1. Select your topic.
You should choose one or two of the short stories from which we have read over the past weeks. You will use these stories as your primary resource. After selecting the short story (ies), you must then decide what element (s) of fiction you want to develop in your paper. For example, let’s say that you really enjoyed O’Connor’s Good Country People, and that you really felt impressed by the theme. Therefore, you would develop your paper around how O’Connor presents the theme of innocence and experience in the short story. If you choose Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, you could write on the theme of good versus evil, or you could write on the symbols throughout the story, such as Brown and Faith’s names, the forest, and the man with the serpent staff.
2. Once you have chosen a topic, you will then need to perform research. Use the library databases (EbscoHost, Eric, Academic Search Complete, CQ Researcher, Jstor) to find credible sources to support or refute your own ideas. You need to use at least 3 outside sources (1 source is the work itself). This means that you will have at a minimum three quotations or paraphrases in your paper, and you will have at least two secondary sources. Most of your quotations should come from the story itself.
3. Type you paper using the guidelines for MLA. MLA documentation can be found in your handbook on pages 393-464. Review the sample paper pg. 465 and paper on pg. 59. Review of signal phrases is on page 406. You can also review MLA at the following website:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/
4. Your research paper should follow the same format as your first paper. You should have an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion (no opposition paragraph). The paper should be 3 to 4 pages in length once completed. This does not include the works cited page.
5. You do not have a title page in MLA unless you have a table of contents (which I do not require), three to four pages of text, and the last page of your paper is a works cited page.
6. Bring your paper to the revision/edit session or to the writing lab A51 for someone to review.
Example Thesis statements:
In Faulkner’s short story A Rose for Emily, the author uses the main character, Emily Grierson, to depict the psychological breakdown of a woman whose fear of loss causes her to commit unthinkable acts.
Good Country People by Flannery O’Connor presents verbal and situational ironies which support the main theme of innocence and experience.
In Young Goodman Brown Hawthorne interweaves intricate symbols to aid in the reader’s understanding of how the main character, Goodman Brown, could be swayed from his religious beliefs.
In Alice Walker’s short story Everyday Use, the author develops intricate and diverse relationships among the three characters to reveal the underlying theme of the importance of family.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who write Young Goodman Brown, and Flannery O’Connor, who wrote Good Country People, are two excellent short story writers who use the theme of good versus evil to reveal the loss of innocence in their main characters’ lives.
In A Jury of her Peers by Susan Glaspell, the author raises many questions about the oppression of women in the early 1900s by exploring gender differences in perception, which also reveals the underlying theme of the empowerment of women.
In An Occurrence at Owl Creek by Ambrose Bierce, the author clearly identifies with the theme of the human need to escape death, and this is exhibited through the use of an unreliable narrator, irony, and shifting perspectives in the main character’s mind.
In The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane, the author uses impressionism, naturalism, and realism to produce a story that unveils the theme of the conceit of man.