Style assignments (Yarnoff)

Contributor: Charles Yarnoff, Writing Program, csy771@northwestern.edu

Comments: Topics 1 and 3 in this assignment for my seminar entitled “Utopian and Dystopian Fiction” illustrate the use of writing prompts that ask students to imitate the style of works they’ve studied.  The assignment is intended to get students to explore the author’s style and use that style as a springboard for developing their own ideas about the course texts. 

Possible Topics for the Final Paper

Here are ideas for the three options you have for your final paper (a three-to-five-page reflection on Voltaire’s Candide or Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s “Voyage”).  Your audience is the people in our class.

1.    A “recently discovered” final chapter to Candide, written in Voltaire’s style.  Here are two possibilities:
o    Depict what happens to the characters as they attempt to “work [their] own fields.”  The underlying purpose of the chapter would be to convey your view of the possibility of creating a good community in an evil world. 
o    Depict what happens when Candide, tired of working his own fields, hears of Diderot’s Tahiti and decides to go there.  The underlying purpose of the chapter would be to use Candide’s experiences to convey your view of some aspect of Diderot’s Tahiti.

2.    A personal reflection essay—much like the one you wrote for Essay One—about some aspect of the utopian/dystopian world portrayed by Diderot or Voltaire:
Diderot
•    marriage
•    the detachment of morality from sex
•    the role of women
•    the role of children
•    the role of men
•    population control
•    religion
•    imperialism
•    incest
•    natural law
•    natural man vs. artificial man

Voltaire
•    Does Eldorado seem truly a utopia to you?
•    Do you find utopian thinking—striving for or believing in the possibility of Eldorado as an ideal—useful or useless?
•    Do you believe that in tending to his own field at the end Candide is acting wisely and ethically or naively and irresponsibly? 

3.   A dialogue—modeled on the method used by Diderot—in which two characters discuss one of the topics listed in #2 above.  The two speakers may be based on
o    yourself and a friend
o    Diderot and Voltaire
o    two invented characters