Close Reading Essay 2: 15% of final grade

Due

  • Friday, March 8 by the end of the day

Requirements

  • ~1000 words (3-4 pages double-spaced), not including Works Cited or Bibliography.
  • MLA or Chicago citation style (most likely, the only text you are citing is the novel you are writing about).
  • Turn in via Canvas; doc, docx, or pdf.
  • Include an AI Writing Tools statement. See the “Course Info & Policies” page under “Academic Integrity and AI Writing Tools” for more information about what this statement should look like.

Your second writing assignment in this class, like the first, is to write a close reading essay in response to a prompt about one of our course literary texts. As in your first close reading essay, you should make an interpretive claim about a literary text based on close textual analysis. For this essay, you are required to write about Home, “How to Tell a True War Story,” or 1-2 of the poems assigned for class on Wednesday, March 6.

As with your first close reading essay, you should answer the question(s) posed by your selected prompt in the form of an argument. This means your essay should have a central claim or thesis statement, this central claim or thesis statement should be defended using specific evidence from the text, and your essay should be organized in a clear way. You don’t have a lot of space (~1000 words is not that long!), so you should eliminate throat clearing and cut right to the chase. You are not required to cite sources other than the text about which you are writing for this assignment, but you may cite secondary scholarship or criticism, or any of the essays we are reading for class on Wed, Feb 28 or Monday, March 4, if useful for your argument.

Remember that your goal in writing a close reading essay is to make a claim that will help your reader to see this text differently. You are looking, in other words, to interpret this text in a potentially new way for your reader.

Prompts

Home

1. What does the idea of “home” mean, or come to mean, in this novel? Focus your response on 2-3 (maybe 4?) specific examples.

  • NOTE: While it is undoubtedly true, as we discussed in class, that Home offers us many different and sometimes conflicting ideas of home, if you choose to respond to this prompt, this fact shouldn’t be the main point of your argument. Your task is to offer an interpretation of the concept of home in the novel, not just to say that “it’s complicated” (it is complicated, but this is also a cop-out). There are certainly many possible interpretations of this concept in the novel, so you aren’t necessarily trying to settle on the definitive one, but rather to offer a plausible one backed up by textual evidence.

2. The novel adopts a dual-narrative structure in which chapters narrated in the first person by Frank alternate and often compete or clash with chapters narrated in the third person that tend to focus on the perspective of just one character. What is the significance of this narrative structure in the novel? In responding to this prompt, you might choose to focus on moments of conflict between the two narrators, or on third-person chapters (like those about Lily and Lenore) that seem to take us away from the central storylines about Frank and Cee, or perhaps on the overall structure of the alternating chapters and how this structure changes in the second half of the novel. There are many other things you could focus on as well in answering this question; the point here is just to be very selective in what you focus on to make your argument.

“How to Tell a True War Story”

3. In a 1990 interview with Elizabeth Mehren, Tim O’Brien calls The Things They Carried “fiction…a novel.” However, in a 1991 interview with Martin Naparsteck, he refers to the work as a “sort of half novel, half group of stories. It’s part nonfiction, too.” Critics have called this text “part novel, part collection of stories, part essays, part journalism; it is, more significantly, all at the same time”. One word for describing this kind of writing is metafiction, which scholar Patricia Waugh defines, in her classic 1984 book on the topic, as “a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (2). How does “How to Tell a True War Story” trouble the boundary between fiction and reality, and what is the significance of this troubling? Focus on 2-3 (maybe 4?) specific examples. You may wish to incorporate Thanh Nguyen’s essay into your response as well.

Poems Assigned for Wednesday, March 6

4. In her famous 1986 essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion”, literary scholar Barbara Johnson defines apostrophe as “a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness” (30). In these poems, however, the addressee is often an aborted fetus (or a potentially aborted fetus, or the aborted hope of a potential fetus). What, then, is the significance of these poems’ use of apostrophe? Select 1-2 of the poems assigned for Wednesday, March 6 on which to focus in your essay.

  • If you select this prompt, you may also be interested in reading scholar Margaret Ronda’s recent essay “Abortion’s Poetic Figures”, which critiques Johnson’s essay and analyzes a collection of more recent poems about abortion.

Write Your Own Prompt

If you would prefer to write about something not included in the prompts described above, you may write your own prompt for this assignment. If you elect to write your own prompt, you must send me this prompt by class on Monday, March 4 (at the latest). I will then approve or suggest revisions to your prompt. Your prompt should focus on Home, “How to Tell a True War Story,” or 1-2 of the poems assigned for class on Wednesday, March 6. It should also articulate a specific interpretive question or questions that your essay will go on to answer.