Assignment #3, due on July 28, is a long research essay of 2000—2500 words, You may choose a question from the options below or design your own topic, to be approved by me before you begin writing, but your final essay should have a clear and precise argumentative thesis of your own design, not just an answer to a topic question. Your essay must involve one of the course authors and works covered in class, though it may also discuss other works by the same author: Art Spiegelman: Maus‎ , Michael Ondaatje: In the Skin of a Lion, Alistair MacLeod: “The Boat,” Amy Tan: “Two Kinds,” Thomas King: “Borders,” James Joyce: “Araby,” Alice Munro: “Wild Swans,” Katherine Mansfield: “Bliss,” Guy Vanderhaeghe: “Cages,” Ernest Hemingway: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

Obviously our two longer works—Maus and In the Skin of a Lion—will have more critical articles and resources, so I do recommend using them, and am only giving prompts here for those two works. Do not choose the same short story you used for Essay #1, please. You are required to use a minimum of three peer-reviewed critical academic sources on the authors/texts chosen for your final paper, so the best way to proceed is to choose an author and topic, go to the library catalogue or databases such as JSTOR, ProjectMUSE, Academic Search Premier, etc., and see how critics are engaging with the author. This will show you what general consensus or debates are considered relevant, and if what approach your own argument might take. In the limited amount of time and space we have, it is important that you be aware of available critical material before committing yourself to a thesis for which no academic sources can be found. Your argument must be original, but if it does not build on, refine, or engage with existing critical work, you will be unable to use your academic sources in a meaningful fashion. You MUST have a clear argumentative thesis, and not just answers to the various questions in the topic prompts. Give your paper a real title! Topic Suggestions Maus: When you have selected your topic and formulated your argumentative thesis, take note of all pages where you find relevant evidence. Plan to do close readings of several significant or representative pages and panels (discussing both text and images) in your essay. You may either include reproductions of the relevant panels or just reference them by page and panel numbers. You are not required to include or discuss Part II, but all your critical sources are likely to be considering the work as a whole, so reading the entire text would certainly be an advantage in analyzing it. Here are some prompts (credit to Dr. J. Lovato, U. of Colorado): 1. Spiegelman's Maus I begins with a quote by Hitler: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.” Make a case for or against the animal imagery in Spiegelman's Maus I-II reproducing the racial logic of the Nazi regime. To answer, consider the degree to which the text’s use of animals resembles or critiques the Nazi belief that particular populations have an essential, unchanging character, or can be ranked as higher or lower on the chain of being. On what basis does Spiegelman appear to choose the animals he does? How does his use of animal masks, and his depiction of “actual” animals—dogs, rats, flies, lice, and so on—fit in, and how do the different versions of animal representation play off one another? 2. In what ways does Spiegelman's use of the comic strip genre in Maus I-II complement or conflict with the text’s biographical, autobiographical, and historical missions? Is Spiegelman more interested in providing us with an accurate record of the past or in portraying the constructed nature of narrative, and how compatible are these goals? Some issues you should consider: the representation/reliability of memory; the use of multiple time frames; the shifts in point of view; the relation between reality and fantasy; the distinction between “real” photographs (I, 100) and drawings. Make a case for or against the Washington Post reviewer’s claim that Maus’s success was “impossible to achieve in any medium but comics.” 3. By turns, Vladek Spiegelman seems to be the hero and the villain of Maus I-II (the last word of Volume I, uttered by Artie about Vladek, is “murderer”). Analyze Vladek’s character, as it is reflected through his own eyes and those of his son. In what senses has Spiegelman offered a portrait of “the survivor,” and how does the discussion in Maus II (445) complicate the term? What are Vladek’s strengths and weaknesses (and are these sometimes the same thing)? Is Artie right to be worried that through Vladek, he has simply reproduced “the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew” (Maus I, 131)? What kind of judgment does Artie pass on his father, finally, and does (should) the reader judge him more harshly or kindly? What does Spiegelman gain by telling the story of the Holocaust primarily through the perspective of a single individual? In the Skin of a Lion: The novel is an amalgam of actual historical events and the author’s imagination. The historical events such as the building of the Bloor Street Viaduct and the Waterworks are depicted from the perspectives of the ordinary manual workers (immigrants, largely) rather than the traditional official powerful masters, and the climax involves a showdown between those two perspectives. “He who controls the narrative controls history,” or as Ondaatje puts it: “never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.” 4. Kwasi Hoffman and Jodi Lundgren argue that Ondaatje’s novel focuses on European migrants so as to demonstrate to the reader the exploitation and degradation they encountered despite their white skin and European ancestry. In the Skin of a Lion points towards a period when the notion of racial identity in Canada was born, highlighting the fact that racism was not solely concerned with people of colour and First Nations, but was, rather, a social construct that was executed within labour and social values. How does Ondaatje inform readers of the complexities and the multi-stranded discourses that underpin Canada’s multiculturalism today? Does the novel suffer from its focus on European immigrants? How does he symbolically tie notions of skin colour to his characters, and what impact does this connection between color, nationality, language, and race have? 5. In a 1992 interview, Ondaatje noted the importance in his work and life of “a sense of an extended family, as opposed to the usual nuclear family. There were my mother and father, but also, after the breakup of their marriage, all the uncles and aunts who took one step forward. I felt supported; I had no real sense of rift. [... I]n terms even of a book like The English Patient, or In the Skin of a Lion, the nuclear family is replaced by a kind of extended family. [... It] has very much to do with family, but nothing to do with blood” (Wachtel 1992, 250-261, 259). How do adopted, surrogate, makeshift, and extended families function to shape the stories of In the Skin of a Lion, and how might this be read as an argument for true societal multiculturalism? How does his writing attempt to redefine national identity using transnationalism and multiculturalism? 6. “Inside and Outside”: Ondaatje’s novel is focused on conveying the experience of the disenfranchised immigrants who built Toronto, to give voice to their silent stories. The Bloor Street bridge and the tunnel under Lake Ontario are built by several nationalities of immigrant men working long hours, and Patrick Lewis is our entry into this secret world. Patrick is not an immigrant, yet he chooses to live among those who don’t understand him and vice versa, in language and in habit. This tendency to stay on the outside yet to long to be inside recurs throughout In the Skin of a Lion, and symbolizes the conflicting desires of immigrants: to truly belong to a new country, be inside of and accepted by a new society, and yet to not lose their own culture, language, and heritage. Examine this problem of the unstable periphery, where Patrick and other characters can neither belong nor be completely separate. How does this tension drive the plot to the novel’s climax? 7. A topic of your choice, to be investigated by scholarly sources. Your subject should be related to one of the authors and stories we are studying in the course, and you must get my approval before you start your research. One of the above topics augmented somewhat, or applied to different authors or works, is also acceptable. We will have a preparation session on July 21 (the second half of the class) to go over citation/research points and other expectations or questions, just to make sure everyone is on the same virtual page before completing their essays. Evaluation criteria • The information must be relevant, accurate, ethical, and complete for the circumstances. Preferably it should engage with existing critical arguments as expressed in your scholarly sources. • Scholarly sources must be used for your evidence. You must use a minimum of three scholarly sources in your essay, with in-text citations for each one, or your paper will fail. If you are unclear on whether a particular source can be considered academic or scholarly, please check with me. • Borrowed information must be correctly documented in MLA 8 style. Sources must not be in footnotes, though additional information may be. All sources you use must be acknowledged by a citation on the separate Works Cited page. • Papers without a Works Cited page will automatically fail. • The organization and layout should follow the research essay conventions, with formal language throughout. Avoid slang, contractions, and personal anecdotes. • The paper must be roughly 2000 (1900-2500) words in length. Please provide a word count at the end. • Good sequencing makes your research essay easy to read. Plan out your argument before your final draft. • The language use in the research essay should be your own. Borrowed wording must be summarized or paraphrased (where not quoted directly) and be documented as in-text citations. • Sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and vocabulary are expected to be correct. • A professional or original style adds to the interest, value and credibility of your essay.