Senior Seminar
Short Story Final Essay
- Main idea and an outline or list of story lines you’ll need to discuss.
- First Draft
- Final Draft
Stories we have read:
Tallent’s No One’s a Mystery
Holst’s The Zebra Storyteller
Maupassant’s The Necklace
Faulkner’s Rose for Emily
Updike’s A and P
Tolstaya, The Circle
Your final assignment on this mini unit on short fiction is to write a 3-5 page literary essay of one or more of the above stories.
You must:
?Type final draft
?Proofread by reading out loud; help each other: impeccable mechanics expected
?Use direct quotes in your essay, but only the ones you really need
?Hand in all the above steps (lowered final essay grade if you don’t)
You may choose from the list of topics below, or create your own thesis, keeping in mind what intrigued or pulled at you when you read these stories. You might, for instance, write about that old man in The Circle, and try to explain the ending. You might have an interpretation that we didn’t discuss in class that you’d like to explain in this essay. Pick a couple characters that you see an interesting connection between, and come up with a thesis.
Ooohh—with literature, there are so many options!
Here are a few ideas:
- Make the big from the small: choose a significant passage from any story, and explain how it’s important to the rest of the story.
- What character do you find yourself intrigued by? Analyze that character and come up with a main idea about that character’s personality. Explain your ideas fully in an essay.
- Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: analyze the male-female relationships in one or more of the stories. What do you make of these relationships? Come up with a thesis that ties them together (Example: In A and P, the male mistakenly believes that to get the attention of a woman, he needs to save her, whereas in No One’s a Mystery, the man needs to be saved by the woman and her hope for life. . . . hmmmm, I’d work on that before I used it).
- Explain the narrator’s decision to quit in A and P.
- Facing the past: How do both Emily and Vissally deal with the past?
- Choose two stories that have a similar narration style, and discuss how that narration adds to the overall story (for instance, both the Russian story and Updike’s use a first person narration, and much of it is told through ramblings in the character’s mind. How does that shape the story?).
- Examine the idea of fate in The Circle. (You knew I had to come back to that, right?)
- What are the roles of women in A and P and in No One’s a Mystery? Or any two or three stories, examine the females characters. What type of women are they? How are they portrayed?
- Look at the above question, and replace women/females with men/male.