Assignment

Compare and contrast some of the poems from this week's readings or the poet you selected for part 1 of the forum. You may compare poems from a single poet, or compare poems across poets. Have a debatable, persuasive claim and focus on specific points of comparison, using the Lesson in week 7 to guide your structure.

• View the list of American Essayists. Select an essayist who wrote after the Civil War (note, the list includes some pre-Civil War essayists. Do not select a pre-Civil War essayist). Search the internet for an essay by your selected author and read it. Compose a thesis that has a persuasive, debatable claim about the significance of the message or theme in the essay or the success/effectiveness of the essay as a whole. Summarize the essay in your intro paragraph, end the paragraph with your thesis, and be sure to include your three points of evidence in your thesis statement. Cite the essay as you would any article on the internet as you examine your points of evidence.

• Discuss one work from this course that you believe had the most significant influence on American literary history. What about this work has been significant? No outside sources or plot summaries are permitted, so do not make this a biography or listing of works. Please be sure to maintain third person perspective.

**No outside sources are permitted in any essay**

Everything you need is in the classroom.

Submission Instructions:

Your essays should be in MLA Style and approximately 1625-1950 words, not including the Work(s) Cited page and formatting. As with most academic writing, this essay should be written in third person. Please avoid both first person (I, we, our, etc.) and second person (you, your).

In the upper left-hand corner of the paper, place your name, the professor's name, the course name, and the due date for the assignment on consecutive lines. Double space your information from your name onward, and don't forget a title. All papers should be in Times New Roman font with 12-point type with one-inch margins all the way around your paper. All paragraph indentations should be indented five spaces (use the tab key) from the left margin. All work is to be left justified. When quoting lines in literature, please research the proper way to cite short stories, plays, or poems.

Also, take great care not to plagiarize.

Submission Instructions: Be sure to submit your assignment to the assignment section of the course.

Poems from this weeks reading

John Grisham: "Somewhere for Everyone"
Sharon Olds "First Thanksgiving"
"Still Life in Landscape"
"After Making Love in Winter"
"The Planned Child"
Linda Pastan "A Rainy Country"
"I am Learning to Abandon the World"
"The Obligation to Be Happy"
"Why Are Your Poems so Dark?"
Larry Levis: "Signs"
"To a Wren on Calvary"
"Winter Stars"

Locate and read four poems by a Postmodern American author of your choice from the included list.

Be sure to use MLA format, follow all the rules especially that there can be no outside sources, only the poems can be the source. You only have to answer one of the bullets not all.

• Reading and Writing about Non-Fiction and Poetry

In a way, literature is just like any hard science. For instance, both disciplines require proof of an interpretation. Furthermore, there always seems to be more than one interpretation, though this could lead to concern as to whether your interpretation is "right." To show that your interpretation is correct, you need to have the ability to prove it with evidence. In literature's case, the evidence will come from the text.

In this lesson, we'll further expand our discussion about writing a good literary analysis, including how to find good textual evidence to support our interpretations. We will also look closely at a postmodernist writer, John Grisham, who is known just as much for his fiction as well as his non-fiction writings. Additionally, we will examine forms of literature beyond what we have studied so far, namely expository essay writing.

Topics covered in this lesson include:

o How to Read and Understand an Expository Essay
o Reading and Writing about Poetry
o John Grisham.