Write a literary essay in which you discuss and analyze one or more of the prose fiction texts that the class has studied this term: Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path”, Alice Walker’s “Nineteen Fifty-five”, and Toni Morrison’s “Récitatif”. Please be sure to demonstrate what makes your selected short story a work of Multicultural Literature. Your essay must thus demonstrate that you have carefully read the chosen text and tried to understand its content and its place in a discussion of Multicultural Studies and the field of Literature in general. Your paper may deal with any relevant aspects of the selected text, but the discussion must take into account the literary merits or qualities, textual analysis, sociohistorical context, creative imagination, and current interest or relevance. Some specific areas that you may want to cover may include the themes, characterization, plot, style, literary features, or a comparison with another text.
You must use at least two scholarly, peer-reviewed sources to support your claims in the essay, and acknowledge the sources. That means you must support your essay with at least two published, authoritative sources apart from any unsanctioned sources like the general Internet and the World Wide Web. (Please remember that scholarly articles retrieved from electronic storage databases like EBSCO, Academic Search Complete, Wilson Select Plus, and JSTOR do count as scholarly sources.) You can also analyze how your selected text relates to some of the common materials that we have studied in class, such as Phillis Wheatley’s poem, “To His Excellency General Washington”; Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia; and the film, Mississippi Burning. Another possible corroborative or relatable source or reference may be the introduction to Chapter Five of the book, Rereading America, by Gary Colombo et. al., titled “Created Equal: The Myth of the Melting Pot.”
Where applicable, try to explore the relationship between the text and any critical theories that you can discern such as Modernism, Feminism, Womanism, Critical Race Theory, Existentialism, Gender Studies, and so on. You may also want to examine how typical or how representative your selected text is, or, the contrary. You must clearly acknowledge all the sources that you use, both within the text of your essay, and in the list of Works Cited.
Although the aim of this broad essay outline is to allow you to explore ideas about the stories in a non-restrictive way, it is in each writer’s interest to clearly define the scope of his or her paper: what you are writing about, and why it matters. This will encourage you to achieve a focus of purpose and avoid unnecessary rambling. State a clear thesis that sets out your aim, reason, purpose, or interest for choosing a particular text, topic, or issue or approach for your paper. You can then maintain your focus by ensuring that every aspect of your essay relates to that central concern. It can be useful to provide a synopsis of the story-line early in your paper so as to situate the reader, but remember that your essay should not be only a mere summary of the story but rather a well-reasoned piece of analysis, discussion, or debate.
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