If novels and dramas contained no problems—for their characters and for their readers—it would be very hard for authors to produce works of the customary length, and even harder for us to pay attention to them.  For this paper, you should choose a topic that lets you comment, directly or indirectly, on frustrations and satisfactions in the three texts we’ve read most recently:  Northanger Abbey, the Sherlock Holmes stories, or Copenhagen.

      Who’s frustrated by these stories?  Readers?  Characters?  Authors?  All of the above?  What desires does each story raise, and how are they satisfied or not satisfied?  Is someone handed a challenge that gets solved more or less well? 

      You’re free to make up your own topic, but here are three proposed topics that ought to work well.  You can either use them yourself or consider them as examples.


      Masculinity in Northanger Abbey 
      It’s obvious enough that Austen’s women characters are living in ways we would find unusual today.  But doesn’t the same go for the men?  How do they talk, how do they act, and how do they get along with each other, as well as with the women who form the center of Austen’s plot?  How do male characters go about getting what they want—and how can you tell what they want to begin with?  Don’t they, like the female characters, often have to wait around for it a very long time?  What are the social expectations these characters seem to feel, and do we get any sign that those expectations can be tricky to meet?  Finally, would you say that in the novel’s frame of values, some male characters are successful as men and some are not?
      This topic may work best if you discuss two or three different characters one after the other.  That will let you make arguments about what each character specifically reveals about standards of masculinity in the novel; you’ll also find it easy to make an argument about what each character adds to the novel’s plot over time and whether the character changes or succeeds. 


      Sherlock Holmes: Doomed to succeed
      Conan Doyle worked within fairly rigorous constraints throughout the Sherlock Holmes stories, probably through some mixture of necessity and choice.  We needn’t read many of the stories to detect his overarching conventions:  a problem had to come to Holmes’ attention, the problem had to be resolved by the end, and Holmes had to be seen to inquire, deduce, and generally act like Holmes.  But if each story needed to be long enough to accommodate all these elements, it also had to end on time.  What effect do you suppose all this might have had on Sherlock Holmes’ character?  When we think about Conan Doyle’s daunting formal conventions, could we also be looking at a new kind of explanation for Holmes’ single-mindedness. . .his conspicuous brilliance. .  .his unusual personal life. . .his recurrent boredom?  In effect, what if some of Holmes’ most memorable qualities also happened to be very useful to a writer who needed to get his detective rapidly onto the stage, allow him to dazzle while some new mystery unfolded, then rapidly yank him off? 
      A fairly good way to tackle this topic would be to discuss two or three stories in sequence, using each story to make an argument about some specific quality of Holmes’ and how it might relate to Conan Doyle’s conventions.  But other approaches are eminently possible.  To make the paper interesting, you’ll want to reread the stories carefully and look for telling, subtle passages to discuss, so that your analysis rises well above the level of predictable generalities.


      Copenhagen:  Movement and time
      For the most part, the play takes place in two time frames.  On the one hand, we have conversations between the dead characters that happen either in some afterlife or simply today, in the present; on the other hand, we have enactments or re-enactments of the characters’ historical meetings in 1941 and 1924-27.  So Michael Frayn, from the outset, faced the problem of how to take his characters repeatedly back and forth between the present and the past.  Presumably, he wanted to effect these transitions in ways that appeared natural in terms of the unfolding conversation, and in ways that would not raise confusion for the audience.  So what are Frayn’s techniques for moving the story between his two major time frames?  What kinds of scenes or topics got inserted for this purpose, and what do they add to the way we see the major conversations in the present and the past?  You might consider the blow-by-blow relations between the characters, their occasional references to points in time other than 1941 and 1924-27, and Frayn’s experiments in describing his characters’ lives through metaphors from quantum physics including uncertainty, waves and particles, and the chain reaction.  Once you’ve considered Frayn’s habits in constructing his temporal transitions, do you have any new ideas about why he structured his play on two temporal planes to begin with?
      Since the play’s structure is complicated, it may work best to present your paper as a discussion of two or at most three transition points, perhaps one from each act of the play.  This will leave you space to consider what comes before, what comes after, and precisely how Frayn needed to glue it together.  If you want to write a more general paragraph surveying Frayn’s techniques for making transitions, you could certainly do that directly after your introduction or as part of your conclusion.

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      As before, this paper should be four to five pages long, or 1300 to 1500 words.  This is assuming you use a 12-point Times font, double-spaced with 1-inch margins.  Make sure to include a page reference in parentheses whenever you use a quotation or refer directly to a specific passage.
      In evaluating this piece of work, I'll be looking once more for the Elements of a Good Paper.


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