English Proposal

Overall, I would like to do my final paper on the theme of living paper and how people in texts read not only each other but also their surroundings. I’m going to be taking a little bit from every text starting from the beginning of the course, The Story of an Hour, and ending with our ending novel, Atonement. My main critical analysis paper will be from The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford; however, I shall be drawing from my other critical analysis papers over Long Day’s Journey into Night, Run River, and Atonement as well.

My question, since a major theme of the class that we have constantly looked at, studied, and pursued over the course of the ten weeks is form and content and how they reflect each other both inside and outside of a text, is how a character or surroundings can be turned into living paper. For example, in The Story of an Hour, the story takes place in the course of an hour, but the woman is read. Her actions and her mannerisms are read as one would read the words of text in a book. The woman from The Yellow Wallpaper not only did reading by reading her surroundings, but was also read by those surrounding her, especially her good doctor husband. Also, in The Good Soldier, Dowell spends several pages in several instances reading Ashburnham to the reader of the novel.

The themes that I have chosen that can relate to the idea of living paper are the various homo-social relationships as well as the hetero-social relationships in several of the texts that we have read, the idea of confinement that takes place in nearly all of our texts, the notion of madness and how it can affect a character’s every day actions and reactions to situations, as well as the idea of a weak or fickle heart, and the role of paper in a text with reading spotlighted as a crime. I believe that these themes, although there are nearly infinite possibilities, will give me the best ability to condense my argument clearly and concisely into the page limit with which we have been provided.

My thesis, as concrete as I can currently manage, will argue how the reader isn’t the only one who is doing the reading. That, through the eyes of the narrator – first person or third person – the reader will have the ability to read deeper into the novel. Also that the characters read each other and their surroundings on a regular basis and draw from that ideas about their fellow man, beast, or plant. When a character will read another character’s body language or hands or eyes, they will be able to assess the probable intentions of their counterpart or what their counterpart desires or is trying to hide. My thesis will also show that, as the character does the reading of the other elements in a novel, the novel will seem to come more to life and vivid. The intonation that is put into these readings will also reflect what the character who is doing the reading wishes or wants.

As of yet, I haven’t decided on a definite chronological flow for my points, but it will be in that basic format as aforementioned above. There isn’t really any way to definitely mesh together two novels because the themes appear in nearly every one we’ve read, so I will chose probably two texts – The Good Soldier and perhaps The Turn of the Screw or The Yellow Wallpaper - and draw the other points of from there, using the other texts to back up those points.