CO200 SELF-CONSCIOUS FICTION

Block 6, 2002

FIRST PAPER

Focus: Briefly discuss your idea for your paper.  If you’re writing about one of the suggested topics, describe how you plan to focus the topic.  If you’re developing your own idea, write it up as a paper topic.  What issues does your topic raise?  What will be most interesting for your reader?  How will you use your answers to develop your argument?  You should explain what you find problematic or worth further investigation: which text(s) will you concentrate on? what’s your critical angle? what kinds of ques­tions are you asking about your subject? how will you go about finding solutions?

Argument: State your argument as a question.  Give us your best description of the problems it raises, the gaps in the text that you hope to clarify through this argument.  

Close reading:  Describe your best textual example.  Cite the passage.  Give us a close reading of the example.  How will you use it to support your most important point(s)?

1. How important are the characters to what happens in Tristram Shandy?  Describe the personality of one of the major characters—say, Uncle Toby or Tristram’s father, for example—and analyze what sentiment or mixture of sentiments the reader is made to feel for him or her.  How are we made to feel what we feel for this character?

2. What is the function or functions of the constant and ubiquitous digressions in this book?  Is Sterne in or out of control?  How can we tell?

3. What are the major ways in which Sterne makes us conscious of ourselves as readers of the book?  Why does he keep reminding us that we are reading?  How does this affect our understanding of or appreciation of what happens in the novel?

4. What is the role of sex in Tristram Shandy?  Why is it so important?  How does its presence affect our experience of the book?

5. Compare Wayne C. Booth’s account of Tristram Shandy to some other critical approach to Sterne’s novel.  What, as you see it, are the strengths and weaknesses of Booth’s rhetorical approach?

6. How many different kinds of counterfeiting are going on in Gide’s The Counterfeiters?

7. Why are there angels in Gide’s novel?

8. “[. . .] in my best contrived phrases I still feel the beating of my heart” (The Counterfeiters, 91).
   Describe the tension between artifice and sentiment in The Counterfeiters.

9. Trace the theme of anti-intellectualism or anti-reason in Gide’s novel.

10. “[. . .] what little knowledge is got by mere words—we must go up to the first springs” (Tristram, 514-515).
    “Words betray one’s meaning [Les mots nous trahissent]” (Gide, 179).
    What similar attitudes towards language do you see in Sterne and Gide?  How do you account for the similarities?