English 1575
Twentieth Century Literature

Assignment Two

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Assignment Two
Taking a Stand

Objective

To produce an argument about a work of literature using specific details from a chosen work as evidence.

Overview

In the first assignment, you had to write three to five pages addressing one quotation from a book. Now, you will need to write a longer paper addressing the overall story. Nonetheless, it will still be important to focus on particular quotations and scenes.

Topics

Choose one of the questions below, and develop an in-depth response to it while referring to specific events in the story. Many initial responses to these questions, when carefully worded, will serve as effective thesis statements for papers.

1. What is most persuasive part of Virginia Woolf's argument in To the Lighthouse about the treatment of women during her time?

2. What, according to Wilfred Owen, is the most horrifying thing about World War I?

3. In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, what is the highest priority of protagonist Jake Barnes?

4. How can a return to Native American beliefs help a character like Tayo in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony? Does it in this case?

5. What gives one character power over other characters in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming?

6. What is the best way to learn about history in our current chaotic circumstances as depicted in Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49?

7. Answer a question of your own choosing. Discuss it with me in advance.

Some Writing Tips

1. Develop an arguable and interesting thesis statement that applies directly to the question you have chosen to answer.

   Example:

   ARGUABLE THESIS (for a different assignment):
   Leslie Marmon Silko argues in Ceremony that the history of colonization dooms everyone in the United States to violence and misery.

   NOT AN ARGUABLE THESIS:
   Ceremony is about a man who returns home from World War II and cannot reconnect with his origins.

   ARGUABLE THESIS (again, for a different assignment): The characters in The Sun Also Rises seek structure in bullfights but ultimately fail to make sense of the fragmented world around them in the wake of World War I.

   ARGUABLE, BUT IT DOES NOT ADDRESS THE ASSIGNMENT: Recovering from the trauma of war is difficult.

2. Organize your argument around this thesis statement. Think of between two and four sub-points and structure your argument around them.

   Example (for the above Ceremony thesis):

   1. The Native American stories identify colonization as the result of "witchery."
   2. Tayo applies this understanding to his own experiences in the war.
   3. The violence and despair in the book's conclusion demonstrate the accuracy of Native American world-view as it predicts difficult times.

   Some grammatical tips:

   1. Avoid using the passive voice whenever it is possible to do so. When writing in the passive voice, you remove the subject from the sentence or at least de-emphasize it. This makes writing less engaging to most readers.

      Example:

      ACTIVE VOICE: Ginger eats spaghetti. (Note structure: subject/verb/object)

      PASSIVE VOICE: Spaghetti is eaten. (Structure: object/"to be" verb/past participle)

      ACTIVE VOICE: Ginger ate spaghetti.
                } Passive voice can exist in any verb tense.
      PASSIVE VOICE: Spaghetti was eaten.

   2. AVOID CONTRACTIONS when writing college papers. Replace "they're" with "they are" and replace "don't" with "do not" (these are just a few examples of the numerous possible contractions out there.

   3. Use italics to signal that you are referring to a word itself and not to the thing that the word represents, such as Wilfred Owen's use of the word blighty. You should also italicize titles of books (even in parenthetical references and lists of works cited) and foreign-language words like afición.

   4. The word it's (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of it is. The word its (without an apostrophe) is the possessive of it. Its and whose both deviate from the above rule about possessives.

   5. A grammatically complete sentence has at least one subject and one verb. If it is missing a subject or a verb, it is a sentence fragment. Sentence fragments are sometimes acceptable, but only if you mean to use them.

   6. Commas. These are tricky little bits of punctuation, and your best bet is to look them up in a style manual. All the same, there are two things I should mention.

      First, a comma is a very fragile, spindly, little thing, and it is not strong enough to string two grammatically complete sentences together all by itself. When you use a comma for this purpose, it is called a comma splice.

      Example:

      WRONG: I hope it stops snowing soon, this snow is driving me crazy.

      See that poor little comma? It is just dying under the strain.

      CORRECT: I hope it stops snowing soon, because this snow is driving me crazy.

      ALSO CORRECT: I hope it stops snowing soon. This snow is driving me crazy.

      Second, if the first word of your sentence is not the subject of the sentence, then it is a good idea to use a comma to separate the subject from whatever precedes it. If it only one word precedes the subject, then this rule is optional, but a whole phrase really does need a comma after it before you get on with the rest of the sentence.

      Example:

      WRONG: In the last days of May I fell into a well.
      CORRECT: In the last days of May, I fell into a well.

      OPTIONAL: Subsequently a team of rescuers pulled me out.
      OR: Subsequently, a team of rescuers pulled me out.

Grading Standards

In grading this assignment, I will use the following criteria. Late papers will lose points according to how late they are. Papers under five pages long will lose points as well.