English 102: Unit 2
Comments on Previous Assignment: When all the summaries from U-1 have been submitted, I know from experience that each summary of “The Story of an Hour” will differ from all the others. No summary is entirely objective. Therefore, keep in mind that when you introduce your topic in a full-length essay by summarizing a story, you can treat this as an opportunity to subtly “slant” readers’ perceptions of the story in a way that prepares them to accept your thesis as being plausible and accurate.
Reading Assignment: Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour” and related material (15-22)
Writing Assignment (10 points): (Read these instructions carefully. They’re not as complicated as they look, and they set a pattern for body paragraphs that we’ll follow throughout the semester.)
Pretend you are writing an essay on “The Story of an Hour.” In your imaginary essay, you have introduced the topic and expressed the main point of your essay in a thesis statement at the end of your opening paragraph. Now, somewhere in the middle of your essay, you decide to include a body paragraph (7-9 sentences) that begins with ONE of these claims:
1) Although Louise exults in her freedom, Chopin maintains the reader’s sympathy for her by portraying her feelings of joy as being unexpected and involuntary.
2) During the final hour of her life, no one in Louise Mallard’s world knows what she has lived through or why she dies.
Each of these statements makes an arguable “claim” in the sense that (1) the story doesn’t state it explicitly, and (2) it could be disputed by someone who disagrees with your “reading” of the story. In other words, it’s a matter of interpretation. What you’ll be doing in the full-length essays for this course is interpreting literature by constructing an argumentative claim (your essay’s thesis) that is backed up by subordinate claims in the body of the essay (the body paragraphs).
After making a claim, your task as a writer is to support it with evidence. This is true for all academic writing and, to some extent, all persuasive or deliberative writing. Fortunately, an essay in literary analysis requires no evidence other than textual evidence – the words on the page, including what the characters say and do. Be sure to include a few brief quotations. You’ll have to be selective, in one short paragraph, so try to include nothing that does not directly contribute to supporting your claim.
Finally, end your paragraph with a mini-conclusion – a sentence that sums up the main point of your paragraph. In essence, it will repeat the idea contained in your claim, but using different wording that takes into account the textual evidence you have presented. Here’s the pattern: Claim + Evidence = Conclusion
Just as an essay has a thesis statement that expresses its central idea, so every paragraph should have a topic sentence that makes a claim. Typically, the topic sentence appears either at the beginning or at the end of a paragraph. For this assignment and for most of your essays, I’ll be asking you to place it as the first sentence in your paragraph. (The point of this requirement is to goad you into organizing each of your paragraphs around one central, interpretative idea – rather than simply telling us “what happens next” in the story.) So start this assignment with one of the two claims given above.
You might notice that each claim really contains at least two separate points to develop and defend. In the first, we are claiming (a) that Louise Mallard’s emotional response is beyond her control, and (b) that this lack of control makes her more sympathetic to readers than if she jumped up and down because the life insurance she took out on her husband is going to pay her a million bucks. (Hint: You’ll probably want to examine the specific wording used in paragraphs 9-11 of the story. Chopin does something very clever there.) For the second claim, you’ll probably want to briefly examine each of the other characters, from Josephine to the doctors.
Whichever claim you choose, try to end your paragraph with a sentence that not only sums up your main point but also suggests how it affects our experience of reading the story. (In other words, what is the point of the claim you just made? Why does it matter?)
Remember: Write in present tense when discussing a literary text. (She sees, not she saw.)
Next Assignment: The next assignment (Unit 3) will involve reading and writing about: John Updike, “A&P” (746) [Note: A&P is the name of a chain of grocery stores.]