Essay Assignments
ENG 161 Short Essay 1: Literary Devices
For your first essay, you will focus on analyzing a literary device’s function in at least one of our pieces of short fiction. We will cover these literary devices over the coming week. Please look carefully at the different options below. Choose one as a template for how to focus your ideas and tweak it to your own advantage and purpose(s).
1. Choose a single literary device and write a comparison/contrast examining how two or three different stories use it to help create, augment, or emphasize a major theme common to all the short stories.
2. Focus on one story, examining how the author intertwines two or three different devices to develop the story’s major theme.
3. Examine how one literary device is evident in the multiple stories by the same author. Does he or she use it to emphasize a particular theme in all stories? Does he/she seem to use it at a particular point in stories?
These are just a few possibilities, but they should give you some idea of how to focus your reading and your thoughts about that reading.
This paper SHOULD NOT be only a plot summary of the story. You can assume your reader(s) know the story as well as you do; thus, focus on the point of the story, discussing plot points only as you need to. To help you support your ideas about the meaning of the text and how some devices are used, you should provide examples from the text, directly quoting passages that illustrate what you want the reader to understand from the story. This is called textual evidence, and is something we will constantly refer to.
Guidelines
· 4-5 pages, typed and doublespaced
· Use MLA formatting and citation style for all textual evidence. Include parenthetical citations and a works cited page referencing any material you use, including from our textbook.
