“Against Interpretation,”

  In her 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag writes: “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.” Of the short stories we have read, choose two or three short stories with common themes that might make readers nervous. Think about writers who succeed in telling stories that are likely to unsettle readers, to shake them from their preconceived notions, to uncover an experience that they might not otherwise see. Please write a formal essay in which you compare and contrast the way the writers use narrative forms to shape their stories and develop their themes, characters or settings. Feel free to choose any combination of stories we discussed. Be sure to focus your argument with a strong, clear thesis, and support your claim with ample evidence from the fiction. I do not want you to do outside research for this assignment. I am interested in your own critical thinking and writing. Your in-text citations and your Works Cited page will simply reflect the fiction pieces you are analyzing in this comparative paper. You should not be investigating or need to reference any outside sources. Keep in mind that a literary analysis is the same thing as an argument about literature. You must give specific examples and direct quotations from the stories you choose as your sources in this essay. With the points that you use from the story, you want to tell why the information is important and how the information proves your thesis. Make sure that your thesis is arguable and that you prove your thesis. As you write, make certain that you are truly analyzing the story, not writing a summary of the story’s events. You are not allowed to look up anything about this story, so there should be only the stories you are analyzing on your work-cited page. The basis of this analysis is your interpretation of the story, no one else’s. Your essay must be original; no essay submitted for another course will be accepted for this assignment. Make certain that you do the following in your essay: INTRODUCTION Introduce the author and title of the stories that you have chosen to analyze. YOUR THESIS should be an arguable statement that tells what you are going to prove about the story you have chosen. This statement must appear as the last sentence of your introductory paragraph. In order to make sure that your thesis is arguable, you might want to begin the sentence with because or although. BODY Each aspect or element of your evaluation should be developed in a paragraph, with a topic sentence, explanation, and specific examples. Make certain that your explanation of the examples that you use from the stories are always longer than the example. In other words, the bulk of the writing should be an explanation of how your examples prove your thesis. Be certain that you prove your thesis by analyzing the information within the stories and that you do not fall into plot summary.