https://youtu.be/gVznaUkmZzU.  LINK TELLS YOU HOW THE PAPER SHOULD BE WRITEN

Each student will write a literary essay on one work we will study this semester.  By “literary essay,” I mean an essay that offers lively and informed insights derived from a deep reading of a literary work.  I agree with Anthony Hecht who says, “The critics that have meant the most to me are those that have broadened my ways of seeing both the individual works and whole genres and types of writing, entire regions of thinking, sources of feeling, and especially social or historical conventions and rituals that often lie immersed and unnoticed at the bottom of some work of literature” (Unheard Melodies 14). 

By literary essay, I mean an essay that offers lively and informed insights derived from a deep reading of a literary work.  I agree with Anthony Hecht who says, The critics that have meant the most to me are those that have broadened my ways of seeing both the individual works and whole genres and types of writing, entire regions of thinking, sources of feeling, and especially social or historical conventions and rituals that often lie immersed and unnoticed at the bottom of some work of literature (Unheard Melodies 14).

The essay will be graded on the strength of the thesis, the writers invention in a critical conversation, originality, insight, clarity, organization, style, analysis, and argument.  It is beneficial to begin thinking about your topics, and to discuss them with the professor, early in the writing process

PICK FROM ONE OF THESE BOOK BELOW

Cather, Willa. My ntonia. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. Foreward by Kathleen Norris.  ISBN:  0-395-75514-x
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Trans. Michael R. Katz. Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2001.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust: A Tragedy. Part I. Trans. Martin Greenberg. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992.
Johnson, Samuel.  The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.  New York:  Oxford UP, 1999.
Shakespeare, William. Othello. Eds. David Bevington and David Scott Kastan. The New Bantam Shakespeare.