Option #1:
In one page, define the radical idea of the curse in the novel Holes. Explain how the idea of a curse in the novel is different than the conventional idea of a curse. Then in two pages analyze the novel’s prescription for removing the curse. This prescription will be your thesis section. Finally, in another 2 pages, describe a personal struggle you had with a curse, as defined in the novel, and explain your success, or failure, with removing the shackles of this affliction or curse.
Be sure to include 3 research sources in your paper. You can include material posted on this blog as research material.
Option #2:
In a 4 or 5-page research paper, explain how the novel illuminates these two psychological processes described by Erich Fromm in his book Escape from Freedom (181-182):
It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed toward destruction. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies--either against others or against oneself--are nourished.
Be sure to include 3 research sources in your paper. You can include material posted on this blog as research material.
Option #3:
Write a 4-page research paper that analyzes the 4 major causes that help transform Stanley from a frightened soul languishing in learned helplessness and nihilism to a magnanimous soul full of self-reliance, hope, and redemption.
Be sure to include 3 research sources in your paper. You can include material posted on this blog as research material.
Option #4:
Write a 4-page essay in which you explore the different meanings of the novel's title Holes. Be sure to support your assertions with examples from the novel.
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