Response writing topics: This is a list of possible
writing topics. You should also feel free to come up with your own
topics.
This page will be updated periodically to reflect
new assignments and explanations.
Possible topics for short stories (response #1):
a) What do “Sweat” and “City of Refuge” suggest
about the power of an individual to control his or her own life?
If the individual does not seem to control his/her own life, what does?
b) Discuss the endings of either “Sweat” or
“City of Refuge”: positive, negative? ambiguous? Explain your answer.
c) Discuss the importance of setting to one
or two of the stories we have read.
d) Both “Strawberry Spring” and “The Tell-Tale
Heart” have unreliable narrators. Compare these two narrators and
the sort of “horror” that each type of narrator creates.
e) Discuss Flannery O’Connor’s use of violence (psychic,
emotional, physical) in either “Good Country People” or “A Good Man is
Hard to Find.”
Possible topics for Tracks (response #2)
a) Are there any heroic figures in this novel?
Explain your thinking.
b) Discuss the implications of the novel’s ending:
positive, negative? Deliberately ambiguous?
c) Is it important to the meaning(s) of the
novel that Fleur is female? Would her power and significance be different
if she were a man? Explain how gender roles and expectations are
connected to the novel’s overall meanings.
d) Do you think that the novel presents assimilation
as a positive thing? Explain your thinking.
e) What does this novel have to say about individual
freedom? Explain your thinking.
f) How does the narrative structure of the novel
contribute to the novel’s central themes? Explain your thinking.
g) Choose two or three important symbols and
discuss their symbolic importance.