Imagination Challenge #2
English 301 Freud at the Bank, Marx on the Couch • Summer 2002

In order to do well on this assignment, you must forget about your peculiar if affable intellectual guide. The only people who really count are the readers you write for: the audience for your paper. Who are they? Well, they are a lot like you. They are impatient and easily bored. They like specific details; they love direct, succinct quotes woven carefully into the fabric of an essay. If you are going to write about an image, they want to SEE a reproduction of that image. They hate misspellings and passive verbs. They like tangy language which is fresh and not filled with clichés. Like you, they RESENT having their time wasted. Recall that the title of this challenge is "Imagination Challenge " so USE your imagination.  While you are not required to use secondary criticism or outside resources on this first essay challenge, a good starting place for published scholarly approaches to the materials in this class are the Modern Language Association Bibliography and the ProQuest Research Library available through Love Library's LION SYSTEM.

You should take no less than 3 and no more than 5 pages (double-spaced typed, carefully proofread, with a dynamic, suggestive title) to complete your task. No cover sheet or folder-cover is necessary and late papers will NOT be accepted. The completed essay is due under my office door, Adams Humanities 4117 on Monday July 1, 2002 under my office door at 5pm, AH 4117.

Select ONE of the following challenges:

1. REDEFINE OBSESSION
Contrast the nature of "obsession" in the work of Darren Aronofsky with that of Susan Daitch.

2. PROXY/ PROSTHETIC
Psychologically we make all kinds of substitutions when it comes to balancing our need to quench our various desires AND maintaining our residences OUTSIDE of prisons, asylums and other state institutional apparatuses.  Explore the manifestation of psychological substitution--what we have discussed in class as proxying or the 'use of prosthetics' in the writing of Mary Shelley and Tino Villanueva.

3. WRITING VERSUS CINEMA
While the novel LC can be read as a piece of innovative historical fiction and Tino Villanueva's poetry in Scene From the Movie Giant can be read as a series of dynamic poems, each can also be read as theoretical tracts:  LC as a philosophical meditation on the relationship between fiction and history; Scene From the Movie Giant as a study of the relationship between psychology and film.  Write an analysis that explores these notions further.

4. FILM and THEATER
Rent and carefully screen any ONE of the following filmed versions of Kafka'sThe Trial: The Trial directed by David Hugh Jones (1993); or Procès, Le / The Trial (1963) directed by Orson Welles. Contrast these projects with the staged version of the same fiction by Héctor Ortega, The Comic Trial of Joseph K.

5. Design your own Thesis.
Design your own thesis incorporating two or three works we have completed!  Email your paragraph-length proposal to me by NOON, Friday, June 28, 2002.

6. POETRY on TRIAL
Contrast the poetic dynamics of Martin Espada and Tino Villanueva

7. Marx and Freud and Daitch
Do the theories of Marx and Freud appear salient with regard to the fiction of Susan Daitch. Identify the ghost of Sigmund and Karl in the machine of Daitch's novel.

8. GRAPHIC NARRATIVES
Contrast Robert Crumb's and José Luis Cuevas's adaptations of the work of Franz Kafka. Include specific close readings of SPECIFIC illustrations.  It is assumed your essay will be illustrated with representative xeroxes.