ENGLISH 4—SPRING 2015—ESSAY #1—Sudden Fiction

ENGLISH 4—SPRING 2015—ESSAY #1—Sudden Fiction

Many of the stories in Sudden Fiction feature relationships between men and women as a central topic. We have at least 12 that we can consider:

The Stories: Popular Mechanics, Say Yes, Tent Worms, Dinner Time, The Anatomy of Desire, The Signing, The Fable, Can-Can, Pygmalion, No One’s a Mystery, Song on Royal Street, The Sock…….

For this essay assignment you will want to read through each of these stories. It will probably be necessary to read them more than once. You will no doubt begin to see interesting similarities/differences between the stories; the stories may even begin to “speak” to each other. Your next step is to begin to ask yourself what kind of themes emerge in the stories; there is a wide variety of possible themes to consider, including: youth, age, intimacy, estrangement, communication, violence, boredom, sickness and health, power, children, lies, truth….and much more.

For this paper your central question to consider is: What are these authors trying to tell us about relationships?

But the question as asked is no doubt too big. You will need to narrow it down by focusing on 2-3 themes of your choice. You may want to pick themes that relate to each other so that you can build a more developed argument.  In developing your arguments, you might also consider taking an approach that looks at: How do we stay on the time line of love? What can lead to us falling off? How do we climb back on?

One valuable tip in writing a paper like this is to NOT start off paragraph topic sentences with plot/names of characters/title of story. This is crucial! Instead, consider starting off the paragraph with 3-5 sentences that establish in some detail the CONCEPT you want to discuss. THEN, you can bring in a moment from one of the stories to support your concept. Another good approach is to bring in support from DIFFERERNT stories to support a concept. In other words, it works very well to have 2 even 3 stories being quoted in one paragraph. For sure every paragraph will need to have at least one piece of support.

You don’t need to bring every story into your paper. But you should bring in at least 5-7 stories through the course of the paper.

Page minimum is 6 pages.

The paper is due Feb 25

First draft is due feb 18, but of course we will be seeing your paragraphs and ideas before then. 

Goooood luck!