English 2100
Fall 2019
Professor Sylvor
Essay #2: Literary Analysis
4-5 pages, typed, and double spaced
Draft Due: In class on Monday, October 28th (Bring 3 hard copies with you to class.)
Essay Due: Uploaded to turnitin.com by midnight on Friday, November 1st
In a thoughtful, focused analytical essay exploring either “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” or “Fiesta, 1980,” respond to one of the following prompts:
- In both stories, we encounter characters who are struggling to figure out what it means to be a man or a woman. Explore the connection between gender and identity in your text.
- Use the title of your story as a lens through which to approach the story’s main concerns. What, in your view, is the central significance of the title. How does it instruct us to read the story?
- We come to understand ourselves better through our relationships with others. Each of the stories you’ve read features important encounters between two people. Choose one of these relationships and explore its significance.
These prompts are your starting points. Once you have chosen a prompt and a text, find a way to articulate your topic in the form of a question. (It can be very simple, like “What does “Fiesta, 1980” have to say about masculinity?”) Then think about the body of your paper as an attempt to answer the question you’ve posed. Once you’ve written your draft and figured out what it is that you have to say in response to your question, you may find that it makes sense to go back and rewrite your introductory paragraph in a way that lets the reader know where the paper is headed and what your central claim is.
Successful papers will do the following:
–Use introduction to lay out the question you’re asking and provide a road map to the rest of the essay.
–Start each body paragraph with a topic sentence that expresses an idea about the text.
–Use direct quotation and paraphrase in order to illustrate your ideas.
–Have a main idea/central claim/thesis that is analytical, rather than descriptive. One way to test whether your claim is analytical or not is to ask, “could a reasonable reader conceivably disagree with what I’m saying?” You want the answer to be, “yes!”
Project #1
English 2100
Fall 2019
Sylvor
The Literacy Narrative
In this first formal essay of the semester, you will be exploring some aspect of your own literacy story. We could spend a long time exploring all of the various ways that people have tried to define literacy, but for our purposes, the term refers to the ability, confidence, and willingness to engage with language to acquire, construct, and communicate meaning in all aspects of daily living.
Your job here is NOT to tell the WHOLE story of your personal history as a reader/writer/student/storyteller/language learner, etc…; instead you will be choosing a particular aspect of your story to focus on and considering the ways in which that it has shaped your current identity with respect to literacy.
I am calling this a “Literacy Narrative,” but in addition to its narrative or storytelling component, your essay should also be reflective, offering some insight into the story you’ve chosen to relate and its implications for your identity.
Brainstorming Questions:
–What are your earliest memories of books or reading?
–What people in your life (teachers, parents, siblings, etc…) were instrumental in your literacy development?
–What was the culture in your family around books, language, learning, reading, etc…
–What were your earliest school experiences like?
–What messages were you given (either explicitly or implicitly) about how you were supposed to behave or what was expected of you?
–What obstacles did you encounter in your path to literacy?
–What pleasurable memories do you have that involve reading, writing, storytelling, etc…?
–How has your literacy narrative been complicated and enriched by bilingualism or multilingualism?
–What experiences involving reading and writing have been particularly empowering for you? Which experiences have been disempowering?
–What ideas do you have about your own capacities as a reader/writer? Where do they come from?
–Which aspects of your literacy have been encouraged by those around you? Which aspects
