Wow, you are a thinker! I don’t know that I could do that paper. If you do it, would you let me read it! Seriously.
Thanks - maybe in 10 years when I retire!
I have to go to English class in a few hours. I’m so tired. But I S000000 much appreciate the ideas for consideration. You all have got my wheels turning. I will have to pick a topic, but I want to learn more about the things you all have posted. My brain is already hurting thinking about it! :) Thank you everyone.
And if others come upon this thread and would like to add their ideas, that would be wonderful. I think this thread could be good for others just as a general topic to learn from, too.
If you liked that topic, but a comprehensive review of literature is (understandably) too daunting, you could just pick out a few literary examples of virtues being mocked and vices being celebrated, and as part of the paper, simply post the question as to whether these examples are merely anecdotal, or part of a trend that has led to the moral decline of our society from the Enlightenment to today.
Just as one quick example, the section of innocent young women was often a celebrated topic in literature. Off the top of my head, I would think of the poetry of John Donne, and in particular “The Flea”:
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
Yet this enjoys before it woo;
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do!
O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou
Find’st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
’Tis true; then learn how false fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.