The American Road—Paper on Exiles & Outcasts

Due Saturday, 7 April, 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) In the Frontier unit, we saw travellers grappling with the physical dangers of the road—breakdowns, disease, enemy attacks—and, through overcoming them, proving themselves as Americans. How is this dynamic altered (or is it altered?) when travellers are put at risk because the very act of travelling is, for them, illicit? What kinds of dangers do runaways face, and how does their experience of danger shape our understanding of what “The Road” means in a given text?

2) What is the relationship between physical transience and other forms of subversive behavior (sexual, political, religious, etc.) in any one of the texts? You might think about answering this question by carefully noting the ways one kind of subversion is used as an allegory for another, or tracing the simultaneous development of two (or more) kinds of subversive behavior.

3) We’re used to thinking of the Road as a space of freedom, opportunity, etc. What happens to this myth if travellers are exiled, rather than journeying by choice? Do any texts show characters finding such freedoms anyway? Or does the Road inevitably mean something else??

4) What does it mean to be an outcast? We have at one end of the spectrum the Joads, who are literally bulldozed out of their home—and, on the other, Sylvie, who simply seems unsuited at some deep level for a settled life. Is it fair to say that Sylvie is an outcast, if she’s legally, financially, and physically capable of staying put? If so, why?

5) In The Frontier, we saw the road as primarily a male space—both at a practical level, in that women were less likely to choose to go on the Road, and at a symbolic level, in that they are traditionally associated with domesticity and civilization. Is the same true with this unit? Are women on the Road more likely to be outcasts of some kind? Are they travelling because they’re already misfits, or does the act of going on the road put them beyond the pale? Are there ways in which gender identity becomes ambiguous on the Road, in a space outside of civilization – or is it reinforced, as a way of establising order in an uncertain world?

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.