Essay 1: The Short Story
Please choose from the following topics and write a 5 page essay.
Note: your thesis when writing about literature will be a claim about the literature, and you need to support your thesis with evidence from the text to support whatever claim you are making about the work.
1. Using “A Rose for Emily,” (p 361) defend the idea that this story is an indictment of the decadent values of the aristocratic Old South (embodied in Emily and Colonial Sartoris) contrasted with the looser social standards of the younger generation.
2. What is the point of the repetition of the words “the things they carried” In Tim O’Brien’s story of the same name? And what is the significance of the various “things they carried”?
3. Compare the telling of a war story using both O’Brien and Erdrich; in what ways are they similar? O’Brien writes of “the burden of being alive” (p 477) in “The Things They Carried” (p 468)—what does he mean? How does that relate, if at all, to Erdrich’s telling of a war story in “The Red Convertible”? (p 515)
4. Compare and analyze the attitude toward marriage and women's roles revealed in two of the following: Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" (p 26) and “A Rose for Emily” (p 361) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
5. Compare the use of irony in Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" with Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" analyzing how effective each author is in his/her use of irony.