English 604
Fall 2004

Hypothetical Paper Topics

You do not have to write your final paper on any of the following topics, but all are possibilities. They are designed to allow significant comparisons between several works-that is, to give the opportunity both to discuss particular works in significant ways and to develop general ideas about satire. Even if you are not interested in using any of them as a paper topic, you should look at the list as a series of models. And, of course, the list suggests potential ideas about satire that seem to me interesting.

-Lords of Misrule: Wit and Sex in the Aristocratic Satires of Rochester and Byron.

-Versions of the Mock-Heroic from Dryden to Byron (or Pynchon).

-Heroic Couplets and Binary Ideas in Satire.

-Urban Satire: Images of the City from Juvenal to Pynchon.

-Overworlds and Underworlds: Satiric Inversions; or the Conflict between the Social and the Moral.

-Gendered satire: Satire as Male Aggression--Women as Satiric Victims.

-Charles II, George II, and George III: Satirizing Monarchs (and All They Stand For).

-The Satirist Satirized: Escaping the Attacker's Trap.

-The Satirist and the Social Position of the Author.

-Satire and the Position of the Reader-Readers as Satiric Victims.

-Satire and Sentiment: Sympathy and Attack.

-The Travels of the Satiric Hero: Open Structures and Dead Ends.

-Creating Satiric Constructions: Devising the Satire of Culture.

-Creating Dislocated Perspectives: The Art of (Mis)Seeing.

-Conservative and Radical Satire: Is satire politically neutral, only instrumental, or implicitly political?

-Entropy and Regressive History-Lucian to Swift to Pope to Pynchon.

-Collapsing Orders: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Satire.

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