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Analyze the categories of persons/things/places/ideas/literary genres mocked by Voltaire

Please answer one of the following topics in a short essay of minimum 5 pages double-spaced. Make sure your essay has: an introduction, conclusion, and body paragraphs with topic sentences that advance your thesis. Also make sure to have supporting quotes from the text itself, in addition to quotes/paraphrases from the scholarly articles you gathered to support your assertions.

Make sure you have a Works Cited page in MLA format to cite your sources. (This is the same citation format from English 101.)  Don’t forget to format the texts properly: book/play titles must be underlined or italicized; article titles, chapter titles, song and poem titles get quotation marks. Prompts In English 204, you can answer the creative essay option only twice out of 4 required essays.

You must complete an “academic” prompt at least twice, although if you do prefer the academic options, you can use them for all the essays in this class. The creative prompts do not require a thesis or a Works Cited page.  This is because I want to give you some chances for creative fun, but I also want to have a chance to feedback your academic writing so I don’t send you unprepared to your upper-level coursework at your four-year college. Academic Options 1.We read both Candide and Journey to the West and Story of the Stone in translation. Research the topic of literary translation and examine the specific challenges faced by literary translators. What is gained in translation?

What is lost?  Give specific examples to support your assertions (especially if you can find stuff about our translations). [You may also consider verse-to-prose translations, and abridged translations.] This prompt is an especially great choice for you  if you grew up in France or China and read this text in the original language. 2. Examine the role of satire in Candide. 

Analyze the categories of persons/things/places/ideas/literary genres mocked by Voltaire

and explain them to readers in your essay. Give specific examples to support your assertions. 3. Write an essay about El Dorado in Candide. Choose your area of focus. Maybe you will compare it to other visions of utopia produced by authors and philosophers, e.g., Thomas More. (You can research the concept of utopia and go from there. You don’t need to read the works you compare it to to write such an essay.) Maybe you will use it as a mirror to reflect humans’ desires then and now (we are still struggling with many of the same struggles as when Candide was written, such as poverty and disease). Or, you could focus on the religious themes in the El Dorado passages, and contrast the progressive idea of praise/worship with the focus on dogma we associate with most religions. 4. Do a  of a portion(s) of Candide, Journey to the West, or Story of the Stone with or without a particular focus. A close reading necessarily focuses on one chapter, one passage, etc.–the entire thing would be too long for an essay. 5. Write a literary analysis of Candide or Journey to the West, or Story of the Stone using  For example, you could do a deconstructionist analysis, or a feminist analysis, etc. 6.If you were raised as a native speaker of Chinese, and/or was educated for any number of years in China, how does our American approach to the text (either Journey to the West or Story of the Stone) compare to how it is taught in China? You can discuss how its content is taught, its lessons, the related assignments – anything that interests you.

Have no fear of offending your professor. Creative Options  No Works Cited page is necessary for these prompts. A. Write about Pangloss’s (or one of the other characters’) life prior to (or after) the book Candide or one of the other texts. B. Update Candide, Journey to the West, or Story of the Stone for modern times, or make Candide or Monkey King and his sidekicks a woman, or a modern woman, etc. C. Write a Covid-19 pandemic version of Candide for the times we are living in!