Analyzing fiction

Purpose

This assignment should help you to examine critically a piece of short fiction.  It should facilitate you in learning to develop thesis driven writing.  This assignment should enable you to focus on one subject while developing a lengthier topic.  It should also help you to develop your analytical skills in prose form.  Finally, this paper should expand your understanding of literary theory and its application in analyzing fiction.    

Assignment

Analyze a short story that we have read from Literature.  Make sure that you use specific textual evidence to support any claims that you make.  You may wish to utilize one of the methods from Appendix A in your analysis.  

Ways to Proceed

Some synonyms for analyze include interpret, explore, consider, and dissect.  Basically your assignment for this essay is to tear open a story in order to explore it from the inside out.  Does everything in the story keep the same meaning when you tear it apart, or do some things take on a different significance beyond what they originally seemed to mean?  Your object in this essay is to dig into this story, to go beyond what the story means on the surface, to make sense of seemingly confusing and/or disparate elements in the text.  Once you’ve torn this short story apart, string it back together in such a way that it makes sense to you.  This is where the method of literary analysis from Appendix A will be invaluable to you.  The critical method you choose will definitely influence how you will analyze your story, so make sure that your method makes sense for your interpretation.  Ultimately, your only caveat for this assignment is to make certain that any claims that you make about the story that you decide to interpret are ultimately supported by the text you are analyzing. 

Criteria for Evaluation

Your paper should be typed, double-spaced, one-inch margins (top, bottom, left, right), twelve point font (Courier New, Arial, Times New Roman, Antique Olive, Bookman Old Style).  Your essay should be at least five (5) pages in length, including the Annotated Works Cited page.  For this assignment you may analyze a short story in the context of a critical method from Appendix A.  I expect proficient use of MLA formatting in this essay.  Further, I expect you to utilize an Annotated Works Cited page that lists the short story that you used for this assignment, as well as any secondary sources on the short story or the critical method that you utilized.  An Annotated Works Cited page is just like a Works Cited page (i.e., it is a page that lists all of the works that you quoted, summarized, or paraphrased in your essay; some people call this a Bibliography).  However, each “Works Cited” entry will have a brief annotation (note, summary, précis, abstract) after each reference.  This annotation should be between 50 and 150 words in length.  It will describe in brief summary what you have read.  For example, if you were doing your  essay on Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” the last page of your essay should look something like this:  

(This represents the top edge of the last page of your essay)

LastName 5

Annotated Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest.  “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”  Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama.  Eds. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia.  New York: Longman, 2002.  Hemingway short story in which two waiters, a young  one and an older one, discuss the last customer of the evening, an old man.  The young waiter hates the old man to the point of being rude to him, notes that the  old man tried to kill himself the week before, and  wishes that the old man would go home.  The older waiter suggests that sometimes one needs a clean, well-lighted place to make sense of oneself.  The old man walks home with dignity; the young waiter goes home to his wife; and the older waiter goes to another  café where he notes that the place is clean, but is not  so well-lighted.  The story comes to a climax with the  older waiter saying the Lord’s Prayer with the word  nada in place of almost everything in the prayer.  Then  the older waiter stays up until dawn, when he can  finally fall asleep.

(This represents the bottom edge of the last page of your essay)

The preceding example of an “Annotated Works Cited” page shows a Works Cited entry containing an annotation with 153 words.  It might be a little lengthy, but it is better to err on the side of caution and be too wordy in such an instance than to be too brief and risk not summarizing the story well enough.  I do not expect perfection on this assignment (or indeed any other assignment that you turn in for me).  However, I DO expect that “A” students will make a valiant effort at least TO STRIVE for perfection.  Your grade on this and future assignments depends as much on your writing ability as it does on your effort.  The better students in my classes are, almost without exception, those students who seriously take to task the prodigious effort of writing a quality essay.  I am sure that those of you who earnestly wish to succeed on this assignment (as well as future ones) will do so.  Good luck on this assignment.

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