SOME BROAD TOPICS FOR CRITICAL ESSAYS ON FICTION

 

 

I: Some General Structural and Formal Topics:

 

1. Discuss the author's (or authors') persona or literary identity and situate it in relation to the total imaginative structure of the work or works. By persona or literary identity, I mean the author’s implied personality, temperament, point of view, values, and tastes. You will want to analyze the interaction between this persona and the chosen subject of the narrative. You can elaborate on this topic by discussing aesthetic qualities (style), tone or larger generic structures, or thematic structures. Or, you can link this topic up with any of the other topics that follow in this list.

 

2. Discuss the relation of the author's view of things to that of one or more characters and situate this relation within the total imaginative structure of the work or works. Consider the author's total persona and how the author locates the character within the author's own range of judgment.

 

3. Compare two or more characters not just in relation to their personal qualities but in respect to their function within the total imaginative structure of the work(s). There needs to be some significant interpretive rationale for your selection. You might choose characters who have some similarity or contrast in personal characteristics and/or situation; or you might choose characters who seem representative of larger categories such as sexual identity, family function, social identity, cultural significance, or metaphysical perspective.

 

4. Discuss the significance of setting and situate this element within the total imaginative structure of the work or works. How does the setting help to define or influence the author's conception of possible values in the story? What limits do settings place on human possibilities? What opportunities do they open up? How do they enter into normative concepts of moral value or cultural order?

 

5. Discuss the narrative structure--the sequential structure of narrated events--and situate this element within the total imaginative structure of the works. Are there distinct structural divisions--for instance, divisions of chronological order or pacing, point of view, represented subjects, or point of view--in the sequence? What is the larger thematic or imaginative significance of these divisions?

 

6. Discuss tone in relation to the total imaginative structures of the works; that is, is the tone comic, satiric, ironic, tragic, depressed, heroic, or what? Tone emerges as an interaction between the emotional character of experience in the characters being represented and the emotional response of the author to the characters. What is the nature of this interaction? To what extent does the emotional quality of the characters' experience set the tone? Is there any tension between the author and the characters (as in irony and satire)? What does tone--this emotional quality or mood--have to do with the significance of the story or stories? Is tone in any way a crucial criterion of experiential quality? And is the identification of experiential quality in any way a primary concern of imaginative literature?

 

7. Discuss the style of the work and situate it in relation to the total imaginative structure of the work or works. Style is the verbal aesthetic correlative for all the other properties I have mentioned in these topics. The most obvious aesthetic properties of language are rhythm--including the rhythmic structure of syntax or sentence structure--and variations in phonic qualities (that is, qualities of sound). These purely aesthetic components are correlated with the connotative aspects of diction or word choice, and these aspects are themselves integrally related to the aesthetic quality of represented objects. Style is evocative and expressive, registering mood and state of mind. It reflects the characteristics of the author’s temperament and manner of thinking. Is the sentence structure complex or simple? Indirect and self-involved or direct and objective? Are the words abstract, subjective, concrete, vivid? Is there much use of metaphor? Tone intermingles with style; irony, pathos, and humor are also components of style and enter into an analysis of the use of language and the way language reflects both the subject matter and the author’s imaginative conception of the subject. How much and in what way does the use of language evoke and make imaginatively vivid the conceptual and emotional components of the literary representation?

 

8. Discuss the use of symbols, allegorical figurations, or fantasy (supernatural events) and situate this aspect of the work in relation to the total imaginative structure of the work or works. How do the events serve the particular purposes of the story? In what way are they lodged within a sense of subjective reality? How are they integrated with our commonplace view of what is objectively real? Is the relation between the subjectively and objectively real itself an important thematic issue? For instance, is the concept of the objectively real associated with science or with materialist sensualism? Is the subjectively real associated with a spiritual or religious conception of the world?

 

9. Discuss the total imaginative structure, that is, the total structure of meaning in a work or works. What are the largest governing elements and what is the relation among them? How do the emotional (tonal), sensory (aesthetic), and conceptual (thematic) elements fit together to constitute a total structure of meaning? If you like, you can argue that there is no total determinate structure of meaning and that the elements of the work can be arranged in a virtually infinite variety of interpretive ways to produce an infinite number of possible significations, but you must use this argument to illuminate a specific work or works.

 

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II: Some General Themes or Subject Topics:

 

1. Discuss the concept of individual identity and situate this concept within the total imaginative structure of the work or works. You might pay particular attention to the problem of the secret identity or the divided self, or you might choose to consider the elementary facultative components and personality components used to depict characters, and you might want to consider the way these components enter into the larger categories such as sexual identity, family function, society, humanity, life, and the universe. You might want to consider the way the structure of individual identity enters into normative judgments of moral value or cultural order.

 

2. Discuss relations of sexual identity and/or family functions in one or more works and situate these in relation to the total imaginative structure of the work or works. Men and women, fathers, mothers, children--are these categories important? If so, how and why? How do they fit in with tone, authorial point of view, setting, social and political themes, or the author's philosophical or religious views? Does it matter if the author is a male chauvinist, a radical feminist, a militant homosexual, or a celibate bachelor? If the sexual character of the author does matter, how does it matter? How does it influence his or her depiction of moral or cultural order? How does it influence the depiction of sexual identity and sexual relations in the story? What relation does it have to metaphysical views and to the total imaginative structure of the author's work?

 

3. Discuss the social and/or political themes and situate these themes in relation to the total imaginative structure of the work or works. Is there a critique of an established social order? Is there any implied alternative? What are the basic elements of the social order? In what way is social order influenced by individual identity, sexual identity, and family structures? Are class relations important? What is the relation of social structure to socioeconomic organization? What is the structure of power and/or authority in the society?

 

4. Discuss the concept of biotic "nature" or "life" in one or more works and identify the function of these concepts within the total imaginative structure of the work or works. In these works, does biology regulate human destiny, both individual and cultural? Or is there some spiritual world that transcends biology? What is the nature of life itself? What about evolution, the development of organic forms through the interactive relation of organisms and their environment? In what way is morality or culture dependent on or in conflict with biotic nature?

 

5. Discuss the concept of the specifically human and identify its significance within the total imaginative structure of the work or works. What, if anything, distinguishes human beings from the lower animals? What are the dominant elements in the human constitution? Are the elements of human nature in concord or in conflict? How do these elements enter into conceptions of sexual identity, of family functions, of social organization, or of culture? What is their relation to the metaphysical (religious or philosophical) views in the work or works?

 

6. Discuss the philosophical or religious views implicit in the work or works and situate them in relation to the total imaginative structures of the work or works. Philosophical and religious views concern themselves with the nature of life, human existence, and the ultimate forces and powers in the cosmos. How do these larger categories correlate with personal and sexual identity, social or cultural order, moral views or normative value structures? Do the larger categories regulate the more particular categories, or do they themselves merely reflect other, more elementary forces within the author's imaginative universe? How much direct attention is given to metaphysics? Is it a main focus? Is there any conflict in the author's sense of what constitutes the ultimate forces in the universe? Is the author in conflict with himself or with the ultimate structure of the universe? What is the place and potential of human freedom or human development within the total universal order?

 

 

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III: Some Topics from Evolutionary Psychology

 

 

1. Discuss the role of mate selection strategies, particularly conflicts between male and female strategies. Consider the greater investment of females in offspring, and the tension between male investment in offspring and male disposition for multiple sexual partners. Consider the psychological dimensions--motivational, emotional--and the ethical or moral articulations of differential male and female mating strategies. Consider differences in short and long-term strategies. Consider values such as attractiveness, health, kindness, intelligence, status, and wealth, as criteria of mate selection. Analyze the way in which those criteria translate into feelings and judgments for the characters, and assess the normative value structures within which the author situates those dramatic relations. Assess conflicts with relatives (close kin, parents, for instance) over mating preferences, and tensions or disparities between conventional social norms and the individual judgments or choices of characters. Is male jealousy an issue? Female? Are their differences in the types and sources of these forms of jealousy? Are males more jealous of potential sexual infidelity, and females of emotional infidelity, or not?

 

2. Discuss the conflict between mating investment and parenting investment in the story. Consider the differences in male and female parenting investment and the three factors that regulate paternal investment in offspring: (a) aid to offspring success; (2) paternal certainty; (3) other mating opportunities for males. Consider also the way in which female reproductive strategies balance off mating effort—maintaining male support—and parenting effort. Are step-parents involved? If so, do they invest less willingly or not at all in step-children? What conflicts emerge from second marriages involving children from previous marriages? What stresses arise because one parent wishes for more investment in parenting or in mating effort than the other parent?

 

3. Discuss conflicts that emerge from child-parent conflict. Do children and parents have different interests? Do they struggle over the distribution of resources? Do parents favor one child over another and distribute resources accordingly? What determines resource distribution? Do children want parents or other relatives to die so they can inherit wealth? Do older relatives resist premature resource acquisition by younger relatives? Do parents ever sacrifice themselves for their children, or vice versa? Do parents try to enforce values that reflect their own fitness interests rather than those of their children, and do they invest those interests with moral force? Do children ever do the same?

 

4. Discuss the way in which the tension between “somatic” and reproductive life effort structures the behavior depicted in the story. Somatic effort is the effort directed toward gaining or keeping wealth, status, material goods. Reproductive effort is the effort devoted to mating, to parenting, and to helping kin. How do the desires for wealth and status enter into the characters’ motives? Are those desires partly in tension with family bonds or romantic desires? Are they partly interdependent with family bonds or romantic desires? Is there any normative organization of good and bad characters on the basis of the focus characters give to somatic as opposed to reproductive motives? (That is, are bad characters hungry for wealth and status, while good characters devoted themselves to love and family?) If so, how do the interdependence of somatic and reproductive motives complicate that moral pattern? What are the conventional social norms depicted? What is the author’s relation to those norms?

 

5. Discuss the tension between affiliative behavior and dominance behavior in social life. Are “getting ahead at the expense of others” and “getting along constructively” major dimensions of social life? If so, what specific goals or motives are involved in each? What personality factors contribute to each? In what ways do they conflict? Are they also in some ways interdependent? How does the acquisition and distribution or sharing of resources enter into this dimension? (Resources include both material goods and social and other opportunities.) How are “sympathy” or “empathy” involved in this opposition? In what way do conventional social status hierarchies complicate or help organize or produce conflict in affiliative behavior? In what way do the desires for mating or parenting or aiding kin complicate or conflict with dominance behavior? For both affiliative and dominance behaviors, what forms of emotion are carried over, as metaphors or emotional parallels, from the more intimate relations of mating and family life? What is friendship? Is it enabled by shared interests (material interests, fitness interests) or concerns (mutual involvement in some activity)? Is it a form of mutual support within an established social framework? Is it an economy of complementary or common affections, ideas, beliefs, values, perceptions? Is friendship or social bonding a primary motive, in life or in this story, or is it supplementary to some deeper need based on more intimate shared fitness interests? Is “power” in itself a motive? Does it serve as an end in itself? If so, what must be sacrificed to it? How does the assertion of power fit within the implied normative framework of value in the story?

 

6. Discuss the tension or interaction between elemental fitness interests, somatic and reproductive, and the functions of human intellect, mind, or imagination. Is the mind used chiefly as an instrument to satisfy needs for survival and reproduction, for acquiring resources, acquiring mates and sustaining relationships, raising children, calculating kin relations, and negotiating social relations, including establishing status and forming social coalitions? Does the mind have ends and aims of its own? Does it provide a distinct set of motives and forms of fulfillment? What function is served by observation, intelligence, imagination? Why is art important? Science? General knowledge? Is some philosophical or imaginative conception of the world an essential part of individual identity? How do mental acquirements enter into social identity? Into mate selection? How do mental acquirements interact with other features of temperament or personal identity? What are the features of mental life? Are there distinct faculties or aptitudes for curiosity, analytic precision, originality, or articulateness? Do spatial and verbal skills diverge in orientation and social function? Are there significant gender differences? How important are all these issues and questions to the characters in the story? To the author? Do distinctions deriving from mental aptitudes and mental cultivation form significant fault lines in the organization of characters into communities or sets? Into protagonists or antagonists?