I try to provide students the opportunity to drive their own research topics to be inclusive of their individual interests.  Examples of topics for the Western Fiction and Drama class research paper chosen by students that represent a broad range of ideas are below:

• “They Don’t Belong!”: Anti-immigrant Nativism in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

• The Significance of Freud’s concept of the Id as Shown Through The Death of John Singer

• Existentialism in Modern Literature: Absurdism, Social Criticism and Anxiety through the Lens of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Eliot

• Demeter and Persephone: An Analysis of Motherhood in The House of the Spirits and The Sound and the Fury

• The American Nightmare: How Death of a Salesman and Catch-22 Challenge the American Ideals of the ‘40s

• The Implantation of the Biblical concept of Greed into 20th Century American Literature