you have to pick one of the questions and answer it with a 4 page paper all instructions
LIT 327 Essay 1 F20 Prof. Coppola Crime and Punishment in Literature Essay #1 For this assignment, please select ONE (1) of the following prompts and write a double- spaced 4-6 page essay of roughly 1,000 – 1,500 words. Your essay should follow MLA style (that means no cover pages, no running heads, no footnotes), with in-text references for your quotations and a works cited page listing . If you have any questions about formatting, consult the Purdue Owl writing center here and make your paper look like the example. Please submit your paper to turnitin.com by the deadline listed on Blackboard. See the Syllabus/Course Information section to find the Turnitin.com login and password. 1) Sean McCann has argued that hard-boiled fiction is fundamentally a parable about the economic crises of the day (i.e. the Depression and the New Deal.) Specifically, he argues: The Big Sleep is an allegory of economic predation in which the vernacular energy of the white ethnic falls prey to the economic elite. “To hell with the rich. They made me sick,” Marlowe notes at one point, and Chandler’s novel suggests that the image is literally intended. At its heart, The Big Sleep is a gothic tale of the way that the wealthy survive by leeching the vitality of the forthright and honest. How do issues of wealth and class, exploitation and corruption play out in The Big Sleep and the other texts we’ve read? In a thoughtful essay, compare and contrast Chandler’s novel to a story by another author using McCann’s argument as a frame for your analysis. 2) In “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler criticizes the stilted and contrived formulas of classical detective fiction, and praises Dashiell Hammett’s work, which he values for its wised-up, hard-boiled attitude and its willingness to actually talk about “the world you live in,” modern urban society in all its ugliness, alienation and corruption. Yet he says that Hammett didn’t go far enough: In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man, and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. In a thoughtful essay, test this claim against Chandler’s The Big Sleep, along with at least one other story we’ve read. 3) Consider the following observation by the critic Steven Marcus: In Hammett’s stories, what the Continental Op soon discovers is that the “reality” that anyone involved will swear to is in fact itself a construction, a fabrication, a fiction, a faked and alternate reality—and that it has been gotten together before he ever arrived on the scene. The Op’s work is therefore to deconstruct, decompose, deplot and defictionalize that “reality” and to construct or reconstruct out of it a true fiction, i.e., an account of what “really” happened…yet that true fiction arrived at by the Op at the end of the story is no more plausible—nor is it meant to be—than the stories that have been told to him by tall parties, guilty or innocent, in the course of his work. The Op may catch the real thief or collar the actual crook—that is not entirely the point. What is the point is that the story, account, or chain of events that the Op winds up with as “reality” is no more plausible and no less ambiguous than the stories he meets with at the outset. How well do you think this applies not just to “The Golden Horseshoe” but to the other detective stories we’ve read as well? What do you think these stories are trying to show about “truth” and “reality”—and what does that imply for the society that they speak to. Discuss at two stories by different authors in your answer. 4) Here’s another critic, Gill Plain: [Chandler’s] criminal fictions are, first and foremost, narratives of besieged masculinity and love corrupted that seek to explain the paradoxical vulnerability of men within patriarchal society…Marlowe, in his isolation, is haunted by the bodies that surround him, bodies that he knows he cannot possess, but which he seeks, in masculine self-defense (or self-assertion), to explain and contain. In a thoughtful essay that analyzes The Big Sleep and at least one other text, explore the extent to which men are “paradoxically vulnerable” in these stories. In what way do bodies (their own, and others) haunt them? What does this imply about the sexual/gender roles imagined by detective fiction? 5) In writing about classical detective fiction, D.A. Miller has drawn attention to the “detective’s brilliant super-vision and the police supervision that it embodies.” The entrance of the detective “marks an explicit bringing-under-surveillance of the entire world of the narrative.” Yet Miller says that the classic detective story works to quickly confine “the fearful prospect of absolute surveillance under which everything would be known, incriminated and policed” by “localizing the investigation”—that is, by inevitably catching the crook and showing that the crime (and the detective’s supervision) were aberrations and in no way part of “normal” life. As such, Miller suggests that classical detective fiction produces a “social innocence” where everyday life is imagined to be “outside” surveillance and essentially untouched by crime. In a thoughtful essay, explore the kind of super-vision (and supervision) to found in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories and compare it to a text by another author we have read. Just how socially innocent is the world of Holmes in the end, and is it substantially different from the worlds of other detectives? 6) Chandler once said that “the ideal mystery is one that you would read if the end is missing.” Taking this quote as a point of departure, analyze the ending of The Big Sleep and compare it to the conclusion of another text that we’ve read. How well do those endings resolve (or not resolve) what really goes on, and what really is at issue, in your texts? 9) Carolyn Reitz draws attention to the way in which domestic and imperial concerns are intertwined in classical detective stories—specifically that the attempt to bring to order the anti-social impulses of domestic crime gets linked up, in complex ways, with a desire to police the boundaries of the nation at a time when empire is expanding and the homeland was perceived to be under threat by a variety of foreign “others.” In a thoughtful essay that compares one classical story and one hard-boiled story, analyze how the detective story engaged with the hopes and fears attached to imperialism, foreign cultural influence and/or immigration.