Humanity Essay

Possible Topics for the Second Paper (7 pages)

1. Select an individual – an artist, scientist, musician, writer, or
other creative figure – and discuss his or her creative process.
You should use primary materials, interviews, and secondary
works to support your ideas. What factors contributed to their
creative success? Can you identify any particular social or
personal elements that may have been important?

2. Following the same format as above, select an artistic
movement or group of individuals known for a distinctive style
or type of creative work. This could also be an academic
discipline. Describe the creative process as it applies to this
group, discipline, or artistic movement.

3. Pick a historical period – Ancient Greece, Qing China,
Modernism, the Renaissance – and describe the creative forces
at work in that period. What factors helped to shape the
creative production during that particular period?

4. Identify and discuss the latest research on creativity. What
are the most recent ideas concerning the development and
nature of creativity, and what are the implications of these
findings?

5. Produce a creative work yourself. This may be a poem, a
short story, a painting, or some other form of creative work. In
addition, you must provide an analysis of the creative process
both in terms of your own experience of being creative and
how you go about this. Your analysis should discuss the
process of creativity as we have explored it in the course of the
class.