Core Assessment Essay

Assignment:

In unit four, we read about a number of critical approaches to literature, and in one of your discussion post you gave a brief sense of how you might apply one of these approaches to a work of literature. Now, you’ll be doing that to much more extensive degree. You will select three works of literature– one play, one short story, and one poem — from your textbook. You will also select one of the critical approaches discussed in your book’s section “Critical Strategies for Reading” Then, you will write an essay that analyzes and interprets the work you’ve chosen through the lens of the critical approach you’ve chosen.

Base Requirements:

• This essay must be between five and eight full pages, not including the works cited page
• This essay must quote from its primary sources, and it must quote from at least three secondary sources, using proper MLA citation.
• This essay must focus on works of literature that appear in our textbook; the works do not have to be ones that were assigned.
• The paper should follow the formatting guidelines listed below.

A note about sources:

Unlike the midterm essay, this one will require you to use secondary sources. Please carefully read the “Secondary Sources” page on this unit’s homepage to get a full sense of what this means.

For this essay, you will be expected to quote sufficiently from the primary sources, i.e. the works of literature you’ve chosen to discuss (in our example, the primary sources would be “story of an Hour” and “Trifles”) you will also be expected to follow MLA guidelines on acceptable ways of quoting and citing sources. If you don’t know what this means, you MUST go to whatever resources are available to you, include the links on the “Further Resources” page of our course, to learn about citation. Failure to understand the mechanisms of citation can lead to plagiarism, which can lead to a zero for the course.