Final Paper for English 224

“The phrase ‘social distancing,’ which shows up in the film Contagion (2011), has dominated American reality over the past several months, leading to extraordinary modifications in our individual and collective behavior. But here’s a curious thing: when we look back through the works on our syllabus this term, it turns out that social distancing, in one form or another, has been with us for much longer that we might have realized–at least since Huck and Jim lit out for the raft in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Removing ourselves from specific ‘ill’ individuals and social groups, and from society as a whole, is a central American endeavor, in fact.”
Write an essay in which you make a case for the truth of this proposition, using whichever of our course texts (including the film) help you do that most convincingly. Feel free to hedge or qualify that defense, if you think that important distinctions must be made between our own contemporary moment and earlier historical moments evoked in our course texts.

**The other books that we read**
Mark Twain “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
Kate Chopin “The Awakening”
Edith Wharton “Roman Fever”
Jack London “To Build A Fire”
Langston Hughes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Charles Chesnutt “The Goophered Grapevine”
Paul Laurence Dunbar “When Malindy Sings”, “We Wear the Mask”, “Sympathy”
MOVIE THAT WE WATCHED “Contagion”