Final Paper

English 355

Dr. McGregor

Argument Paper 3

Subject: This assignment asks you to develop a claim about a course text of your choice, in consultation with me. You should focus on close reading a representative passage or passages from your text in order to make your argument.

**If you are struggling to come up with a topic, here is a suggested prompt: Choose a text and write about what makes your chosen text modernist? You can use our “modernism so far” document, which I will post to Wolf Den, to identify some aspects of modernism. Which aspects does your text embrace? Which does it resist? What kind of modernist novel/story/poem is it? How does calling it “modernist” help us to understand it—or does it?**

Method: Your goal here is to use your close reading of representative examples from the text to make a claim about the text as a whole.

· Based on your close attention to the details of your chosen text, develop a claim—a specific, non-obvious, interesting argument—about its meaning.

· Consider how the content (i.e., the subject matter) and the form (i.e., meter, rhyme, rhythm, diction, syntax, line length, stanza arrangement, sound patterning, and/or typographical appearance) of the text in question work together, in harmony or dissonance, to make meaning.

· Your essay should support your claim with specific details—direct quotations, paraphrase, and summary—from the text.

· Your may also reach out from your text to show how it responds to its historical context—e.g., Word War I and its aftermath, the Red Summer of 1919, the “roaring twenties,” the expatriate experience, the Great Depression, or the Second World War, etc.

Resources: You may use outside sources on this paper to provide historical context or argumentative conversation partners. But you are not required to do so—we did not study or practice the use of sources, so I am not expecting it. If you do use outside sources, be sure to cite them in MLA format. Consider supplementing a Google search with some academic sources using a database like JSTOR (jstor.org).

Format: Your final paper should be at least 800 words. If you have more to say, feel free to go over that number. Use a 12-point standard font (eg, Times New Roman, Garamond). MLA format. Search “Purdue OWL MLA” on Google for guidance if needed.

Process: 1. Precis. You will turn in a one-page document identifying your

A. Text

B. Topic

C. Key passages

D. Outside resources you need

on Wolf Den on Sunday, November 8th.

2. Draft. You will turn in an initial draft of your essay to me on Wolf Den on Sunday, November 15th. We will workshop your drafts in class on Tuesday, November 17th.

3. Final Version. You will turn in your final version of the essay to me on Wolf Den on Sunday, November 22nd.