GH 301: Slipstream Fiction Essay #2 [100 Points]

For your second essay in the course, you have two options. Choose ONE of the options listed below.You must use a size 12 font [preferably Cambria, Book Antiqua, or Times New Roman] and your typed essay must be double-spaced with one-inch margins set for all four sides of the page. Make sure that you use format paragraph to remove the extra spaces that MS Word automatically puts before and after paragraphs. Set the values to zero.When you present quotations from the essays and stories, use the standard MLA documentation procedures illustrated in class and always integrate the quotations; that is, at no point in your essay should you stop your writing and present a quote that is not introduced by some of your own language.

For example: As the narrator of Jeffrey Ford’s “Bright Morning” contemplates the meaning of his dreams about Franz Kafka, he wonders if “Kafka would be the type of restless spirit to reach out beyond the pale” (161).

Whenever you quote a story or essay, follow this format. Always establish the context for the quote with some of your own language, and always supply the page number in parentheses after the quotation, following the punctuation procedure provided in the above example.

Option 1

Decide which one of the following stories is the best example of slipstream fiction and write your 3-4-page essay [900-1,200 words] justifying your choice. Use summary of specific moments in the story and integrate quotations to illustrate your points. Of course, you will have to introduce the story and author and provide a brief plot overview in your introduction, and then briefly define slipstream fiction before moving on to discuss the story in detail. Remember, when you define slipstream, you must distinguish what you see as slipstream fiction from fiction belonging to other more clearly defined genres. That is, you need to identify the features of the story that classify it as fiction of the “very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel” (Sterling 3) or as “weird” fiction as defined by Spinrad, or as grounded in “cognitive dissonance” (Kelly and Kessel xi-xii). In other words, devise a narrowly defined definition relying on a statement or two made by our authors and then show how your selected story feels like a slipstream fiction. Here are the eligible stories:

“Pretending” by Ray Vukcevich

“Bay” by David Erik Nelson”

“The Specialist’s Hat” by Kelly Link

“The God of Dark Laughter” by Michael Chabon

“Sea Oak” by George Saunders

“Bright Morning” by Jeffrey Ford

“You Have Never Been Here” by M. Rickert

“You Were Neither HotNor Cold, So I Spit You Out” by Spindler and Nelson

Option 2

Write your own slipstream story, and then add a one-page explanation of what makes your story slipstream. In your submission, the story should come first and be followed by your one-page explanation. Your explanation should identify the story [or stories] read in our class that influenced your writing of your story. Of course, your story will necessarily be longer than 3-4-pages because stories typically involve prose description as well as conversations among characters [dialogue], and those conversations tend to take up quite a bit of space. Look over any of our assigned stories for models of how to present and punctuate dialogue.

Length: A one-page, double-spaced explanation and a 5-7-page slipstream story.

DUE DATE: Whether you choose option 1 or option 2, youshould submit your work in Microsoft Word by e-mail attachment no later than 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, April 1.Follow the same rules as for essay #1. That is, title your Word document with your last name and then essay 2. For example: Smith Essay2.docx

EARLY SUBMISSIONS: If you choose option 1 and decide to write about “Pretending” or any one of the stories assigned in weeks seven or ten, you should try to complete and submit the assignment early. Because you have already received feedback on a previous essay, I do not need this time to wait for a number of submissions to establish methods of evaluation. I will immediately evaluate and return the early submissions as soon as I receive them.