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Please pick one of the following questions/topics and write a response of 5-6 pages in length (double-spaced). Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions about your essay. Please submit your essay as hard-copy. Electronic submissions are not acceptable. deadline: 2/22/06, 1 p.m.
- Compare the figure of Ottilie in Goethe’s Elective Affinities with that of Olympia in Hoffmann’s The Sandman.
- Discuss the differences in Goethe’s and Kleist’s understanding of nature with the help of the works discussed in class.
- What qualifies Hoffmann’s The Sandman as an example of “Romanticism.”
- What do Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud have in common?
- Compare and contrast different narrative perspectives in at least two of the texts we have read so far.
- “The lover was nearer the divine than the beloved,” claims Aschenbach in Mann’s Death in Venice. Can we say the same about any of the other texts we have read so far?
- Compare the way in which Goethe, Kleist, and Hoffmann allow elements of history (politics, social, cultural, science) to enter the fabric of their texts. To what extent can we read their texts as expressions of their specific times?
- Discuss how one of Rilke's poem might stage Nietzsche's opposition between the Dionysian and the Apollinian, between form and ecstasy, between the inidividual and self-transcendenced.
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