Second Essay Assignment

Peer Review: See Syllabus
Due Date: See Syllabus
Length: 4-5 pages

Assignment Goal: For this assignment students will create an argument about how the structure of narrative in one of our novels explains an important theme of the story.

Assignment Description: For this assignment students will choose either The Valley of Fear or If He Hollers Let Him Go. In their introductions, they will provide readers with a strong opening scene that illustrates their main idea, transition into a strong thesis statement, and provide an overall summary of the plot of both texts.

For their thesis statements, students will use Aristotelian concepts of narrative to identify what they believe is the catharsis, anagnorisis, and peripeteia of the novel they chose. We might loosely translate these terms as the climax, self-knowledge, and plot-twist that accompanies self-knowledge in the narrative. Where students choose to locate these moments will depend on what they believe is most important about the stories. The thesis statements should be able to identify, then, what theme/conflict the student believes the narrative is attempting to "work out," and then spend the rest of the essay analyzing how earlier passages in the novel build up toward these three moments.

For this 4-5 page paper, students will find one early passage that builds toward this climax-sequence and analyze it. They will then spend at least one paragraph analyzing the catharsis, and at least one paragraph analyzing the interaction between anagnorisis and peripeteia.

In their conclusions, students will offer readers a connection between the theme they discovered in their chosen novel and a similar theme from another novel we've read in the course. This comparison and contrast will help elucidate their claims and establish their writing firmly in the sequence of texts we've read.