Write an essay of about 3000 words (10-12 typed, double-spaced pages) on one of the following topics. Please remember that these are suggested topics only, and that you need to narrow and refine your argument; think carefully about exactly what idea or thesis you want to present in your work. Although this is not necessarily a research paper, I will expect you to do an adequate amount of background reading. Please use the current MLA format for documentation. Due in class on Friday, December 2.

1. In a note posted on-line at the Brick Books website (http://www.brickbooks.ca/Don_Stan.htm), Don McKay argues that "[a]udience is not just who shows up or buys the books, but attention given to the other. We might in fact say that poetry is audience, is listening in a way that fosters intimacy, that opens into the textures of another who speaks." With reference to the work of two of the writers on the course syllabus, discuss the nature and the (cultural) politics of audience. How does literature shape attention? How are the changes it might provoke instituted or incorporated in our cultures? How are they resisted?

2. Most of the work we have been examining in this course describes, and even enacts, the creation and the transgression of boundaries: cultural, social, linguistic, political. With reference to the work of two of the writers on the syllabus, investigate the ways and means of confronting boundaries or limits. Why are such confrontations significant?

3. Both Terry and Neuromancer, for example, focus almost obsessively on the human body -- its flesh, its materiality. Examine the nature of corporeality in the work of two writers on the course syllabus.

4. Many of the core texts in this course either position themselves in, or attempt to produce a particular version of, history -- whether personal, national or literary. Interrogate the historicism of two writers on the course syllabus: how and why do they make history?

5. Investigate the first publication of a poem or text included in the works on the course syllabus. In what journal or anthology, for example, did a particular piece of writing first appear? For what audience was it intended? Was it revised? How and why? How do the material circumstances of its publication affect how we read it?

6. Discuss the relationship between performance and text in the work of two writers on the course syllabus. Why might certain forms of enactment or action -- praxis -- be at stake in this writing?

7. A project of your own devising: please consult with me before you begin to write.