Topic for Final Paper
"I can't go on.... I go on." Samuel Beckett
"Every angel is Terrifying" Ranier Maria Rilke
"Going Blood Simple" Dashiell Hammett
In our earlier readings, the afterlife was a real and vivid presence to the authors and deeply shaped their vision and art. But our recent readings (from Coleridge on) see the Infernal as a metaphor, an allusion, a useful mythos, a nightmare, a distant horror, The dark inner life we feign would deny but dare not, the dead land traveled by wanderers too numb to know they have already died.
Take two of our more recent authors and explore both their sense of a metaphorical Infernal, corrupted world and reach for their answer as to how (why) they (we, you) go on alone. What passes for a positive course that might give meaning or at least the impulse to go on and create and value art and whatever else the authors find to value.
Bonus points for connecting the authors you select with our earlier authors.
Be sure to account in some way for the art of the work you interpret and analyze. What do you make of language and narrative and fragmented order and design. What does provide order in the texts you select? What is the value of that order?