Final Essay Questions (due 5:00 PM, March 17th)

For your final essay, you'll respond to one of the following five prompts, which will allow you to analyze and synthesize our readings throughout the term through one of several broad frames (ideology, aesthetics, identity, gender and nationity).  Within each question, you'll be required to decide upon a number of key ideas/concepts/characters (usually three) and then explore each with appropriate complexity, bringing a wide array of textual evidence into play to support your points.  Before further discussing the nuts and bolts of your finals, here are the five prompts:

• As our readings throughout the quarter have demonstrated, the Beat Generation was as much an ideological movement as an aesthetic one.  In particular a spirit of transgression pervades the work of our authors, whether that takes the form of socially-forbidden behavior (a sexually permissive attitude, homosexuality, use of alcohol and drugs, racial integration, etc.), political and religious attitudes out of step with mainstream conservative thought (pacificism, legalization of marijuana, anti-nuclear beliefs), or outright criminality.  Explore three major types of transgressive behavior exhibited by the Beats, supporting each key concept with sufficient supporting examples.  How do the authors view their own actions — do they acknowledge their wrongdoing or downplay it, taking issue with society's mores?  Can you make any connections, either between authors or the types of transgression you address, drawing more general conclusions about the place of rule-breaking within the Beat ethos?

• As the question above acknowledges, in addition to ideological transgression, the Beat Generation was also a movement of great aesthetic innovation, proposing not only new  potential subject matter, but also new modes of expression.  From Kerouac's "spontaneous bop prosody" to Burroughs' cut-ups, the Beats embodied Ezra Pound's dictum, "make it new," in a variety of startling ways.  Consider three literary techniques or styles employed by the Beats throughout their writing, providing copious examples from the texts themselves.  In each case, evaluate the effectiveness of the technique, its appropriateness to the subject matter and spirit of the writing: does form follow function?  does style get in the way of the message or augment it?  What common threads do you see among the writers you discuss — are there general characteristics that you can consider emblematic of Beat literature?

• Neal Cassady is, in many ways, a vital catalyst for the Beat Generation — even though he left behind a sparse literary legacy (the unfinished autobiography, The First Third, and a series of letters), it's no stretch to say that if he never arrived in New York, befriending and captivating both Kerouac and Ginsberg, the Beats might never have achieved their full cultural potential.   You've read Cassady's tracing of his own history, and seen the ways in which he's been depicted in On the Road and throughout Ginsberg's poetry, and drawing upon these sources, I'd like you to conduct a character analysis of Neal/Dean, exploring the complexities of his identity — his strengths and weaknesses, sins and virtues —paying special attention to the differences, the contradictions, between these portrayals.  Is Cassady ultimately "a very interesting and even amusing con-man" as is alleged in On the Road, or does the turmoil of his childhood absolve him (or at the very least explain) his character flaws?  You might wish to, though by no means are required to, frame your analysis of Cassady through Aristotle's characteristics of the tragic hero, adjusting or subverting the rubric as needed.

• Throughout the quarter, we've lamented both the absence of female authors and lead characters in the various Beat Generation writings we've been reading, along with the general attitudes exhibited towards women, which have ranged from indifference and neglect to outright misogyny.  We'll address this issue in the last week of the term, with readings from Joyce Johnson and other female contemporaries of the Beats (Hettie Jones, Carolyn Cassady) who'll offer their own stories from the time period, documenting their search for ideological, spiritual, literary and sexual freedom, along with the pitfalls and benefits of living their lives outside of society's expectations for young women.  Guided by these lessons, I'd like you to go back into our earlier readings and explore three female characters you find there — some potential candidates: Marylou, Evelyn, Helen Hinkle, Terry, Mardou Fox, Naomi Ginsberg, Elise Cowan — comparing their experiences with the first-person testimonies of Johnson, Jones and Cassady.  In what ways are they liberated and how are they degraded by their male partners and society at large?  Who emerges relatively unscathed and who pays the greatest costs?

• The Beat Generation is an essentially American literary movement, and many would argue, ultimately a patriotic movement — celebrating the heart and soul of American life and exploring the true breadth and diversity of its populace along with its natural grandeur — even if its authors might not agree wholeheartedly with mainstream American culture or morality.  That having been said, it's curious that all of the authors we've read have benefited greatly from time spent outside the United States, and many of our readings have either taken place in international locales (including Mexico, Tangiers, Paris, London, Wales, South America, India and even Interzone) or were written there. Analyze the tensions between the foreign and domestic in Beat literature: how are places like Mexico City and Tangiers depicted by the Beats, and why are they so attractive to them?  What dangers exist in these places, and what freedoms can be found there that aren't readily available in America?  How does the Beats' interaction with these cultures and locales relate to their exploration of America itself and its various counter- and sub-cultures, its ethnic groups, its artistic scenes?  Is the ideal base of operations for the Beats within or outside of America, and why?

Your final essays should be a minimum of six (6) pages (and by six pages, I mean that the text of your essay itself makes it to the very bottom of the 6th page, or better yet onto a 7th), and written in MLA style (including a proper header, parenthetical in-text citations and a works cited list at the end), double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman, no tricked-out margins, etc.  You'll e-mail your papers to me (at hennessey [dit] michael [@t] gmail [dut] com) no later than 5:00 PM on Thursday, March 17 (get your essay out of the way so you can go out and drink a lot ... of wholesome milk ... without worrying).  I will be meeting with my poetry workshop from about 1:30-3:30 that afternoon, but will have special office hours afterward (until about 5:00) so you can pop in with any last-minute worries or questions.

As I said in class on Thursday, while 6 pages seems like an endlessly long paper, I can assure you that it's not really a lot of space to discuss these topics in great depth, therefore I wholeheartedly encourage you to dispense with any and all filler, including bloated rhetoric and lengthy five-paragraph-style introductions that ultimately say very little while taking up a lot of word count.  Don't hover over the surface of the issues — dive right in and get to the heart of your argument from the start.  I also recommend that a) unless you have compelling reasons to do otherwise, organize your essay around the topics (characters/techniques/etc.) you've chosen to discuss, rather than proceeding chronologically or dealing with each author individually, and b) you write through the source texts themselves, rather than providing a general summary of an author's viewpoint then introducing a quote.  For example, which of the following is a rhetorically stronger?

• "Kerouac believes that authors should '[w]rite what [they] want bottomless from bottom of the mind,' and this is made clear in On the Road when...," or 
• "Kerouac believes that writers should be free to say whatever they want.  He says 'Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind.'  He does this in On the Road, too, when he..."

You should make full use of techniques like paraphrase and summary in addition to copious quotations from your source texts (and all three of these borrowings of others' ideas should be properly cited) and should also be able to deftly excerpt and/or alter quotations so that they more effortless fit with the flow and syntax of your prose (as in the first example above, where a capital letter is made lower-case and the pronoun is changed).  We'll talk a little more about this, along with how to effective construct an argument and use evidence, in class on Tuesday.

If you're not familiar with the ins and outs of MLA format, the following two links might be of use to you:

• OWL (Online Writing Lab) at Purdue University, offers an extensive explanation of MLA style guidelines.

• The MLA Style Manual page on Wikipedia offers general guidelines as well.