Length: 5-6 pages (double-spaced, word-processed, 1" margins)

Topics:

1. Compare and contrast the representations of colonial exploration and conquest by Henry Stanley in the excerpt from "Through the Dark Continent" and Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. How are their attitudes similar and/or different with respect to the following: the colonial project, their fellow colonialists, and the African natives?
   
   
2. Compare and contrast Joyce’s "The Dead" with Yeats’s "Easter 1916" with respect to the ideas of Irish nationalism voiced in the "Proclamation of the Irish Republic" (2299). How does each writer complicate or question notions of Irish national identity (such as those represented in the "Proclamation")? Your paper should briefly outline the main ideas in the "Proclamation" before examining how these ideas are treated in both Joyce’s short story and Yeats’s poem.
   
   
3. Compare and contrast the portrayal of the battlefield experience of World War I by Robert Graves in his memoir Goodbye to All That (2280) and Wilfred Owen’s "Dulce et Decorum Est." How does the poetic treatment of war differ from its portrayal in autobiographical prose narrative?
   
   
4. Virginia Woolf wrote the following about fiction in a letter to Gerald Brenan: "The best of us catch a glimpse of a nose, a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement. Still, it seems better to me to catch this glimpse, than to . . . make large oil paintings of fabulous fleshy monsters complete from top to toe" (2560). Explain what Woolf means by this and apply it to one of the following narratives: Joyce, "The Dead," or Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street."
   
   
5. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot writes: "The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in acutal emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ is an inexact formula" (2452). Explain how Eliot’s idea of poetry is different than Wordsworth’s, and apply Eliot’s ideas to one of the following poems: Eliot, "The Burial of the Dead" and/or "A Game of Chess" (from The Waste Land); Yeats, "Easter 1916," "The Second Coming," or "Sailing to Byzantium"; Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" or "September 1, 1939."