Ok, need five topics to possibly spend a semester on...hmm...well I think that if they're supposed to apply to my major then I could either do a 30 plus page paper on nihilism or on my argument about everything...let's see what I get searching "Nihilism" on google...
Ok, about four million seven hundred ninety thousand results...cool. The first one is wikipedia and that's not going to be permitted...otherwise they look pretty promising on just the first page alone...the question is is it a good idea to spend a semester researching something that depresses so many people? I'm not really worried about my own personal well being so much as how the topic might effect others in this class. Assuming there will come times when we have to discuss our topic, but who knows, my cheery manor might take the sting off of the revelation of pointless existence...yeah that was actually kind of fun to write...
There's also this argument I've had in my head for awhile that I have written out before but not in as great detail as I think I should. It basically boils down to me believing that everything we do and live by exists but isn't real...not to sure how I'd go about the google search this time, guess I'll just look up the people who's arguments I'll be referencing and countering and add them all up...So searching for David Hume, Anselm, Descartes, and Plato I get a total of 152980000 results. The first few are wikipedia links for all of them, but a lot seem to be arguments for or against things they had to say, the last few on the page of them have actual writings by them available online...my confidence of these sources is pretty high since I know what it is that the authors have actually said I feel comfortable trusting these sources since I'll be able to tell if something is off with the citing or arguments they make. My problem with this idea is though I know it is very in depth, very expansive, and very well researched I'm not sure I could make it go beyond 12 to 15 pages. Even if I start to play devils advocate and attempt to defeat all possible counter arguments I'm just not sure if I can make it past 20 pages.
A third possibility that comes to mind and this is literally just off the top of my head would be to write about the subject of horror in fiction, with 26,200,000 results on a Google search it certainly seems possible but I'm just not sure if I'm interested in writing what other people think horror is. I'm sure I could write what I think horror is in relation to fiction, but then again I'm not sure I could make that last for 30 pages. It can remain a possibility for now but seems unlikely...
Another topic off the top of my head would be strange stories/myths/unconformable "facts" from the World War Two era...stuff like "there was a secret mission carried out to spray Hitler's personal garden with a drug that would turn him into a woman." Actually heard that on a History channel documentary, there is no possible way to confirm whether or not something like that is true at this point in time, but the whole concept of events like that is always an entertaining thought. Searching world war 2 weird facts on Google yielded 18,200,000 results, but the problem is that quite a few are not going to be academic and many more are going to be just plain false, which is partly the point, to write say a paragraph or so on every fact I find giving specifics and say a percentage on the possibility of it's reality/validity, but I don't like the idea of spending hours researching stuff someone made up.
The final topic I came up with is...well Batman. Why would I want to spend a semester on Batman? http://www.merrickmonroe.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/goddamn-batman.jpg That's why! Batman rocks lol. I could definitely find enough info on him just on the internet alone when a Google search turns up 339,000,000 results. If I was able to use the source material to cover different aspects about the characters, the themes at play, the psychology and sociology in the fictitious world and the real one, I'm sure I could spend a semester writing about the character(s). A problem I see however is I know for a fact I can find hundreds of experts on the character(s) in relation to all different kinds of fields, some of them I can even talk to one on one, the problem is that I don't think they would qualify as academic experts...If that one hurdle can be overcome I'm sure I could turn this into quite the paper...
Ok, so those are my five topics...I think I'll write I-Search papers about Nihilism, my argument, and Batman...since I feel I know quite a lot about them already, but am still able to discover much much more.
