Category Archives: Final Project Proposal

Final Essay Proposal

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My final project will be an essay about the novel The Deep, elaborating and researching the concept of History. Within the story, I will analyze and explore the scenes of ‘Rememberance,’ and its impact on Yetu physically and emotionally. To navigate intergenerational trauma and how we tell these narratives ethically and fully, discussing how the body holds memories, trauma, and history.

Below is my working Thesis:
In The Deep by Rivers Solomon, intergenerational trauma surfaces as a living archive, revealing how bodies carry and transmit historical memory. Through Yetu’s anguish, showcased in her collapse under the weight of Rememberance, reveals how bodies become living repositories of history.  By examining the ethical responsibilities of narrating such inherited pain, this essay argues that the novel redefines history not as a fixed record but as an embodied, collective experience shaped through storytelling, silence, and survival.

Final Essay Proposal

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I plan to focus on the reading, “The Day After the Wedding” from Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, examining how he uses Huldbrand’s nightmare of women transforming into monsters not only as a foreshadowing but as a symbolic dramatization of the emotional strain already present between Undine and her husband. By clarifying how the supernatural reflects the couple’s unspoken fears–specifically Huldbrand’s anxieties about female power, intimacy, and the instability of his new marriage–I argue that the nightmare becomes a way for the text to surface the tensions neither character can articulate. Because Fouque blurs the line that is between dream and waking reality through Romantic imagery–“pale and cold” moonlight, shifting feminine specters, and Huldbrand’s momentary fear of Undine–the story ultimately suggests that love becomes most unstable when desire clashes with suppressed emotional fears. In this way, the story uses the supernatural not simply for atmosphere, but to highlight the emotional vulnerability at the core of relationships in the Romantic era.

I will be honing in on how the nightmare functions not just as a foreshadowing but as a window into Huldbrand’s suppressed fears about women and marriage, showing how Romantic literature uses the supernatural to expose emotional tensions that characters cannot openly express.

Final Essay Proposal

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For my final essay, I am going to sort of combine my ideas from discovery 2 and a blog from week 13. I want to focus on how both Emmett and Nye and the reading on African water spirits rethink the relationship between humans and the environment, especially through the idea of water as something alive. I’m planning to use close readings from both texts to show how each one gives water a kind of identity. I’ll use Emmett and Nye’s line about managing behavior and the examples of water spirits who “personify the source of water” to show how these ideas challenge the mindset of controlling or using nature. My argument will be that both texts suggest environmental problems come from culture and imagination, not from nature itself. By treating water as a being we’re in relationship with, these offer a more ethical and sustainable way of thinking about environmental responsibility.

Final Project Idea(s) ?

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Truthfully, I am still in the brainstorming process for our final project. I’m torn between focusing on “The Deep” and exploring more of the history and themes of the book, as I’ve really enjoyed what we’ve learned before. It’s quite immersive with its aquatic world building, seeing the world through an Oceanic lens. There’s also the idea of religion being used to thicken a boundary with nature, asserting their superiority over it instead of connection (I’m thinking Undine). Then there’s a creative project which I’ve always leaned towards since I am passionate about creative writing. Decisions, decisions, I hope to come to a conclusion soon.

Final paper idea

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For my final project, I’d like to focus on the short film The Water Will Carry Us Home and how it greatly supports the claim that water holds history, in particular the history of the transatlantic slave trade acknowledging the often silenced side of history which is the victims side. I just know that I want to focus on that general idea, I need to fine tune it a bit more but I will certainly include film stills to help my argument.