Review this week’s assigned reading and resources to prepare for this discussion.
Choose one of these short stories for your Short Fiction Analysis Essay. You may not write on a story not on the list of options you see here.
Short Fiction Analysis Essay options from our eBook, Authoring America, Volume 4:
Zora Neale Hurston’s “Drenched in Light,” 4.13.1
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams,” 4.15.1
William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” 4.16.2
Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” 4.18.2
Richard Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star,” 4.23.1
Short Fiction Analysis Essay options from our eBook, Authoring America, Volume 1:
James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” 5.11.1
Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” 5.12.3
Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” 5.17.1
Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” 5.23.1
Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” 5.29.1
Short Fiction Analysis Essay options from Introduction to Literature, edited by William Stewart:
Philip K. Dick’s “Beyond the Door,” 107
Kate Chopin’s “Regret,” 103
Madhuri Vijay’s “Lorry Raja,” 120
Short Fiction Analysis Essay options from Writing the Nation:
Kate Chopin’s “The Storm,” 2.8.2
Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” 3.5.1
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” 5.15.1
Eudora Alice Welty’s “A Worn Path,” 5.16.1
Short Fiction Analysis Essay options from Introduction to Literature, edited by Eric Aldrich and Anthony Sovak:
Franz Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” 64
RESPOND
In an “essay-looking” post, please post a rough draft of your Short Fiction Analysis Essay for peer review. The version of this assignment that you will submit for a grade, will need to be formatted in APA style, including a title page and include a reference page that indicates the story you selected, but this is not a requirement for the rough draft you’ll post in this week’s discussion. No research is required, but if you include information that is not from your own mind and creation (that is, you consulted another source or a website or something similar), then you must make clear what information in your draft came from the source you found. In your draft, you should make the following moves, each in its own paragraph. The reader’s journal assignments you did in previous weeks.
Introduce the author’s full name and the name of the story. (Short story titles should be in quotes.) Provide a short summary of the story and identify the structural elements of the story’s plot (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution) to situate your readers and to give them context.
Discuss the literary elements of the story, using evidence in the form of direct quotes from the story for support. The literary elements you should discuss are setting, narrative point of view, narrator type, characterization, symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony. (As you work on your essay, this area might be divided into several paragraphs.)
Articulate the theme of the story. What unified message do all of the literary elements in the story that you’ve identified point to or work in support of? After looking closely at all the literary elements of the story, what message(s) are you left with? What might the author of the story want readers to think, know, or do after reading the story?
Close by telling your readers what about the story you found most compelling and why. What surprised or intrigued you? What stayed in your mind after you put the story down? What did the story help you to see more clearly or appreciate more fully? Why is this important for your readers?
Requirements
Initial posts:
Citation Requirements: minimum of 1 source
Word count: 600 words
APA
Submission: Rough draft of essay as discussion post
