American Literature 3 page Essay

Essay Response: 3 pages, double-spaced, 12 point font, Times New Roman

Due Sunday, March 3 by 11:00pm (CT)

Please select one of the following four prompts and develop an essay in response to it. Your

essay should have an introduction with a thesis, main body paragraphs with topic sentences, and

a conclusion that wraps up. You must also incorporate direct references to the literature in the

form of quotes and brief summaries. Remember: the literature is your object of study. Use it to

substantiate and support your claims and observations. Secondary sources are not required;

however, if you do utilize an outside resource, then you must cite it according to MLA guidelines

(8th edition).

When you complete your exam essay, please upload it to the TurnItIn portal on Moodle.

Option One

Compare Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” with O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

More specifically, discuss how these stories represent the region of the U.S. South. To what

extent do they continue or deviate from the tradition of regionalist writing that we studied in the

first half of the term?

Option Two

Focus on two of the sections in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to discuss how this poem represents

modernist themes and concerns that impacted the early-twentieth century.

Option Three

How and to what extent does Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” echo, extend, or

otherwise engage with earlier representations of minority identity during the Harlem

Renaissance? Select two texts from the period of African American Modernism (see Hughes,

Cullen, McKay, and Baldwin) and analyze them alongside Anzaldua’s excerpt.

Option Four

How do the fantasies of Ursula K. Le Guin enact a feminist ideology? Discuss the features and

effects of “She Unnames Them” and “The Wife’s Story,” and connect those narrative strategies

to the stories’ resistance to patriarchy