Assignment instructions:

1. Discuss the role of men in "Trifles" and in "Everyday Use."

Write about three-four-page essay (750 to 1,000 words). Discussing the two texts

Your essay should meet each of the following content requirements:

(a) have a thesis that you can support with textual evidence and not just a summary

(b) address your chosen topic in a coherent and organized essay, not a point-by point answer to the promptsNB! This point is extremely important

(c) incorporate critical perspectives using the "Questions for Textual Analysis"(Down Below)

(d) be word-processed, double-spaced, in 12-point font with no more than one inch margin all around, free of spelling and grammatical errors, and with an accurate and captivating title; identify yourself and the course on the paper itself and number your pages with your last name before the page number (use a header)

(e) document all secondary sources (if you use them) according to the Modern Language Association (MLA) method of documentation 8th edition. For instructions, Google OWL Purdue.

Article to be use:

"Trifles"

Text

Click http://www.one-act-plays.com/dramas/trifles.html link to open resource.

"Everyday Use"

Text

Click http://www.cusd200.org/cms/lib7/IL01001538/Centricity/Domain/361/Everyday_Use.pdf link to open resource.

Questions for Textual Analysis

The following questions are drawn from key approaches to understanding texts in the humanities and social sciences. Some questions will be more relevant to some texts than to others. Part of developing your skill as a reader is to know what questions are more (or less) relevant to understanding the texts before you.

Historical and political issues:

• What are the events of the period that you are reading about? What is happening? Revolution, peace, colonization, reconstruction?

• Who are the players?

• Who has authority and on what grounds is that authority held, given, or relinquished?

• How does the narrator deal with issues of race, class, and gender?

• What are the historic specifics that indicate changed world views from the time of the text and those of today?

Literary issues:

• Who is the narrator and how reliable is that character's point of view?

• Who are the characters and how do they interact?

• What happens, if anything? In other words, what is the plot?1

• What theoretical approaches broaden your understanding of the text (for example, formalist, post/modernist, feminist, Marxist)?

• How do form and function work together?

• What kind of metaphors, similes, and images are dominant and what is their effect?

• What are the conflicts or problems that drive, that organize, the text?

Philosophical issues:

• What is the world view presented by the characters' understanding of themselves, their roles, or their relations to others and events?

• What ethical problems do the characters confront?

• How is power constructed?

• Are questions of good and evil cut and dry or does the text probe a more nuanced view?

• How do we know what or that we even know? (Epistemology)

• How do you know that you are alive; what can you know about being? (Ontology)

• How does the text explore justice and injustice?

1 Let us define plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died,' is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief', is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: ‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.' This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development.

It suspends the time-sequence; it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say ‘and then?' If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?' That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by ‘and then-and then- ‘they can only supply curiosity. But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.

This long quotation is from:

Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1970.
93-94. Print.