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Your Assignment
- What is your assignment?
- Ultimately, for Essay #2, you will compose an analytical essay on one of the stories read for this unit.
- But, for this week's journal, you will examine each of the following stories in depth:
- James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues," p. 38
- Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," p. 735
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper," p. 342
- William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily," p. 314
- Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," p. 889
- On the basis of your investigation, you will decide which story you would like to use in Essay #2.
- This will be a rhetorical analysis.
- Your text, Ann Charter's The Short Story and Its Writer, provides background material on "Analysis," on p. 1272.
- What does your assignment tell you to do?
- "Conduct an analysis of each story by "breaking" the story into its component parts.
- This means making notes of the areas that stand out to you.
- For example, examine the characters, what they do, say, what others say about them and so forth.
- Then, go on to another features such as point of view.
- Then go on to others."
- "Next, read the corresponding Casebook entries for each story. You may use these as well as any other secondary research to enlighten the author's meaning/purpose/message (potentially your thesis) in the stories."
- The Casebooks are found in Part Three of The Short Story and Its Writer.
- "Take notes on these Casebook entries and another research you obtain."
- Professor Gendron will be explaining how to synthesize an essay from the notes you compile, and how to document sources.
- Finally, "as you work on this essay, prepare a "Working Bibliography."
- This creates a formal account of each source used.
- It is best to keep track of sources as you go along.
- You will turn this record of sources into your Final Bibliography.
Your Text: The Short Story and Its Writer
