American Litterature

Final exam: The final exam is an interpretative essay of 8-10 pages (2000-2500 words, not including notes and bibliography). This essay must conform to all of the following criteria that you must address in a thoughtful and analytical manner. Criteria: 1. Analyze and discuss American Literature after 1922 from our course readings with respect to one of the following themes: a. The Southern experience b. Gender and/or race and/or class c. Illusions and disillusions d. Travel and travelers e. War 2. Select two to three texts and analyze how they represent attitudes about one of the themes above. One of these selected course texts must be either Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) or Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) or Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1991). 3. Your essay should consider the ways in which the texts you’ve selected represent continuity in American attitudes as well as divergences depending on historical context, the race or gender or class of the authors, and the ways in which the author’s choice of literary form conditions both their representation of the topic and the audience’s response to that topic. 4. Cite at least two secondary sources and include substantial comment about the ways in which your argument coincides with, elaborates on, or disagrees with those critical positions. You should choose two secondary sources from the Recommended Sources folder on our Blackboard course website, and, if you choose, add one or more of your own—provided they are academic articles or monographs. 5. Your essay should cite both primary and secondary sources responsibly using MLA citation conventions. Further instructions: Be sure to deal with specific passages from the texts you analyze. The substance of a successful argument will exhibit a well-reasoned interpretation from textual evidence as well as the larger cultural context in which the text participates. While some description of a text is always necessary to keep your reader informed, be careful not to simply re-tell what the authors have written. The reader of your essay will be familiar with the texts, so that you will only need to include a brief reference to the immediate context of a quoted passage. In a paper of this length (8-10 pages), you should have no more than two long, indented quotes, each no more than 10 lines max. You do not need to have these long quotes. You should generally quote shorter passages, as described above, to support your analytical claims.