<p>OK, so I need to think of a topic for a big English research paper-->it must involve an American author from the 1900s to now. </p>
<p>I was just gonna do something standard like Kurt Vonnegut, but people have done cool stuff like compare a Michael Crichton book to An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, my brain is not working and I can't think of any cool ideas like that....so if anyone has an idea ill be forever grateful :)</p>
<p>We're writing a paper about Toni Morrison and whether or not her novel Beloved sort of encourages affirmative action by saying the past is still alive and well. </p>
<p>What sort of paper does it have to be?</p>
<p>Last year my research paper on Beloved by Toni Morrison! Good book.</p>
<p>I think you should just pick an author that you honestly really like and are interested in. After that, try to work something cool in- if it doesn't work out, being interested in your topic is the more important thing.</p>
<p>the teacher's pretty flexible, so the paper can be like "compare two works of author", "compare one work of author to work of another author on same topic", etc. She basically doesn't care. </p>
<p>I was thinking of comparing the book "God is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens to...some other book, but then I read an excerpt from God is Not Great and was not impressed</p>
<p>Write it about yourself :D</p>
<p>(Unless you're not American. Or don't write.)</p>
<p>How bout analyzing/comparing some of the dystopian/political/societal commentary books such as Brave New World, Animal Farm, 1984, Cat's Cradle, etc?</p>
<p>I dunno if you would be interested in that stuff, but it's what I would do.</p>
<p>ya that sounds pretty interesting</p>
<p>a piece of advice that's helped me: pick a book you respect, rather than REALLY REALLY LOVE. I find that analysis sometimes ruins that, or you might just become frustrated with the paper and bring it over to your book.</p>
<p>ideas for your paper? I would probably do something about post-modernism and whether it really conveys a different message than other literary movements...what constitutes a novel? what is literature? what is classic?
you could also compare like a postmodern novel to a classic, and show how they each tell a story (this would be better if you could get two to match up with similar basic plots-child w/o parents, etc)</p>
<p>I did a 13 page paper on a post modern novel and the teacher said it was so creative and brought up lots of insight-there's just a lot of directions you could go, and virtually no error :)</p>
<p>also if you're iffy on post modern, there's great stuff on the internet if you google it...or ask your teacher (he/she sounds cool to let you have so much freedom!)</p>