EBOLA
Exceptionally brilliant, original literary analysis

Instructions: You must type a three-to-five-page paper that discusses a particular aspect of Beloved that you found interesting or worthy of comment.Your paper should be a complete argument, making a claim about the work and supporting the claim with evidence from the text. You should focus on a single issue so you can explore it in depth. Your paper should betyped (Times New Roman, size 12), double-spaced, and follow MLA formatting as discussed in class.

STEP ONE: Choose a topic. Choose something from the list on the back of this handout, or come up with your own.

STEP TWO: Derive a thesis statement to determine what you will be arguing. Remember: S.O.B. (Subject, Opinion, Blueprint).

WITHOUT A CAREFULLY CONCEIVED THESIS, YOUR PAPER WILL NOT SUCCEED.

EXAMPLES:
  • Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1960 poem “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed” demonstrates how the poet uses the conventional poetic form of the ballad to treat the unconventional poetic subject of racial intolerance.
  • The fate of the main characters in Antigone illustrates the danger of excessive pride.
  • The imagery in Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” reveals the ambiguity of humans’ relationship with nature.

STEP THREE: Write your introduction.

Capture your reader’s interest. You may use a quotation, provocative question, brief anecdote, startling statement, or a combination. You will also need to include background information relevant to your thesis statement, and YOU MUST INCLUDE THE TITLE OF THE WORK AND FULL NAME OF THE AUTHOR.

EXAMPLE:
Robert Frost, a renowned 20th-century poet, is known for incorporating simple diction and rural imagery understandable by all readers. One of the many compelling and recurring motifs in Frost’s poetry is his juxtaposition of opposing images. Using only the titles of some his poems, such as “Fire and Ice” and “Bond and Free,” the reader can detect how Frost unifies opposites; a closer look into some of his less obvious poems, such as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Birches,” further reveals how he brings together contradictory themes. Although he is considered to be a provincial poet, this motif demonstrates how he was actually a sophisticated philosopher. Through the comparison of opposing images, Frost goes beyond the calm of New England’s snowy woods to reveal profound and opposing intangible ideas such as human desire and hate, love and freedom, life and death, and heaven and earth.

STEP FOUR: Write your body paragraphs. You will need several (not just three) to support your thesis statement.

1)Topic Sentence: Relate your paragraph back to your thesis statement

2)Subsequent sentences should provide explanation and textual evidence.

  1. Textual evidence includes summary, paraphrase, specific detail, anddirect quotations
  2. Refer to handout on how to integrate textual evidence, or see Mrs. H-D for assistance

STEP FIVE: Write your conclusion.

You want your paper to have a sense of completeness that lets your reader know it’s come to the end. Restate the thesis, summarize main points you have made, but do not introduce a new topic. Try and answer the BIG WHY. Why is your topic of exploration significant as a whole?

EXAMPLE:
In conclusion, Robert Frost is fondly remembered as a great pastoral poet who wrote poems from which people of all ages and backgrounds could take meaning. Although some may find his topics of snowy woods and birch trees to be quaint rather than profound, it is clear through his device of juxtaposing opposites that Frost was in fact a pensive philosopher. His pithy poems that distinguish two polarized images result in spawning numerous possibilities for each poem’s interpretation, and his longer, more pastoral works reveal his reflections on grave topics such as life and death and heaven and earth. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Frost did not rely on weighty allusions or a hefty vocabulary to produce meaningful poetry—he was able to compose deep, philosophical meaning from everyday life.

STEP SIX: Title your paper. Example: “The Juxtaposition of Opposing Images in Robert Frost’s Poetry”

STEP SEVEN: Proofread and ensure that it is following MLA guidelines in formatting, punctuation, quotation integrations, etc. It goes without saying that this paper must be typed!

Potential Topics to Explore for your second ExceptionallyBrilliant and OriginalLiteraryAnalysis Paper

  • Numerology Significance
  • 124
  • Sixty Million and More- the best guess of the number of captured Africans who never made it alive out of their homeland or off the slave ship. The dedication begins the idea of racial and inhumane exploitation that builds throughout Beloved. Cryptic dedication, starts the novel off with a number.
  • These numbers: 86 days, 7 years, 9 years, 28 days, etc.
  • Importance of Rubbing: “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
  • Amy rubbing Sethe’s feet Chapter 3
  • Sethe rubs Paul D’s knee in Chapter 7
  • Beloved rubs (almost strangles) Sethe’s neck in Chapter 9
  • Baby Suggs cares for Sethe’s “blossoming” back
  • Beauty among pain
  • “Follow the tree flowers…”
  • Sethe’s Chokecherry Tree on her back- described as beautiful when it was actually a horrible beating leaving painful, permanent scars on her back.
  • Sweet Home: “It wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home.”
  • Animal Imagery
  • Denver’s delivery (“antelope”)
  • Baby Beloved is a “pup” and Paul D. refers to her as a bitch
  • The “four horsemen” come to take Sethe and her children back to Sweet Home, but the second nephew couldn’t come because he had beaten her too much and the animals would have reacted in a crazy way like Sethe because the nephew abused them so badly
  • schoolteacher writing down “animal characteristics” of the slaves on his notebook paper
  • Paul D. telling Sethe, “You have two legs, not four”
  • Mister
  • Analysis of Morrison’s Narrative Techniques
  • Steam-of-Consciousness
  • Repetition of actions, phrases, events
  • Layered narration
  • Juxtaposition of important historical events with the supernatural
  • Chronological distortion
  • Epiphanies/Discoveries made by characters
  • Sethe’s discovery Halle isn’t going to return
  • Sethe’s discovery Beloved is really her daughter she discovered 18 years ago
  • Paul D’s discovery (and Denver’s discovery) of what Sethe did to her third child
  • Denver’s discovery that it wasn’t Sethe she should fear, but rather Beloved
  • Color Imagery
  • Baby Suggs’ obsession with color
  • Sethe’s inability to see color until Paul D arrives
  • Red heart, red light, orange squares
  • White stairs
  • Water Imagery (Beloved emerges from the water, the Ohio River, etc.)
  • Music Imagery (Paul D singing; singing at the Clearing, etc.)
  • Food Imagery (Sethe’s milk, meals, etc.)
  • Trees (Chokecherry tree, “boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores,” Brother, Follow the Flowers, etc.)
  • Iron (Sethe’s eyes, the iron on her back, iron bit, iron chains etc.)
  • Dancing (Beloved and Denver, dancing at the Clearing, etc.)