First Paper (Topics) DUE Friday January 23 by 11:59 p.m. 650 words. Email your paper (as an attachment) to me at [email protected]. Put you name in the subject title or header of your title. Put your name in your paper. You will need a title for your paper and a thesis, an argument that you can state in one sentence. Your thesis should go at the end of your first paragraph. See Paper Guidelines. Grading: If you don't put your name on your paper, it's an automatic E. If you don't have a proper title, it's an automatic E. If you don't have a thesis, it's an automatic E. One third of your grade will be based on your title; one third on your thesis; and one third on the rest of your paper.

You may write on any of the readings or films we have seen thus far in the semester. The only constraint is that you must have Levinas's On Escape more or less explicitly in mind. I also suggest that you make your case (support your thesis) by focusing on a particular feature or small part of the reading or film. Less is more.

1. In what way is a model prisoner condemned to remain a prisoner? (I'm thinking of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and "A Hunger Artist.") How can the prisoner establish his innocence or authenticity even if he remains in prison?

2. Is escape possible in any of the readings or films we've seen? Is escape a metaphysical impossibility?

3. What is significant about the way the narrator of "Wakefield" tells the story twice? Why begin with the putline (a kind of plot summary) and then retell it as a fiction? How does repetition matter in the story? (You might also want to write about various kinds of repetition in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.)

4. What's up with marrage and heterosexuality and marriage in the films we've seen and texts we've read? What kinds of impediments to marriage are in place?

5. The return. Wakefield returns, but we get two different versions of his return (or we get one and not the other.) James Allen returns near the beginning of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and turns up at the end.

6. Discuss Levinas's style. Is his philosophical essay also a poem? What difference does hte metaphor chains make, for example?

7. Segregation in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. There a few scenes with African-Americans. In the opening scene, a black soldier is portrayed ina clearly racist manner although he is not segregated. In the chaingang compound, however, black and white prisoners are segrated, and the black prisoners are not portrayed in a racist manner, apart from the reference to the "buck" (but even that is admiring and respectful). And he's the guy who never misses and who helps Allen escape by hitting the ankle bracelets. After this rather prolonged scene, the black prisoner and disappears (like many other characters in the film).

8. Guilt and innocence. Is Wakefield guilty? Is James Allen? Is the hunger artist?

9. Weight, weightlessness, and weight loss: Levinas and Kafka. Does Kafka's self-starving, self-jailed hunger artist's illustrate or challenge Levinas's notion of the crushing weight of being? Or is being crushed a version of weighing so little as to be lifeless? Is starving the same thing as vomiting? Is the hunger artist an escape artist who never leaves his jail cell? Does he escape? Has he already escaped? Is a paricular body or kind of body condemned to feel the weight of being more than others? Does it matter the profession of fasting is dying out, so to speak? Does being alive mean being sick (nauseated or malnourished)?

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