TL;DR: Use Invisible Man to show how an older understanding of America persists or changes in the 20th Century, explaining why this might matter to us as scholars.
Overview
As this is our second major paper, you will want to go back to both my notes on your first paper and your notes on the discussions we’ve been having over the course of the semester. Central ideas recur in this course, and engaging with them and their shifting complexity is part of what you have to do to fully demonstrate your understanding of them. Try to remain focused--the more you include, the less you can say about it.
In writing this paper, you need to take the novel we’re currently reading, Invisible Man, and put it into dialogue with an older text we read--though this older text cannot be one you’ve used before. This means thinking through how the perspective provided by Ellison’s novel offers you one kind of understanding, and then how that is complicated, extended, modified, or otherwise altered by the data in another. As always, complication is valuable, and no two texts ever say exactly the same thing.
You will need to articulate what you hope to show, then rely upon evidence taken from the texts (in the form of quotations primarily) that you carefully analyze and discuss to help me understand how you have gotten to the idea you have found.
At the end of your paper, I expect you to talk about how this complex presentation of an idea tells us something useful or interesting about America as a country or idea.. Help me understand how what you are doing in your paper might be relevant or valuable beyond simply getting a grade.
Sample Solution