Old Mr. Hall
Research Paper Topics
(These are topics, not titles)
Yes, you might well want to look into SparkNotes or Cliff’s Notes, but don’t pull your essay or even your theme from them.
The alternative is a topic from one of the hard sciences in your major: medicine, engineering, metallurgy (welding, after all, is applied metallurgy), electrical theory, and so on. Don’t drift into exposition; state an arguable thesis and support it with authoritative sources. If you are making this choice, you must present your thesis statement, written, to me for my official nihil obstat before mid-term.
No fuzzy studies, sociology, psychology, politics, biography, contemporary culture, Jerry Springerisms, sex, sin, satanism, suicide, gun control, or other opinion-editorial pieces.
There is no point in complaining that these topics are difficult – of course they are difficult; they’re meant to be difficult. We’re not in high school any more, Toto. Remember, though, that reading up on your topic will probably be the most difficult part; once you have determined your thesis then you write to the thesis and support it with cited facts.
Understand also that you can reverse your thesis without that being a change of topic. If, for instance, your original thesis is that the Ponsonby Electric Corporation’s Model 39ZB is the best X-ray imagining device for small hospitals in rural areas, and your reading of technical manuals leads you to conclude that the Snorkbarger Model 93B is better, then write to that – in doing so you are not changing topics.
Similarly, if your original thesis statement is that Lady Macbeth is the lead in Macbeth, and your reading of primary and secondary sources leads you to conclude that the lead is Macbeth after all, you haven’t changed topics.
Don’t panic. We’ll talk.
The Topics
Why did T. S. Eliot write his play Murder in the Cathedral as unrhymed verse?
Why did Jean Anouilh write his play Becket as prose?
Why is Moby Dick not about the stupid whale?
Why were the Jeeves and Wooster stories popular in the Soviet Union?
What were the ten most popular songs in the USA (or England or Germany) in 1914? What were the ten most popular songs in the USA in 1919? Explain the change in mood.
Develop the theme, from literature, of Newfoundland as The Isle of Unrequited Dreams. That’s the title of a book, by the way, so you can’t re-use the title.
How do C. S. Lewis and the Inklings continue the Greek concept of the symposium?
What is the theme of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium?”
What is the symbolism of the ruined abbey in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” which is not about the abbey?
What is a common theme in “The Things They Carried,” “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” and “Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner?” No, no, not death; death is indeed a theme, but that’s too easy.
Why does John Updike use the name of a chain grocery store (it’s since disappeared, but the A & P was once a huge grocery chain) in his eponymous story? Why not a drug store, or a hardware store?
Who is more responsible for the murder of King Duncan: Macbeth or Lady Macbeth?
How does Lord Byron prefigure Adolf Hitler? Or the character John Wayne played in The Shootist?
Why did John Milton write Paradise Lost in blank verse?
Why did Geoffrey Chaucer write The Canterbury Tales in rhyming couplets?
What is the role of Alyosha in relationship to non-familial characters in The Brothers Karamazov?
On what three real people was the character of James Bond based?
Explain the Number Six in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. Why not five? Or seven?
Did the OSS pay John Steinbeck to write The Moon is Down?
What theme is shared in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay?”
What theme is shared in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Dear Native Brooks?” No, not the rivers; that’s too easy.
What theme is common to Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village?”
Was Thomas Becket really a martyr, or was he a manipulator whose plan went wrong?
Was Thomas More really a martyr…?
How does any one tale in The Canterbury Tales anticipate the Protestant Reformation?
Jack Kerouac – Hippie? Or beatnik?
Waiting for Godot – Does it have meaning? Or is it a joke?
Does Tennyson, in his later works, betray the ideals of his fellow Romantics?
“Sailing to Byzantium” – Explain Byzantium / Constantinople as a symbol of Heaven.
Connect the theme of alienation in “The Seafarer” with the Romantic (as in the literary movement, not some sappy modern screed) poem of your choice.
Does C. S. Lewis base Peter Pevensey in the Narnia stories on Saint Peter?
Does the life of the Elder / Staretz Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov parallel the moral development of Dmitri? Don’t drift into a compare-and-contrast structure; your research paper is persuasive.
Develop the idea of Huckleberry Finn and Scout Finch as naïve narrators.
Why is the idea of the forest so attractive in literature? Consider Shakespeare’s Arden and the forest outside of Athens, Sherwood Forest, and the forest in early American literature.
Why are Heinlein’s juvenile heroes almost always boys?
Take any symbol in The Old Man and the Sea – the boat, the sea, the old man, the fish, sharks – and develop it in a way not found in SparkNotes.
Persuade the reader that Macbeth is really about Lady Macbeth.
Explain how New Orleans Jazz is an example of the Hegelian dialectic.
Explain Steinbeck’s Travels With Charlie as an Arthurian quest.
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