paper writing

Essay Topics: Choose ONE of the two topics. Essays should be roughly 1000 words.

You do need to offer formal introductions and conclusions for these papers. You DO need to have a clearly stated thesis that you demonstrate using a coherent argument supported by quoted evidence, as you would in any analytical paper.

1. In the battlefields of the WWI poets and in the Belgian Congo of Heart of Darkness we encounter landscapes that are horrible in a variety of ways. For the WWI poets, no-man’s-land becomes horrible due exclusively to the human political activity of modern warfare. In Heart of Darkness, the human-influenced parts of the landscape (the colonial stations and outposts) are horrible in one way, and the primordial jungle is horrible in another. Discuss how the different ways in which the books handle landscape have an impact on their message about human nature.

2. I sexual desire, as D. H. Lawrence portrays it, more like the violence of warfare in the WWI poems, or of political oppression in Heart of Darkness?