A literary analysis of a theme or topic out of one of the following books: Bastard Out of Carolina, Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Humanities
Need a literary analysis of a theme or topic out of one of the following books: Bastard Out of Carolina, Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Length: at least 5 full pages (as in, all the way to the bottom of the fifth page.) If you have more to say, you can go up to 7 full pages. This length requirement doesn’t include your Works Cited page, which should be attached after your final written page.
Required citation style: MLA
Sources required: at least three: 1) your primary text (what we read in class) and 2) two outside scholarly sources. You want to go for peer-reviewed articles in academic journals. You do not want Wikipedia, about.com, newspapers, magazines, blogs, random websites, random interviews, Youtube, Sparknotes, etc. Book chapters are fine, as long at the book is academic. The library website has many useful databases; ProQuest, JSTOR, Project Muse, and PsychInfo may be helpful. If you don’t know how to search for academic sources, either visit or do an online chat with a Reference librarian. I do not encourage websites as sources, and .com/.net websites are not considered scholarly.
Subject: your choice, but it must be from one of the texts we have read thus far in class. I do not want to see a compare/contrast paper, so unless you are a skilled writer who sees a theme across a couple of books and can clearly write about it without devolving into compare/contrast, stick to one text at a time. I am not looking for a response paper (“I hated it!”). I am not looking for a book report or plot recap. I am looking for a literary analysis, which is a fancy way of saying your interpretation, based on a close reading, of a text. I often tell students to think of a text as a puzzle. In a literary analysis, your task is to focus on one or two pieces and offer your take on how and why those pieces work to give meaning to the larger whole. So: what interests you? What could you intelligently discuss for five pages. Domestic violence? Poverty? Gender roles? Toxic masculinity? Literacy? Symbolism?
