This may be an optional paper for you. If you missed any of the first three papers, you must do Paper 4. This paper will take the place of a missed essay and will appear in the grade book AS that missed essay score. But you can also do Paper 4 to replace an essay with a score that you'd like to improve on. If, for example, your lowest essay score was a 70, and you wanted to try to improve that score, earning an 80 on this paper will increase your overall course grade by 10 points.

Choose one (1) of the following topics and write four page essay (that's four or more full pages) in standard MLA format which is thoughtful and supported with several specific examples from the work(s) you are analyzing. For this class the last topic will be the same for all of the essay assignments (it just seems like such a natural topic with lots of choice available). The other topics will offer you some variety. Your essay will be evaluated on both form and content. Do your best, and good luck!

  1. Expand on any one of the questions from Discussion 10 (Horror).

  2. Expand one either question 1 or question 2 from Discussion 11 (Science Fiction).

  3. Compare and contrast a classic work of literature with its improbable film mate. OK, this needs a bit of explanation. If you were to compare, say, the book and the movie versions of True Grit, you would have a fair amount to say, but the pairing is obvious, predictable. If, however, you were to pair Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with the musical West Side Story, you'd have some more dramatic comparison/contrast. For this topic do not pick obvious comparisons; look for a film that is somehow based on a work of literature without being just a copy of it. Here are a few (of many) possibilities:

    • Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale" (from The Canterbury Tales) and John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
    • Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now
    • Victor Fleming's film The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Gregory Maguire's The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West or the musical Wicked of the original novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
    • Beowulf (author unknown) and John Gardiner's Grendel (yes, this is comparing a book with a book) or any of a number of unusual film versions (there is a sci-fi version of Beowulf and an interesting film version of Michael Chrichton's The Thirteenth Warrior; stay away from the simple CGI film; it's really a fairly literal re-make)
    • Jane Austen's Emma and the Amy Heckerling's 1995 comedy Clueless
    • Homer's The Odyssey and William Saroyan's The Human Comedy
    • T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita
    • George Orwell's 1984 and Terry Gilliam's Brazil
    • loads of Shakespeare:
      • The Tempest and the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet or Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Book
      • Hamlet and Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well
      • Macbeth and Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood
      • King Lear and Akira Kurosawa's (do we see a pattern here?) Ran
      • A Midsummer Night's Dream and the teen comedy Get Over it! or Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
      • Twelfth Night and the teen comedy She's the Man
      • of course the topic mentions Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, but Baz Luhrmann's updated version of the play (reviewed poorly by Siskel and Ebert who said, "In one grand but doomed gesture, writer-director Baz Luhrmann has made a film that (a) will dismay any lover of Shakespeare, and (b) bore anyone lured into the theater by promise of gang wars, MTV-style" (how can you resist?); however, you will not get much mileage out of Franco Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet because it's too literal a translation of the original play

    There are tons of other options for this topic; I don't pretend to know them all, so if you have an idea that you think will work, you might want to run it by me first.

For some tips on writing about literature, go to

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