Snider, Book Review Titles #
Dr. Clifton Snider
English 384
California State University, Long Beach
Description
of the Assignment
and
Reading
List for Final Paper
This paper should be 6-7 pages long (not counting the Works Cited
page), double-spaced, font size 12 or 14, MLA style, with no
staples and no separate title page (see the sample pages in the MLA
Handbook; click here for examples of how
to
cite sources MLA style). Put your paper and other required
material inside a regular-size
file
folder. Your interpretation should apply one of the critical approaches
we've
covered this semester, and you need to use at least three secondary
sources,
only one of which may be an
authorized web page (see the pages on
evaluating sources in the MLA Handbook; a database such as the MLA International Bibliography is
probably the best way to find articles and books; see next paragraph).
These and the edition
of the text you're using must be cited, again MLA style. I want copies of each of your
secondary sources. Without such copies, you will not receive a
grade for your paper. You need an
introduction
(with thesis, underlined), body, and conclusion. Identify the
approach (theory) you're using and provide a brief explanation of the
approach,
preferably from primary sources (think of your reader as the class as a
whole, including me). You needn't find an article on your title using
the approach you've chosen. You will need to hand in your rough
draft with your final
draft, and it must show substantial
revisions. If you fail to
provide such a rough draft with your final paper, I will deduct 20
points.
You may choose any of the four main texts we've covered or any of
the stories or poems (including Auden's), so long as you choose an
approach we did
not use extensively in class to examine that text. I have
provided
links to all of the authors below. Some of these links are more
useful
than others, but at the least
they provide background information to
help
you chose an author or a title. They are not necessarily
authorized web sites; if you are in doubt about whether they are, see
me. Use the MLA Bibliography
(available free to students, staff, and faculty at CSULB), as
well as the University
Library,
for further research. If you use a database, or any electronic
source, you must cite it as such, MLA style.
Please limit your choice to this list.
FICTION
Ackroyd,
Peter, The Clerkenwell Tales (an
historical mystery set in London, 1399, with characters similar to
those in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales)
Alexie,
Sherman, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (by
a Spokane Indian; the movie, Smoke Signals, is based on these
stories; choose one or a cluster of stories)
Anaya,
Rudolfo, Bless Me, Ultima (the modern classic about an
Hispanic boy growing up in
New Mexico) or Alburquerque
(an adopted Hispanic/Anglo boxer/student discovers his biological
mother on her deathbed and searches for his biological father in the
midst of political intrigue; see the novel for an explanation of the
unusual spelling of Albuquerque)
Alumit,
Noël, Letters to Montgomery Clift (a Filipino
boy loses his parents to the thugs of the Marcos dictatorship and grows
up in Southern California; a powerful first novel by the Filipino
performance artist and writer) or Talking
to the Moon (a novel based on the real-life shooting of a
Filipino postman and a Jewish day care center)
Allende,
Isabel, Daughter of Fortune (a young Chilean woman goes to
California during the gold rush to follow and find her lover)
Arenas,
Reinaldo, Old Rosa (an extraordinary novel in two stories,
"Old Rosa" and "The Brightest Star," by one of Cuba's finest writers,
whose
life is the subject of the Julian Schnabel film, Before Night Falls;
"Old Rosa" is the story of a strong woman farmer who loses her older
son
and her land to the Revolution and discovers her favorite, younger son
in
bed with another young man; "The Brightest Star" tells the story
of
that son, Arturo, a writer imprisoned in one of Castro's forced labor
concentration camps for homosexuals); The Doorman (about a
Cuban refugee who
becomes a doorman at an expensive Manhattan apartment building, listens
to the tenants' pets, and hopes to bring the tenants happiness); The
Color of Summer (a comic satire, the last book Arenas wrote before
dying
in 1990, the next-to-last novel in his quintet, Pentagonia; parts of
this
novels are used in the film, Before Night Falls); Mona and Other
Tales
(stories that span Arenas's career)
Baldwin,
James,
Giovanni's Room (a love story in Paris); Another Country
(whites and blacks try to get along in New York), two novels by one of
America's most important black writers
Barnes,
Djuna,
Nightwood (a ground-breaking novel highly praised by T. S.
Eliot)
Bennett, Alan, The Laying on of Hands (very
funny, satiric novella, together with two other amusing stories)
Berger,
Thomas, Little Big Man (the only white man to survive
"Custer's Last Stand," who's lived as an Indian and a white man)
Brontë,
Charlotte, Jane Eyre or Villette
(a young Victorian woman goes to teach on the Continent)
Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights (a powerful Victorian
love story)
Brown,
Rita Mae, Rubyfruit Jungle (a lesbian comes of age)
Bradford,
Richard, Red Sky At Morning (adolescents struggle in Santa
Fe, New Mexico)
Burroughs, William,
Queer or Naked Lunch (two novels by an important "Beat"
novelist)
Carroll, Lewis,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and/or Through the
Looking-Glass
(Carroll's famous tales for children and adults, more popularly known
as Alice in Wonderland)
Carter, Angela,
Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (stories by a
highly-praised, modern feminist writer; the movie, The Company of
Wolves, is based on the story of the same title; choose one or a
cluster of stories)
Cather,
Willa, O Pioneers!; My Ántonia (novels about two
strong
pioneer women); Death Comes for the Archbishop (based on Father
Lamy, who built the cathedral in Santa Fe, NM); or Shadows on the
Rock
(a young girl in 17th-century, French Quebec)
Cunningham, Michael,
The Hours (Cunningham intertwines the actual (albeit imagined)
life of Virginia Woolf with two fictional women who don't know each
other; the basis for the movie of the same name)
Conrad,
Joseph, The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (a dying black sailor
on board a ship at sea creates problems because of the crew's sympathy
for him); Lord
Jim (the moral dilemma of an English sailor who jumps a ship he
thinks is sinking, a ship that has on board 800 defenseless Moslem
pilgrims)
Dhalla, Ghalib Shiraz, Ode
to Lata (a young man of East Indian heritage, born and raised in
Kenya, looks for love in Los Angeles and finds obsession, lust, and
some resolution to the conflicts between his past and his present; a
remarkable first novel)
Dickens,
Charles, Oliver Twist; Great Expectations; or Hard Times
(all classic Victorian novels)
Eliot,
George, Middlemarch (a classic Victorian novel by a woman
about a woman, her marriage choice, and her cultural milieu) or Silas Marner (another classic tale
about a humble weaver in the Victorian era)
Erdrich,
Louise, Love Medicine (short stories entwined into
a
novel about two families, the Kaspaws and the Lamartines, the first in
Erdrich's
Native American series)
Esquivel,
Laura, Like Water for Chocolate (a matriarchal family
in Mexico near Texas during the Revolution)
Fante, John, Ask the Dusk (a novel about an
Italian-American newcomer to Los Angeles in the middle of the last
century)
Firbank,
Ronald, Sorrow in Sunlight (British title; American
title: Prancing Nigger) or Concerning the Eccentricities of
Cardinal Pirelli (early-20th-century short novels of high camp by
an aesthete-modernist admired by Auden and Forster)
Flaubert,
Gustave, Madame Bovary (one of France's greatest
novelists writes about the frustrations of a bourgeois woman in the
19th-century)
Forster,
E. M., Where Angels Fear To Tread; A Passage to India; or
Maurice (set mainly in, respectively, Italy, India, and
England--English xenophobia, colonialism, homophobia and same-sex love)
Fuentes,
Carlos, The Old Gringo (by one of Mexico's most important
writers, set in Mexico during the Revolution, near the Texas border,
"answers" the question, "What happened to Ambrose Bierce?")
Gaarder,
Jostein, Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy
(a metafictional, metaphysical novel about a little girl who learns
philosophy in Norway)
Glasgow,
Ellen, Barren Ground (the story of a strong woman in early
20th-century America who, despite great difficulties, manages to
prevail on her dairy farm in Virginia)
Golding,
William, The Inheritors (a short novel by the Nobel
Prize-winning novelist about the last eight Neanderthals and their
encounter with the "new people," the Homo sapiens who will replace
them)
Hamsun,
Knut, Growth of the Soil (one of Norway's greatest
novelists
describes the struggle to make something out of virgin land in Norway)
Hardy,
Thomas, The Mayor of Casterbridge; Tess of the D'Ubervilles; or
Jude the Obscure (late Victorian novels about men and women caught
in forces seemingly beyond their control)
Heinlein,
Robert, Stranger In A Strange Land (a man from Mars)
Hesse, Hermann,
Demian; Siddhartha; Steppenwolf; or Narcissus and Goldmund
(novels about the need for spiritual growth)
Hollinghurst,
Alan, The Swimming Pool Library,
The Folding Star, The
Spell, and The Line of Beauty
(one of the best living novelists writing in English)
Isherwood,
Christopher, The Berlin Stories (the inspiration for the
musical, Cabaret); Lions and Shadows (a roman à
clef about English writers from the 1930s, including Isherwood
himself, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender); Prater Violet
(Isherwood's short novel about film making); or A Single Man (a
gay professor in Los Angeles loses his lover through death; probably
Isherwood's best novel)
Jong, Erica, Fear
of Flying (a woman's sexual liberation in the 1970s)
Joyce,
James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Ulysses
(considered by some one of the most important novels of the 20th
century; all Joyce's fiction is set in his native country,
Ireland)
Knowles,
John, A Separate Peace (a boy's initiation novel set
at a prep school in 1942)
Kosinski,
Jerzy, The Painted Bird (a boy faces prejudice and
anti-Semitism
in WWII Eastern Europe) or Being There (a simple man grows up
with TV his only representation of the outside world; then he must face
that world, a humorous and meaningful novel)
Lawrence, D.
H., Sons and Lovers (Lawrence's classic initiation
novel),
Women in Love, The Rainbow (two more classic Lawrence
novels),
Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Fox (two women running a
ranch
find their lives disrupted by a male stranger), The Virgin and the
Gipsy,
St. Mawr (partly set in the American Southwest), The Man Who
Died
(a fantasy about Christ after the crucifixion). The last four are
all
short novels. Also, if you wish to write about a Lawrence short
story, see me.
Lear, Edward,
The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense. You may choose a
related group of Lear's limericks and/or one or several of his nonsense
songs,
such as "The Dong with a Luminous Nose," "The Courtship of the
Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò," or "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat." If you
choose Lear, you might want to consult my article, "Victorian Trickster: A Jungian Consideration
of Edward Lear's Nonsense Verse." Psychological Perspectives
(Journal for The C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles) No. 24 (Spring-
Summer 1991).
Leavitt,
David, Family Dancing (short stories; chose one or more); The
Lost Language of Cranes; Equal Affections; A Place I've Never
Been Before (short stories; chose one or more); While England
Sleeps;
or Arkansas: Three Novellas (Leavitt's fiction has gay
themes
that appeal to a wide audience.)
Lim,
Paulino, Jr., Tiger
Orchids on Mount Mayon (the first of a trilogy by CSULB Professor
of English Lim, this novella introduces a set of characters in the
modern
Philippines in the context of political violence, marital infidelity,
and an erupting volcano)
Lowry,
Malcolm, Under the Volcano (a powerful novel about an
alcoholic
British consul in Mexico)
Mansfield,
Katherine, "Miss Brill," "Bliss," and many other masterpieces
in the short story genre by a writer from New Zealand
Maugham,
W. Somerset, Of Human Bondage (Maugham's great
coming of age novel); The Razor's Edge (a man struggling to
find spiritual meaning); or The Moon and Sixpence (inspired by
the life of Paul Gauguin)
Maupin,
Armistead, Tales of the City (1970s San Francisco)
McCullers,
Carson, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter; The Member of the Wedding
(girls coming-of-age novels); The Ballad of the Sad Café
(obsessive love); Reflections in a Golden Eye (love on a
military camp); or Clock Without Hands (a man copes with dying)
Meriwether,
Louise, Daddy Was a Number Runner (a young African-American
girl in Harlem)
Mishima,
Yukio, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea or
Confessions of a Mask (two novels by a modern master in Japanese)
Momaday,
N. Scott, House Made of Dawn (an American Indian caught
between two cultures, white and Indian)
Morrison,
Toni, Sula (this bestselling novel by the Nobel
Prize-winning novelist explores the relationship between two African
American women in the first half of the last century and reveals much
about African
American women in general)
Phillips,
Caryl, Cambridge
(an examination of slavery in the West Indies, the novel's main
characters are
an English woman who visits her father's Caribbean plantation and an
African slave, the title character, educated in England but enslaved on
the plantation)
Proulx,
Annie, Larry
McMurtry and Diana Ossana,
Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay (includes Proulx's
award-winning story, the screenplay by McMurtry and Ossana, and
commentaries by all three) or
you may choose the story itself,
"Brokeback Mountain" or the collection, Close Range, it appears in)
Proulx,
Annie, The Shipping News
(the Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel about a widower who returns to his ancestral
homeland, Newfoundland, with his aunt and two daughters to start a new
life)
Rhys, Jean,
Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys imagines what happened to an important
character, Bertha Rochester, in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre)
Rice,
Anne, Interview with the Vampire or The Vampire
Lestat (vampires faced with human moral dilemmas)
Plath,
Sylvia, The Bell Jar (Plath's autobiographical novel about
a talented, suicidal young woman)
Rölvaag,
Ole, Giants in the Earth (Norwegian immigrant farmers
struggle to make it in the United States)
Rushdie,
Salman, Midnight's
Children (an epic-length story of a Moslem Indian/Pakistani
family that tells the history of India and Pakistan from their founding
in 1947)
Silko, Leslie
Marmon, Ceremony (a Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, man, half
Native American and half white, returns home from WWII in desperate
need of
psychic healing)
Spanbauer,
Tom, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (the story of a
part-Indian boy who grows up in a late-19th/early 20th-century
whorehouse in Idaho surrounded by Mormons)
Snider,
Clifton, Loud Whisper
(the story of a 1980s rock band from Long Beach, CA, whose bisexual,
drug-addicted leader falls from stage during a concert and becomes
paralyzed); Bare Roots (the
coming out/coming of age story of an only child of divorced parents,
born in Wisconsin and
raised from the age of seven in Southern California; despite the
constraints
of fundamentalist Christian religion and a lifetime of abandonment, the
protagonist is able to find himself through a troubled relationship
with
his college roommate); Wrestling
with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers (two gay Pentecostal
preacher's
sons become friends; then one disappears under ominous circumstances)
Stein,
Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein's
most famous book and one of her most accessible ones; Toklas was
her long-time companion)
Tan, Amy, The
Joy Luck Club (immigrant Chinese women and their daughters)
Undset, Sigrid,
Kristin Lavransdatter: I, The Bridal Wreath or Kristin
Lavransdatter: II, The Mistress of Husaby (the first two novels in
the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian novelist's trilogy about an
aristocratic woman in 14th-century Norway)
Vidal, Gore,
The City and the Pillar (the pioneering gay novel that Vidal
says halted his career as a novelist for several years) or Myra
Breckinridge (a transsexual in Hollywood)
Walker,
Alice, The Color Purple (an African-American woman's
struggle against racism and male brutality and her discovery of
love)
Waters,
Frank, The Man Who Killed the Deer (an American Indian
caught between two cultures, white and Indian)
West,
Nathanael, The Day of the Locust (trouble in Hollywood)
Wharton,
Edith, Ethan Frome (a gloomy, moralistic, yet vivid story
about
a bitter New England marriage and the desperate desire of the husband
to
flee with the woman he loves, his wife's cousin)
White, Patrick,
A Fringe of Leaves (a novel about a white woman abducted by
Australian aborigines in 1836 by the Nobel-prize-winning Australian
author)
White,
Edmund, Caracole (an experimental fantasy novel), A
Boy's Own Story (a gay initiation novel), The Beautiful Room is
Empty
(sequel to A Boy's Own Story), or [with Adam Mars-Jones] The
Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis [AIDS]
Winterson,
Jeanette, Oranges Are Not the
Only Fruit (an
orphan is raised by a strict Pentecostal mother to be a missionary and
comes out as a lesbian in the North of England), The Passion (an innovative
historical novel about a peasant soldier in Napoleon's army and a
web-footed young woman from Venice), or Written on the Body (the narrator,
whose gender is undisclosed, is in love with a woman)
Wilde,
Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (a beautiful young man
gets his
wish to remain young while his portrait grows old, but also shows the
effects
of his evil deeds); you might also want to consider Wilde's short
stories
or his fairy tales.
Woolf,
Virginia, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse,
Orlando, The Waves, or Between the Acts (all novels
in the unique, modernist style of one of the 20th-century's greatest
novelists)
If you wish to write on a novel or short story not listed here, see
me. You must have my approval for any title not listed. For
additional titles, see my Book List
for English 100 and other courses (fiction titles only).
POETRY
From each poet you may choose a single poem or a combination of
closely related poems. You must clear the title(s) with me first.
If I do
not own a copy of the poem (s), you must provide one with your paper.
Auden, W. H.
Allen, Paula
Gunn
Margaret Atwood
Bishop,
Elizabeth
Blake, William
Brontë,
Emily
Brooks,
Gwendolyn
Browning, Robert
Byron,
(George Gordon), Lord
Cavafy, Constantine
Creeley, Robert
Dickinson,
Emily
Donne, John
Eliot, T.
S.
Erdrich,
Louise
Field, Edward
Frost, Robert
Garcia Lorca,
Federico
Ginsberg,
Allen
Gunn,
Thom
Hardy,
Thomas
Harjo, Joy
Hogan,
Linda
Hopkins,
Gerard Manley
Housman,
A. E.
Hughes,
Ted
Keats,
John
Kenny, Maurice
Kinnel,
Galway
Komuyakaa,
Yusef
Lawrence, D. H.
Lifshin, Lyn
Locklin,
Gerald
Lorde,
Audre
Merrill,
James
Momaday, N.
Scott
Olds,
Sharon
Plath,
Sylvia
Rimbaud, Arthur
Roethke,
Theodore
Rossetti,
Christina
Rossetti, Dante
Gabriel
Rumi
Sexton,
Anne
Shakespeare,
William
Silko,
Leslie Marmon
Snider, Clifton
Snyder,
Gary
Swinburne,
Algernon Charles
Tennyson,
Alfred Lord
Thomas, Dylan
Webb,
Charles Harper
Whitman, Walt
Williams, William
Carlos
Yeats,
W. B.
DRAMA
Albee,
Edward,
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, or
The Sandbox
Aristophanes,
Lysistrata
Beckett,
Samuel,
Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy
Days, or
Krapp's Last Tape
Bennett, Alan,
The History Boys
Chambers,
Jane,
Last Summer At Bluefish Cove
Chekhov,
Anton,
The Bear (also translated as
The Brute, a one-act play),
The Cherry Orchard or
Uncle Vanya
Fierstein,
Harvey,
Torch Song Trilogy or
On Tidy Endings
García
Lorca, Federico,
Blood Wedding
Glaspell,
Susan,
Trifles
Ibsen, Henrik,
Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House, or
Ghosts
Jarry,
Alfred,
Ubu Roi (or
Ubu the King)
Kane, Sarah,
Blasted or
Crave
Kaufman,
Moisés,
The Laramie Project
Kramer,
Larry,
The Normal Heart
Kushner,
Tony,
Angels in America
Marlowe,
Christopher,
Doctor Faustus or
Edward II
Miller,
Arthur,
Death of a Salesman, or
The Crucible
O'Neill,
Eugene,
The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, or
A
Moon for the Misbegotten
Orton, Joe,
What
the Butler Saw, Loot, or
Entertaining Mr. Sloane
Osborne,
John,
Look Back in Anger or
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Pinter,
Harold,
The Homecoming, A Slight Ache, or
The
Dumb Waiter
Rattigan,
Terence, The Browning Version
Shaffer,
Peter,
Equus or
Amadeus
Shakespeare,
William,
Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Part I,
Henry V, King
Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III,
Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, or
The Tempest. You can also do your paper on a theme in
Shakespeare's sonnets.
Shaw,
George Bernard,
Major Barbara,
Pygmalion, or
Arms and the Man
Shepard, Sam,
True
West
Sherman,
Martin,
Bent
Sophocles,
Oedipus Rex or
Antigone
Stoppard,
Tom,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or
Travesties
Synge,
John Millington,
Riders to the Sea or
The Playboy of
the Western World
Williams,
Tennessee,
The Glass Menagerie, Suddenly Last
Summer, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire,
Night of the Iguana, or
Sweet Bird of Youth
Wilde,
Oscar,
The Importance of Being Earnest, A Woman of No
Importance, An Ideal Husband, Lady Windemere's Fan, or
Salomé
See me if you wish to do a play not listed. You need my approval
for whatever title you choose.
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Page last revised: 7 May 2007