Write a three-to-four-page paper (double-spaced, reasonable margins, etc.) examining how any of the last four texts we have considered (Fitzgerald through Wright) represents the interest and meaning of a given aesthetic or cultural medium.
Feel free to construe the term medium broadly. You can write about the role of any medium in one of these works—from relatively straightforward examples such as magazines or newspapers in The Great Gatsby to much more abstract instances such as gossip or criminal trials in Their Eyes are Watching God.
You can write about any social practice or aesthetic form that links up different individuals or groups. It might be that the text you consider works to dramatize its own mediating relations to its possible readers. If you think that those dynamics are important to the way the text thinks about mediation, you should certainly feel free to address them. Good papers will ground their arguments in specific textual details.
You should make your exposition as precise and grounded as possible. Please remember to make an argument. Work to advance a position sufficiently uncertain that you could not assume that your reader would believe it independent of your analysis. Make sure that the position you advance can be established by reference to the evidence you have at hand.
Optional texts:
– Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) – Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key (1931) – Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) – Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945)
