In a 4-5-page typed essay (the works cited page will be page 5 or 6), for an audience already familiar with the literature, analyze any one work of short fiction discussed in class. Your analysis should address only ONE of the following:
- Character Analysis: Analyze the psychological make-up of one or more of the characters of a story. What are the characters’ motivations? Why do they behave the way they do? How do the characters develop or change in the story, and why? If relevant, consider how certain characters act as literary foils to others. Is the narrator a character in the story? If so, how does the character influence the story through his or her narration? How would the story be affected if told by another character in the story?
- Symbolism: Analyze the symbolic, archetypal, and/or allegorical elements of a story. How might the story’s plot be allegorical? Explain the allegory. How are its characters archetypal or symbolic? How are other elements of the story symbolic or archetypal?
- Themes/Major Ideas: Analyze one or more of a story’s themes or major ideas and how they are developed. What themes or major ideas emerge and how are they produced or influenced? You may analyze the characters, narrator, structure, use of irony and/or symbolism of a story in order to establish its themes or major ideas.
Secondary Sources
You must draw from at least TWO secondary sources, both of which should be found from the Yuba College Library and/or its databases. In other words, including the work of fiction itself, you must cite at least three sources. The Works Cited page will be page 5 or 6 of your essay.
SparkNotes and other such online equivalents to CliffsNotes can be a good place to begin, but they are not acceptable as required secondary sources for your literary analysis. Neither is Wikipedia.
Format
Essays must be double-spaced with one-inch margins on all sides. Do NOT justify the right margin on your computer. Place your name, the course title, and the date at the top of the first page. All essays must have titles and numbered pages. Use nothing larger than a 12-pt. font size in Times New Roman or a similar font. To preserve the correct formatting and avoid losing points, I strongly recommend saving your essay as a PDF document before uploading. Essays will be graded on formatting, including hanging indentation, which can be altered unintentionally when reading a saved Word document on another computer. See how to save a Word document as a PDFLinks to an external site. and how to save a Google document as a PDFLinks to an external site..
MLA Format is required. You must include a Works Cited Page. The following links will take you to short video tutorials on how to create hanging indents in your Works Cited page: