consider how the formal features of each work help make its argument.
7. The third floor of the Court of Fiestas of Diego Rivera’s Ministry of Public Education murals include three “dinner” scenes that mirror each other in basic composition: El pan nuestro [Our bread]; La cena del capitalista [The Capitalist’s Dinner]; and Banquete de Wall Street [Wall Street Banquet]. Consider the relationships between the scenes, paying attention to the composition, imagery, use of color, and symbolism. How does each “dinner” inform your understanding of the other two scenes? What argument is Rivera making about the nature of Mexican nationhood and the future of the Mexican state?
8. As discussed in Prof. Burford’s lecture, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston all approached African American spirituals in different ways. Compare and contrast TWO of these writers on spirituals. How do they explain the spiritual tradition with respect to black American experience, and how do they assert its universality? What, according to each, are the most essential features of the spiritual? Where might these thinkers agree and disagree with one another, and why?
9. In consultation with your conference leader, devise your own topic.
1 Cited in Julie Jones, “Interpreting Reality: Los Olvidados and the Documentary Mode,” Journal of Film and Video 57.4 (Winter 2007): 20.