EC 102
Short Essay Assignments
Unit / Options1: Plot / 1. Suggestions for Writing 122
2. Write an essay defending or at least explaining Francis Weed’s actions and providing evidence from the story.
3. Rearrange the scenes of “Sonny’s Blues” into chronological order, and explain how this rearrangement would alter the meaning and effect of the story. Supplement your analysis by describing how other orders might affect the story.
4. Evaluate the endings of “The Country Husband” and “Sonny’s Blues” using the implied criteria for endings supplied in “Happy Endings.”
5. Analyze Alida’s motivation in trying to trick Grace in the past by disappointing her about Delphin and about why she chose to reveal the truth so many years later. How satisfying is it to Grace to reveal the paternity of Barbara after all the years of civilized, yet faintly hostile, social interaction between the two women?
6. Create another scene describing what Alida Slade must be thinking after Grace’s revelation.
7. The reader shouldn’t respond “No way” to Grace’s revelation. Go back over the story and find all the clues about Barbara that make the revelation believable.
8. If Delphin Slade is the father of both daughters, what accounts for how very different the girls are from each other?
2: Narration and POV / 1. Suggestions for Writing 149
2. “Hills Like White Elephants” first appeared in Hemingway’s collection of stories Men without Women. (That fact alone probably gives you several ideas for a paper.) Think, then, about the ways in which this story fits in the category “men without women,” about the one moment in the story when we see the man without Jig, and about why Jig agrees to the operation. Think also about the irony of that title for a story about pregnancy, a state of affairs it’s impossible for “men” to bring about “without women.” The man seems not to want to be “without women,” and in fact seems to want Jig all to himself. How does that aspect of his characterization help you make sense of the collection’s title?
3: Character / 1. Suggestions for Writing 215
2. Do some library research on Eudora Welty and discover what she has said about “Why I Live at the P.O.” Write an essay evaluating the contribution of her comments to your understanding of the story.
3. According to the stereotype, spinsters like and keep cats. Write an essay about Judith and the cats. What role(s) do the cats play in “Our Friend Judith”? How does Judith’s treatment of, and interaction with, the cats help characterize her?
4. Write a personal essay about a time when you felt that someone was viewing you stereotypically instead of seeing you as you really are or were. What stereotypes did the other person impose on you? Did you challenge his or her perception of you in any way? If so, did you get a reaction? What sort?
5. Race is a sensitive issue because no matter how sure a person is that he or she is not prejudiced, it may be impossible to be free from racial stereotyping. The reader is looking for clues to Twyla’s and Roberta’s race based largely on racial stereotypes. Re-read the story and for each episode explain the racial basis for each clue to the girls’ race. What does that tell you about your own bias if you have any?
4: Setting / 1. Suggestions for Writing 261
2. Analyze the photographs in Tan’s “A Pair of Tickets.” What do they represent? Do photographs represent the same things each time they are mentioned in the story? How is the significance of the photographs influenced by setting?
3. Write a personal essay about (a) visiting a place in which the prevailing standards and values seemed very different from your own, or (b) visiting a place that holds significance for an older family member—parent, aunt, uncle, grandparent.
5: Tone / 1. Suggestions for Writing 860
2. Write an essay comparing “Persimmons” and Emily Grosholz’s “Eden” in terms of what each poem says about the role of language in familial relationships (or in relationships more generally).
3. Write an essay that suggests what the speaker in “Green Chile” might learn or come to see about himself, life, family, and/or culture by contemplating his grandmother’s preparation of green chiles.
4. Write an essay that explores the question of whether or not Baca’s speaker ultimately depicts himself as irrevocably cut off or estranged from the way of life represented by his grandmother and the “sunburned men and women” in the poem.
6: Speaker / 1. Suggestions for Writing 881
2. Look up Henry David Thoreau’s letter to H.G.O Blake, dated 11/19, 1856, in which he talks about Whitman and his poetry. Write an essay analyzing Whitman’s poem in light of Thoreau’s comments.
7: Situation and Setting / 1. Suggestions for Writing 913
2. Compare a way in which a particular place is exploited as a setting by different poets, such airports in Oliver’s “Singapore” and Winters’s “At the San Francisco Airport” or beaches in Plath’s “Point Shirley” or Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and so on.
8: Sound of Poetry / 1. Suggestions for Writing 996
9: Internal Structure / 1. Suggestions for Writing 1018
10: External Form / 1. Suggestions for Writing 1049
2. Choose any poem in this chapter (or in the book as a whole) and write an essay analyzing the significance and effect of the poem’s external form—its particular pattern of rhythm and rhyme, its stanzaic form, the way it looks and/or is organized on the page. How, exactly, does the form contribute to meaning in this particular poem? If the poem uses a traditional form of one sort or another—such as the villanelle, the sonnet, or shaped verse—what’s the significance or effect of the use of this traditional form? How, exactly, does the poem conform to, and vary from, the traditional form of which it is a version? How does the poem’s particular form, including these variations, contribute to its effects? Is this traditional form typically associated with articular themes and/or structures or believed to create certain expectations about content? In what sense might this poem be said to use those expectations (whether to defy or fulfill them)?
11: Whole Text (Williams) / 1. Suggestions for Writing 1603
12: Author’s
Work as Context (Shakespeare) / 1. Suggestions for Writing 1836 (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
2. Evaluate A Midsummer Night’s Dream by comparing it with a Shakespeare play generally considered inferior, such as Titus Andronicus or The Merry Wives of Windsor.
3. Choose a relatively minor character, such as Egeus or Philostrate, and explain in a four-page essay what this character adds to A Midsummer Night’s Dream .Be careful not to focus on the level of plot; it is obvious that without Egeus’ prohibition of a match between Hermia and Lysander, for example, the adventures in the woods would never take place. Focus instead on how Egeus or Philostrate reinforces the play’s thematic concerns.
13: Whole Text (Chekhov) / 1. Suggestions for Writing 1641
2. Suppose a politically active friend wrote you a letter saying, “I’ve just found the clearest statement of revolutionary [or conservative; you pick] ideals in all literature: it is Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.” Write a reply to your friend in which you build a case against the argument that the play is entirely revolutionary (or entirely conservative). Of course, your position will be stronger if you cite specific passages.
14: More Plays (Ibsen) / 1. Rewrite one of the conversations between Nora and Mrs. Lynde from Mrs. Lynde’s perspective. Include stage directions as necessary.
2. When we first meet Nora, she’s sneaking macaroons, and references to these cookies appear throughout the play. Write an essay exploring the significance of sweets for Nora’s character, for Torvald’s, and for their marriage. Think about the particular sweet that Nora prefers. What precisely is a macaroon? Would it make a difference if Nora had a fondness for chocolate cake or ice cream, or jelly beans instead?