Lit Crit Essay 1: Prose/Fiction and the next week's schedule

Lit Crit Essay 1: Prose/Fiction (200pts)
Due: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 (hard copy in class, or by 6pm e-mail)

Write a literary analysis of one or more of the stories in our Prose/Fiction Unit. You will want to have a thesis and provide textual evidence, which explains towards your thesis. Cite the page number of all quoted, paraphrased or summarized text from the stories at the end of each citation.

The essay must be a minimum of three (3) complete pages, double-spaced, using a 12-point standard font, with a maximum length of five (5) pages. As the title of the assignment implies, you are being graded on your success at writing a literary critique – a clear and developed argument is of the most importance.

Title the piece of your literary critique to clue us in to the topic and thesis. The title is the first place your reading audience looks to to understand what they are going to read about.
Do not make it personal; avoid using the “I”. Write with the texts and literary elements being your subject. Avoid pronouns when possible. Refer to authors by their entire name, or their last name. You are not on a first-name basis with any of the authors, so these types of rhetorical mistakes must be wiped from your essays. These rhetorical gaffs will lower the grade, since they are easily fixable in proofreading.

Prompt:

Choose between the following two prompts, and respond to only one (1). These prompts can be found in our Norton anthology, suggestions #1 and #3 (236):

1. In any one story in this book find five words that have special thematic significance, and write an essay discussing the way each [word] relates to the story as a whole.

2. The great twentieth-century painter Pablo Picasso once said, “One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite – that that particular peach is but a detail.” Is a work of art “about” the details of its surface, or “about” its underlying themes? Write an essay exploring the relationship between details and theme in one or more of the stories in [our] anthology.

Also: To give you time to do the best job possible, we will not have class this coming Thursday (3/12). However, I will be available to meet with students in Congress Room 527 during our usual class time.  

We will resume class on Tuesday. Also note that the Midterm Exam is on Thursday, March 19th. This will be a review exam of the literary elements, and some of the questions will refer back to readings specifically linked to those elements. For instance, "A Hunger Artist" might be dealt with when you are asked a question of "symbolism".