Instructions: Below are three essay questions. Select one of the following, and write a cogent and well-supported response to the question. Be sure to build on historical, literary, conceptual and cultural considerations as well as to give in-depth close readings and to comment on at least three different works (novels or films) that we have addressed.
PROMPT 1: The nature of “justice” depends on a number of theories that seek to define a just and moral society in terms of a continual struggle to honor and protect civilization and its basic ideals and values. In practice, justice routinely requires the exercise of institutional discipline and punishment by the state or, in terms of the stories that we have read in class, often calls for alternative forms of violence—sometimes outside or above the law—as a means to achieve a measure of cessation or closure to those who have allegedly been victimized. Discuss the reciprocal nature of violence and the sacrificial crisis that popular fiction elaborately stages and ritualizes, and suggest ways that justice is or is not achieved. Why or why not? How do certain works of pulp fiction equate justice with revenge or deconstruct the binaries between civilization and savagery or barbarism?
PROMPT 2: Discuss the meaning and function of gender and sexuality in the hard-boiled detective novel (Red Harvest; I, the Jury); the western (Riders of the Purple Sage); the adventure story (Tarzan of the Apes); and/or the romance (Like Water for Chocolate). Select at least three texts to compare and contrast. How is masculinity and femininity affirmed or not through a series of tests? What are the distinct male or female codes and values? Do these text promote misogyny, sadomasochism, violence against women, sexual power and authority or women’s liberation? Why or why not?
PROMPT 3: Pulp fiction almost always features a “hybrid” character or outside/inside elements that bring together opposing forces. Building upon the concept of the Manichean order and the function of myth, select three texts, and discuss the hybrid figures in each, making claims about the figure that lies in-between two extremes and who enables a symbolic resolution of the plot (or not). How does the hybrid figure precipitate this change (or is powerless to do so)? What does this hybridity mean in terms of the larger social, economic and political implications about the broad divisions that keep the two extremes apart (or, as in the case of In Cold Blood, are profanely and violently brought together)?
ANY ONE OF THESE 3 PROMPTS!