Compose a research-based analysis of any of the stories covered in this course. This should be much more in-depth than the short essays. Students should develop a thesis and support it via the primary text and secondary research (Secondary sources are books or articles written ABOUT the stories, themes, and ideas you’ll be exploring. Primary sources are the actual stories). Students may compare/contrast two or three of the stories and/or characters. Here’s a possible approach. Below is a brief proposal. Imagine I am astudent and I wanted to propose an essay idea to my professor. I’m beginning with a quote that I think illustrates a central idea of my analysis.

Our taverns and Metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly.
-Walter Benjamin

In many ways, the formal and thematic substance of Literary Modernism (the way it’s written and what modernists write about) exists as a response to the onset of modernity in the late 19th/early 20th century. Specifically, many of the texts we’ve read so far have thematically dealt with the perceived problems of capitalism. Two stories in particular–“The Rocking-horse Winner” and “The Metamorphosis”–are very critical of the ways in which the construct of capitalism serves to imprison the hearts and minds of working men and women. In other words, at this time in history, capitalism, industry, and technological developments had culminated in a new type of daily existence for many. After thousands of years of AGRARIAN civilization, men and women of the Western world found themselves living in cities, commuting to offices–slaves to train timetables, scientific labor management, factories, assembly lines, etc. At the center of this transition was a rising consumer-based culture–one in which the pursuit of currency (i.e. buying power) lay at the heart of man’s daily existence. This had profound and perverse effects to a civilization trying desperately to keep up with its own developments.

In 4 to 6 pages, I will explore the ways in which these stories criticize the constricting structure of capitalism and the immorality of the consumer culture it produces.