Additional assignment for Wednesday the 21st: paper plan

Your paper will be 12-15 pages, double spaced and typed with one inch margin and 11 pt font. You should write about Crash, Money, or Nights at the Circus, seeking to analyze an aspect of the text that will shed light on the significance and meaning of the novel. It is important that you pick an angle for analysis that will give you a fresh perspective on the book. Avoid themes, such as "technology and sex" for Crash, which will lead you to comments already covered in class discussion or fairly apparent to anyone who has read or thought about the book. In order to gain a unique perspective, you might choose to see the text in light of a related work or aspect of the time period in which the work was written. For instance:

• Money is related in many ways to Thatcher's economic policies, which may surface in the book in the theme of value - in the economic sense - or value in the ordinary sense: how we value things
• Crash appeared at a time when there was a significant cult of masculinity associated with cars. Now, this is true in the present day, but in Ballard's time a persistent pop culture theme involved rambling or driving as a mark of masculine freedom.
• References to sports and games in Money may be a clue to its purport: Amis imitates Nabokov's love of games. Amis is an avid tennis enthusiast who has written extensively about tennis.
• Crash contains many references to evolution: a "new sexuality." His novel of sexual experimentation comes at the height of the sexual freedom of the 1970s. Are there clues in the novel as to whether it is a comment on this new culture of sexuality? Pornographic films such as Deep Throat enjoyed a mainstream audience in the same era, and were regarded as art films - for a short time until restricted by the Nixon administration.
• Nights at the Circus is often read as a feminist novel, but it has also made many feminist critics uneasy, and has sometimes been seen as a somewhat caustic attack on separatist feminism close to the novel's time or excessively romanticized images of women. Are there specific references to feminist ideas in the book that might assist us in reading it?
• Angela Carter's book is often seen in terms of Bakhtin's idea of the "carnivalesque." Using Bakhtin as a reading tool, you could write about the book in this tradition.
• Martin Amis' Money is not only about cinema but in many ways influenced by cinema, especially in its use of a likable anti-hero. It would be interesting to find a film or set of films that may have influenced the book.
• I don't know if Tod Browning's Freaks, a cult movie, may have influenced the subject matter of Nights - people with physical oddities parading before an audience. Certainly it refers to the old world of traveling shows, burlesques, and so on - a world which was disappearing due to social disapproval at the time of the book.

Most good ideas may require some research. The above ideas are only intended to give you a sense of a good subject for a critical essay. Such an essay is written for readers of the book and attempt to add something new to the knowledge about the book. Its subject should be carefully introduced, and it should draw evidence from the book, avoiding general, unsupported statements or plot summaries. Think of a possible theme and bring in two copies on Wednesday.