English Assignment | Online Assignment
Format: Your essay, which counts for 25% of your final grade, should be at least 1500 words (about five pages in length), and utilize at least five sources. It should be double-spaced throughout and follow MLA format. Please don’t include a title page; a simple MLA style heading will suffice (your name, my name, class title, and date in the top left corner). Center your title below the heading. It should include the title of the text(s) you’re working with and briefly describe or refer to your topic. Each page of the essay should also include a header comprised of your last name and the page number. This header should appear in the top right corner at the ½” margin.
Content: These are formal, researched critical analyses, so use voice, style, sources, and format suitable for academic prose.
Assistance: Several sources can help you complete this project. I’ve placed materials about writing a literary essay and a sample essay on Canvas. While the sample essay is longer than the one you are expected to write, it will provide a useful model. If you’re unfamiliar with MLA style, The OWL at Purdue has a concise guide on its website. I can help you at any stage of this project, from brainstorming ideas to helping you revise a final draft, and I will offer comments on the initial draft that you submit.
Plagiarism: Don’t do it. I can easily find essays purchased online, and I am horrified by the quality of writing that students will pay $9.95 a page for. You can do better, and I expect you to do so. If you plagiarize this paper, you will fail the course.
Your essay should respond to one of the following questions. Consult me before choosing an alternate topic, or I will not accept your essay:
The Heart of Darkness
Analyze Conrad’s use of images of light and darkness in the novella.
Define the heart of darkness—what is it? Where does it reside?
Write an essay that discusses Conrad’s novel with Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men”
Woolf/The Hours
How is The Hours a modernist film?
Eliot
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a study in Prufrock’s psychological condition, and, by extension, the condition the psychological condition of the modern man. With this in mind, compare and contrast Prufrock’s self-image with the image he presents to others.
Write an essay that discusses Prufrock as a modernist poem. What, exactly, is “modern” about it? How does it adhere to the tenants of modernism as we defined them in class?
Kafka
Given our class discussion, what, ultimately, is the meaning of Gregor’s metamorphosis. Discuss the implications of Kafka’s choice of animal with respect to Gregor’s life before the change, and speculate as to Kafka’s larger purpose.
How is Gregor’s situation analogous to that of a disabled or chronically ill person? What are the larger implications of such a comparison?
Postcolonial Writers
How do Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa” and / or Darwish’s “Identity Card” conform to the standards of a postcolonial text?
Analyze a single image or group of related images from either of the poems we discussed in class.
How does Achebe directly engage, challenge, and respond to Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness in Things Fall Apart?
