Write an essay where you examine Emily Dickinson’s complex relation to what Richard Wilbur calls “sumptuous destitution.”

Choose one of the topics below for your final essay. 1) Phillis Wheatley’s poetry exposes the contradictions at the center of colonialrevolutionary America’s definitions of liberty. Write an essay where you analyze how she articulates these contradictions in her poetry. 2) Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797) can be read as a cautionary tale for women to be mindful of the dangers of seduction, but we also hear in Eliza’s declarations of freedom and her desire for friendship strong opposition to the dominant models for being and belonging circulating in post-revolutionary America. Write an essay where you consider Eliza’s utopic ideas for being and belonging in relation to the social and political realities she has to contend with. Yliterature gothicizes American history. Write an essay where you examine what American literature has to say about questions of race, sex, and/or gender in American culture, and why gothic conventions figure prominently in these works. Choose one or two and show how they impact the gothic genre or how the gothic genre impacts these subjects. Focus on one text and use one passage or image from one of the texts in the Of Interest folder to support your main idea.4) Write an essay where you examine Emily Dickinson’s complex relation to what Richard Wilbur calls “sumptuous destitution.” Wilbur’s essay, “Sumptuous Destitution,” can be found in the Of Interest folder. You might also consider reading Anne Carson’s “Sumptuous Destitution”. 5) You can also propose your own topic, but you must present me with an outline of the essay with quotations from the text(s) and a general idea about the essay and its thesis at least two weeks before the due date. If you are going to take this option, I’d recommend developing a lead or forum entry you feel strongly about. If so, you should read the entries of your fellow students as well as my comments. That should help you hone in on an idea for the essay. You also need to let me know which text from the Of Interest folder you’re using in your essay. It’s up to you how to make use of this text or image in your essay.GRADING CRITERIA:Organize your essay around a clearly articulated thesis. A thesis is a debatable statement that needs to be substantiated with evidence and analysis. Organize your evidence in well-constructed paragraphs that are unified under topic sentences that the paragraphs then logically develop.

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