Humanities 105 Essay #4
A Loving Analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Our Missing Hearts
The Situation: You are Erich Fromm, famous sociologist and commentator on love, conformity, and other key 20th and 21st century topics. You spent some time recently reading two novels, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Our Missing Hearts and can’t believe how much they seem to connect to the ideas in your own famous book The Art of Loving. You are so excited that you decide to write a letter to one of your sociologist colleagues and friend’s at UCSB (GO GAUCHOS!!!) or another institution of higher learning of your choice letting them know about the connections you’ve found. Your purpose in this letter is to let your friend know about the insights and connections you’ve found between the novels you’ve read and your (Fromm’s) own theories of love. In doing this you will be able to show your instructor that you’re beginning to see how the different texts and ideas in this course work together and build off of each other.
The Purpose: There are two purposes in this assignment 1) show that you understand some key points about Fromm’s theories of love and apply these to explain the ways that love is a key theme novels we’ve read in our course. You can demonstrate this through well-chosen evidence and summary/analysis of your evidence 2) show that you understand how the different works we’ve read have similarities and differences in terms of conceptualizing the struggle for love. You can demonstrate this by thoughtfully structuring your assignment to think about how what evidence you will make it clear that you can see how the ideas in The Art of Loving relate to The Picture of Dorian Gray and Our Missing Hearts.
The Details: Your assignment should use well-chosen quotes from the readings we’ve done. Cite the page numbers of any quotations and make sure the quotes are in “quotation marks.” Your letter should be about three pages in length. Remember that Fromm is writing a letter to a friend in this assignment so you can keep it casual. Imagine that you are Fromm, but also imagine that his letter would be a conversation to chat with a friend rather than a traditional academic essay.
Finally, you should have some fun with this assignment if you can! You do NOT need a works cited page for this assignment.
Grading Criteria for Essay # 4
Strength of Ideas Range and depth of arguments; logic or arguments; appropriate sense of complexity of the topic; appropriate awareness of similarities/differences in figures’ viewpoints (7 points possible)
Organization and Development Logical and clear arrangement of ideas; effective use of transitions; unity and coherence of paragraphs/dialogue; strong use of textual evidence and analysis/commentary on evidence; evidence is cited correctly using (page numbers), quotation marks, author’s names/titles of texts (7 points possible)
Clarity and Style Ease of readability; appropriate voice, tone and style for assignment; clarity of sentence structure; gracefulness of sentence structure (3 points possible)
Sentence Structure and Mechanics
Sentences are grammatically correct; errors do not inhibit my ability to understand their meaning; accurate spelling and proofreading (3 points possible)
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/94900794-our-missing-hearts