The American Road—Paper on The Frontier

Due Sunday, 18 February, by 10:00 p.m.

Send papers as Microsoft Word attachments to rpfeingold@smcm.edu
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Your paper should be 2800 words, or roughly 8 pages. Please don’t include your name anywhere on the paper itself—I try to grade anonymously. After I’m done, I can reconstruct who wrote what from my e-mail files.

For further information about my general technical & stylistic expectations, please see my paper-writing FAQ page : this will give you information about citation styles, tips on how to construct an argument, etc. It’s mostly designed for Intro students, but it might give you some useful hints. Generally speaking, I respond well to a solid organizational structure; close, detailed reading of specific passages; a connection between those readings and a larger idea; and careful proofing.

Assignment:
As the syllabus says, “In your essays, you’ll be expected to select a text we’ve read; articulate a significant question or idea arising from your reading of it (in the context of the American Road); and explore that idea or question in depth. In other words, have a thesis, for crying out loud, and develop it into a sustained argument. In all essays, you’ll be expected to perform close textual readings as well as demonstrate quality abstract thought.”

Here are some possible prompts for writing:

1) Frederick Jackson Turner argued that Americans’ encounter with the frontier made them (us) what we are; specifically, that we demonstrated our mastery and the power of our civilization by taming the wilderness, but that we were simultaneously roughened up and envigorated by our experiences of and in said wilderness. How does this contention apply to one (or potentially more) of the texts that we read/viewed for this unit? How are the characters defined—or how do they seek to define themselves—in terms of this tension between civilization and savagery? Does their journey commit them to one side or the other of the civilization scale? Does it involve their learning to find a balance? If the text is one composed significantly after the period it depicts, how does this built-in anachronism affect the question?

2) Moving beyond the question of whether or not the Native American characters in any of the works are depicted prejudicially (because, natch, they are), or even the question of the rightness of objectifying them in the name of symbolism, how does said symbolism work? Picking one (or more) of the works that present a more complex or ambivalent set of ideas about “Indians,”what’s the relationship between the protagonist(s) journey and these Others s/he encounters along the way?

3) Gender, gender, gender. How is any of the protagonists (male or female) affected by his/her gender identity—not just in the sense that men and women might be doing different things, but that their experiences might be subtly (or not so subtly) shaped by expectations (their own and others) about what being male or female means?

4) How has the mythic role of The Frontier changed over time, as you see it in these texts? What does it mean in contemporary America?

If these are too general, let me know—I just wanted to get some ideas out there. By all means, please come talk to me about specifics, even if they’re embryonic. And you’re absolutely not required to write on one of these topics—they’re just here as suggestions, in case you can’t think of anything.

If you have any questions, contact me via e-mail, come to my office hours, or stop by to see me. Just as a suggestion: try not to wait to do this until midnight the day before the paper’s due.