7 textbooks with questions.

Questions

FORMAT. Please make sure that your answers are clearly labelled by number and DOUBLE-SPACED. There is no minimum or maximum number of words. Includingshort quotationsfrom the texts will increase your score but are not required. A solid answer is the typed equivalent of 2-3 double-spaced handwritten pages in an exam booklet (medium-sized handwriting). References from outside sources are allowed (no deduction) but are not required. Answers will be evaluated on standard paragraphing, grammar, and spelling. Counterarguments are not required but are often useful (of course!). No Works Cited list is required.

THE GOAL. A successful assignment is a creative act. Use your class notes, optional study group discussions, and any other relevant materials to pull together everything that you have learned this term. Always give credit to students or authors who give you good ideas to develop. Keep references to outside sources brief.

The focus in this course has involved putting yourself in the place of the everyday reader of a bestselling text. Use first person and your opinions generously,as these texts were, in most cases, meant for a general public, but note relevant biases. Please come up with your own definitions.

SHORT ESSAY. Below are NINE questions. You are to choose any SIX questions from the nine. You must cover all seven texts over the six questions. For each question choose two texts (there will be overlap by the end of the assignment). In some cases you will focus on only one character or idea from each book. If not indicated, you may use two characters or ideas from each book, but no more than that.

1.Heroes.What kind of heroes do bestsellers admire? Keep in mindthat bestsellers, by having so many readers, often reflectwhat a culture already admires, but you may wish to argue that bestsellers can also influencecultural definitions of heroism.

2.Characterization. Successful bestsellers have characters that are bothfamiliar and unique. Compare two characters from two texts and show how this principle does (or does not) work.

3.Gender.Are there (by accident or design) “men’s” books and “women’s” books? Marketing campaigns often make this distinction on the basis of content, but should they?

4.Relatability.Does relatability matter when you read a bestseller? Can “relating” to a book move a reader to read more of it than she would otherwise? Does relating to a book make it a “better” book?

5.Simple Plot/ComplexPlot.Research indicates that bestselling books devote 30% of their content to only one or two ideas/topics. Non-bestselling books tend to include more. Compare two books with respect to this principle and discuss their comparative readability and appeal.

6.What Makes a “Page-Turner”?Compare two books (one scene in each book) in terms of scene construction. Your choices may include examples of successful or unsuccessful construction, but the pair should be related, not random.

7.Author Swap.What if Grace Metalious had written Hiroshimaand John Hersey had written Peyton Place?You can use this pair or select another pair of authors from this course and discuss the implications (good or bad) if the authors were switched. Focus on one or two important scenes in each text.

8.Timing.Based on your experience in this course, do you believe that timing can make a bestseller? Choose two texts and argue that if these two texts had been published in different eras, they would NOT have become bestsellers.

9.Can Computers Predict Bestsellers? Carefully read “The Six Main Arcs in Storytelling […] by Adrienne Lafrance in The Atlanticmagazine. (If you Google the article keep window open or print out article). This article argues that computers can usefully predictthe kinds of story arcs that people like to read (and are more likely to make bestsellers). Do you agree that bestsellers are predictable in this way? Tie this issue to two texts from this course.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Hiroshima, John Hersey Peyton Place, Grace Metalious The Godfather, Mario Puzo Jaws, Peter BenchleyCarrie, Stephen KingHelter Skelter,Vincent Bugliosi(first 200 pages and last 200 pages minimum)The Firm, John Grisham