JOIT PAPER: SOCIAL SCIECE AD HUMAITIES

TEAM C, SPRING 2011, PROFESSORS VARAT AND KELLETT

Deadline: Monday, April 25th at 10:00 a.m.

Choose ONE assignment from the three options below. Please read the instructions carefully.
The paper should be five to six double-spaced pages (one inch margins on all sides). Research is
not required for this essay; you will be evaluated on your own analysis of these works. You may,
however, include research if you consult both Professors Varat and Kellett beforehand and if you
do not substitute research for your own analysis. Any paper that includes research must include
internal citations AND separate Works Cited and Works Consulted pages. Documentation should
be in MLA style. A separate title page is not necessary.

Requirement and special note: Be sure to provide necessary citations when you make specific
references to any outside sources from which you obtained specific information. A bibliography
at the end is not enough; you must also cite WITHIN the essay exactly where you obtained what
information. Do not use Wikipedia for any of your sources, since the information on Wikipedia
is not always or necessarily expert or scholarly. Include all referenced and consulted sources in
your bibliography.

OPTIO OE: IDUSTRIALIZATIO

Europeans in the nineteenth century experienced rapid social change caused, in part, by the
industrial revolution. The horrible effects of the industrial revolution produced a number of
critics of it. Choose one of the following two combinations of critics:

a. “The Chimney Sweeper” poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and
Experience and Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto
b. Gustave Courbet’s “The Stone Breakers” and Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto

Compare how these works express revulsion at the terrible treatment suffered by workers during
the early stages of the industrial revolution. Explain how each artist or writer tries to persuade
the audience to support his point of view. What rhetorical strategies do they share? How does the
genre or medium in which they work (poetry, painting, or political treatise) affect the ways in
which they attack the effects of the industrial system?

OPTIO TWO: IMPERIALISM

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European countries asserted unprecedented
imperial power over regions of the world they colonized. Compare Rudyard Kipling’s “The
White Man’s Burden” with a scene from either Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre or Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness. How do these texts represent the effects of European imperialism on
colonized people? How do colonized people get cast as “others” in society? Do these texts
promote imperialism, or are they critical of its effects?
OPTIO THREE: THE GREAT WAR

Compare Heinrich von Treitschke’s “The New Nationalism and Racism” with either one poem
by Wilfred Owen or one scene from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the
Western Front. What are their different attitudes toward war? What kind of language do they use
to represent the experience of combat? What do they suggest about the impact of the Great War
on the youth of Europe?