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Paper #1 (Due Nov. 27. One page, typed, 250 words)
Please choose one of the following topics and write a one page
paper in which you focus on ONE idea about one of the readings so
far. You will need to introduce the author and work, and you will
need a good thesis, i.e., an assertion with an argumentative edge
that requires you to present and discuss evidence to support it. Your
evidence will come in the form of a quotation from one of the texts.
For example, if I were to write about "A Hunger Artist, " this is how
my paper might start:
Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" presents a strange entertainer who
starves himself to make a living. As odd as this occupation
might seem, Kafka's narrator presents it as almost normal. By
the end of the story we realize that the audience that is entertained
by this starvation, not the starvation itself, is the object of
Kafka's contempt.
After this beginning, I will need to find some evidence to
support my assertion that Kafka has contempt for the people who gawk
at the Hunger Artist. I find it near the end, where the people
stream by, oblivious of the Hunger Artist, occasionally belligerent,
then don't even notice when he dies, and really love the panther.
Toward the end of the story, after the Hunger Artist's career has
stalled and he has joined a circus, he finds himself in a cage
outside the menangerie. At first he is pleased to have so many people
stream by, but then he realizes that they hardly notice him and that
he is just an impediment on the way to the next animal exhibit. We
hardly know what to think of this audience reaction until we reach
the end of the story, where the Hunger Artist dies and is replaced by
a panther. The audience is enthralled by this new exhibit: "his noble
body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed,
seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in his jaws it
seemed to lurk" (177). Here the irony of seeing a caged animal as
enjoying his freedom and even locating freedom in the jaw (as if to
eat is to be free) overpowers the reader with contempt for the
shallow, thrill-seeking public.
I would finish off my paper with a paragraph in which I
consider the implications of this contempt for the audience. Is this
how Kafka feels about his own readers? Or about the people who don't
read his work? Or about how people react to art in general?
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