Literature Essay

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Texts for Course paper

You may write your Course Paper ONLY on (any one or more of) the following texts:

  1. Federico García Lorca (Avant-garde/ Spain): Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejías
  2. Jonathan Swift (Enlightenment/ Ireland) : A Modest Proposal
  3. James Joyce (Modern/ Ireland): The Dead
  4. Mo Yan (Modern/China): The Old Gun
  5. Rabindranath Tagore; (Modern/ India): Kabuliwala
  6. Hanan Al-Shaykh (Modern/ Lebanon): The Women’s Swimming Pool
  7. Naguib Mahfouz (Modern/ Egypt): Zaabalawi
  8. Doris Lessing (Colonial/ Rhodesia): The Old Chief of Mshlanga
  9. Nawal El Saadawi (Feminist/Egypt): In Camera
  10. Leslie Marmon Silko (Post [-] colonial/ United States): Yellow Woman
  11. Toni Morrison: Recitatif
  12. Alice Munro (Contemporary/ Canada): Walker Brothers Cowboy
  13. Pablo Neruda (Modern Romantic/ Chile): Tonight I Can Write; Ode to the Tomato
  14. Clarice Lispector (Modern/ Brazil): The Daydreams of a Drunken Woman
  15. Jorge Luis Borges (Modern/ Argentina): The Garden of the Forking Paths
  16. Katherine Mansfield (Modernist/ New Zealand): The Garden Party
  17. Witi Ihimaera (Postcolonial/ New Zealand): This Life is Weary

The purpose of this essay will be to demonstrate to me that you can argue effectively about literature. You should have a clear thesis statement that you then support with specific evidence throughout the rest of your essay. Your evidence will come from the text itself and from secondary sources as well. This essay is not a plot summary, response paper, book report, or explication. Instead, it is a persuasive analysis in which you enlighten the work of literature you are writing about.

You should assume that your reader is familiar with the literature you are discussing and address that reader accordingly.

The specific topic concerning literature is up to you, and the approach you use in your analysis will also be up to you. You are welcome to employ whatever analytical tools seem appropriate to your topic and to your interests. Your essay must deal with literature we are studying in this course. Look at the list I have given under “Course Paper texts”. You may discuss one or two works of literature but no more than two works. For example, you can write a comparative analysis of the female characters in “The Woman’s Swimming Pool” and “In Camera,” OR you can do an in-depth analysis on the role of desire in Mo Yan’s “The Old Gun”(it is up to you!).

You must have at least FOUR secondary sources. NO BLOCK QUOTATIONS (any quote that extends beyond 4 typed lines). These sources must be scholarly. Remember, you are in college and your writing must reflect scholarly thinking and presentation. This is not your weekly discussion board responses.

Papers should be double spaced, with 1” margin on the left and 1.5” margin on the right. Please use 12-point Times New Roman. Cite your sources according to MLA. You should have a minimum of FOUR outside sources. Do not use Internet sources unless the exact same source exists in a printed form and merely happens to be on-line in a full text version. Papers will be graded on the originality of argument, use and integration of textual evidence, development of detail, and mechanics of writing.

When I grade the paper, I will look for well thought-out thesis and support, idea development, organization and “flow” (logical transitions, topic sentences), clarity of expression (grammar and punctuation), and adherence to MLA formatting (Font, Spacing, Titles, Headings, In-text Citations, Documentation).

Word Limit: MINIMUM of 8-9 double-spaced pages (9th page will be Works Cited)