First Literary Analysis
First literary Analysis Before you begin this paper, reread the syllabus where you will find more information about the two fiction essays. This is the first paper that you will write for this class. It should be at least 700-1000 words long (about 3-4 full pages, double spaced, font size 12, standard margins). Remember that the names of stories should be in quotation marks. First read through the Essay Formatting Guidelines (1& 2) attached to this assignment For this assignment you must choose one story listed on the syllabus that we are reading for the class, but do not use Alice Walker’s “The Flowers” for the paper. You can choose a required story or an optional story, but it must be on the syllabus for this class. There are three parts to the paper you will write. Please label each part of the essay: Part One, Part Two and Part Three Part One: Respond to the story by thinking about how the work made you feel or think. React to the process of reading the story. What is your attitude toward the subject, the writer’s style, the characters in the story, or any other aspect that made an impression on you for whatever reason. Do you relate to the setting, the situation, the tension of a character in a personal way? Did you find the story satisfactory, or did it leave you confused or puzzled. What particular passages in the story affected you, in what way? In this first part of the assignment, you are reacting to the work of literature so there is nothing correct or incorrect about what you say. Still, the writing must be clear and coherent, grammatical and in the proper format. Part Two: In this part of the essay, you will look at one particular important character and talk about this person in as detailed a way as you can. Use quotes from the text to demonstrate support for why you think the way you do about the character. Does the person change in some way as the story goes on? Why do you like, dislike, admire, despise, love, sympathize with, or hate this character? How important to the story is this character? Why does the character do the things he or she does? Why does he or she think and speak a certain way? What issues does this person have and why? You are essentially doing a mini-psychotherapy analysis of the character in this section. The more detailed you can get, the better. See Chapter Four in the Norton Anthology for ideas about analyzing characters in fiction. Part Three: Step back now and think about the writer. What is the writer’s name? But do not talk about the writer’s own life, the biographical information. Think more about what the author has created with words. The character in the story you chose to think about is not a real person (though he or she may be close in some way to a real person known to the writer – something we can’t know for sure because writers lie). The character has to be seen as a creation of the writer, something built out of words, created by language, something imagined by the writer. In this part of the essay, you will talk about what you think the author did with his or her words to make you feel the way you felt in part one and what you thought about the character in the second part. What did the writer emphasize in some way? Are there symbolic ways that the writer used to make you understand something otherwise not clear? Is there something about the language you think the writer used to suggest something to you as a reader? Is there anything unusual about the way the story was written? For this last section of the essay, you may also refer to the text: Chapters 3, 6, and 7 in the Norton Anthology. Remember: If you use any ideas or language from on line sources, you must provide the MLA parenthetical (or in-text) footnotes and a Works Cited page. You do not need to cite or document where the literature (the stories themselves) comes from, just anything written somewhere else about the stories or writers. Without proper documentation, you might be guilty of plagiarism. If you are uncertain, email me with your questions. You DO NOT want to plagiarize, intentionally or not. NOTE: When you finish writing your paper in WORD, attach it to the assignment submission page as a WORD doc. Do not paste it directly into the submission box. I want your formatting to remain in tact. Remember to read through the Essay Formatting Guidelines (1& 2) attached to this assignment
