Requirements: 5-7 pages. Double-spaced. At least one secondary critical source

Requirements: 5-7 pages. Double-spaced. At least one secondary critical source is required. Citations should be in MLA style (page numbers in parentheses after quotes, works cited page at the end of the document).
Topics: Write an original argument about any of the texts that we have read for class up to this point. You can choose your own topic, drawing from prior weekly work or class discussion. If you would prefer to work from a prompt, you can let the prompts below help you. Argument: A good paper will have a thesis statement, textual evidence and explication, and a developing argument that employs transition/topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph. Your claim should lead to a unique understanding of some aspect of the text. You may also choose to engage with secondary sources if appropriate, possibly emending or correcting a reading by another critic.
Secondary Sources: Use the MLA Bibliography or JSTOR (both located in the “Research Databases” on the Library Website) to research your subject. Ideally, you will use one or two articles to position your own argument, using their theses to frame the context for your own. Put your paper “in conversation” with another piece–you don’t have to agree with them or even be writing about exactly the same thing.
1. Write about the theme and depiction of one broad theme (choose one: nature, sexuality, gender, race, labor, religion, perception, art) in any of the works that we have studied so far in class. Focusing on one or two scenes, make an argument for how the work depicts this theme, and what that depiction represents/does for the work’s wider significance or meaning.
2. Choose a passage from one of the texts and explain how that passage is integrally important to understanding the work’s wider meaning. Begin with a claim about how the text can usually be read (you can even use the Internet analysis for this), and then make an argument about how the passage in question changes or qualifies that traditional reading.
3. How do we read Scarlet Letter today along questions of gender and feminism? In Nina Baym’s seminal essay—“Revisiting Hawthorne’s Feminism” (Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 30 (Spring & Fall 2004), 32-55)—Baym argues that Hawthorne is a feminist writer against what she sees as the predominant reading of him as anti-feminist. According to her, these perspectives see Hawthorne’s use of the feminine as “always in the service of masculinity issues, that he viewed assertive or aggressive or rebellious women as threats to masculinity; that his inevitable punishing or containing of truant women demonstrated deep hostility to them and a profoundly conservative view of their proper place.” Consider Baym’s essay, and, choosing some aspect of The Scarlet Letter (a passage, a character, etc.), weigh in on Hawthorne’s depiction of the feminine and whether it should be considered feminist or not or something different.
4. Should we read Poe’s “Ligeia” as supernatural or not? Consider the debate that raged between Roy Basler (“The Interpretation of Ligeia” 1944) and James Schroeter (“A Misreading of Poe’s ‘Ligeia'” PMLA 1961), as well as their snarky replies to one another (“Poe’s ‘Ligeia'” PMLA 1962). 60 years later, make a claim about how we should interpret “Ligeia” either supporting either of the two views, or coming up with one that is contrasted with both of them. Support with evidence.
5. In Ian Marshall’s “Literal and Metaphoric Harmony with Nature: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘Circumstance'” (Modern Language Studies 1993), he argues that “Circumstance” should be read as an early ecofeminist work. However, Marshall notes near the end, “there is much to complicate this reading of the story as an affirmation of ecofeminist ideas” (54). Use your paper to take up something within the story (it can be one of the things Marshall notes, or something else you noticed) that complicates Marshall’s reading and explain what a better or more nuanced reading might be.