Description
Please choose ONE of the following topics for an essay of approximately 600-750 words. Your response MUST be in the form of an essay, with an introduction and thesis statement, body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph. You must support all generalizations and claims that you make about the work you are writing about with examples and/or references to details, dialogue, characters, images, etc. from the work. Please cite these references with the page number from Backpack Literature where your reader can find them. In the case of poetry or Othello, you must include the line number. If you write about Othello, remember that any reference must include the act and scene numbers (if your reference is to Act II, scene i, lines 12-20, write (2.2.12-20) as your citation). Wherever possible, employ the terminology related to literary analysis we have used in the semester (protagonist, climax, iambic pentameter, rhyme scheme, in medias res, antihero, sonnet etc., etc., etc. You will be graded on the clarity of your main idea/focus, the organization of your body ¶s, the details and support for your ideas, the correctness of your citations, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
You are NOT required, and you are urged not to, use any outside research for this essay other than Backpack Literature. It doesn’t matter whether you are “correct” in any interpretation; you will be assessed on what you are able to analyze and evaluate based on your experience this semester. However, if you do use or read any outside source of information about the story, poem, or play you write about, and ANY idea from that source finds its way into your essay, you MUST provide an in-text citation AND a full MLA citation in a Work(s) Cited.
- About Shakespeare’s play Othello, the Moor of Venice, the text writes that “It is a safe bet that [the play] will triumphantly live as long as fathers dislike whomever their daughters marry, as long as husbands suspect their wives of cheating, as long as blacks remember slavery, and as long as the ambitious court favor [to court favor: seek favor by fawning or flattery…to ‘suck up’ to] and the jealous practice deceit [practice: to carry out; perform]. The play may well make sense as long as public officials connive behind smiling faces, and it may even endure as long as the world makes room for the kind, the true, the beautiful—the blessed pure in heart” (739). In the circumstances of the world and country we find ourselves in today, December 2018, does the play live, make sense, and endure? How would you convince someone who has yet to read the play?