write a essay (1500words),About a novel :The Trial

GERM 1027 Essay #3

Due Date:  April 8 (to be placed in my mailbox, #61, on the 1st floor of McCain)

Thesis Due Date:  March 25 (to be emailed to [email protected]; for additional advice you may also contact your tutorial leader; students whose first language

is Mandarin may also want to email their thesis statements to Michelle Lee at

[email protected])

Length:  approximately 1,500 words

Here are some possible essay themes:

Justice and Injustice

Innocence and Guilt

The Use (or Misuse) of Parable

Self-esteem and Self-abasement

The Labyrinthine

The Nature of Power and Authority

The Individual and the Collective

Meaning and Absurdity

Joseph K. and Franz Kafka

The Trial

and the Modern World

Choose one theme to pursue.  You are allowed to come up with your own, although I would like you to clear it with me first.  Essays should be around six pages (not including the title page or bibliography). The themes are broad, but part of the assignment involves your coming up with a clear and effective thesis or argument about your theme in relation to The Trial.  Your essay should have an introductory paragraph that closes with a proper and specific thesis statement, paragraphs organized around topics that reinforce your thesis, and a strong concluding paragraph.

For this essay I want you to use at least four critical resources, so check with the library to find the most appropriate books and/or articles.  For books, the website Novanet provides a complete listing of all books and journals held by universities in Nova Scotia. For articles, the website JSTOR (which is free to access as Dalhousie students) provides thousands of articles on numerous subjects.  Note: Internet sources such as Wikipedia, Douban, SparkNotes, and CliffsNotes are not critical sources. Please ask me if you have any questions about the validity of a source.

I want you to use the critics to aid your argument, but not to supplant it.  Sometimes you may agree with the critic, but your argument is often enhanced by having an opinion to spar against.  Be specific, focus in on key scenes or elements, and make sure that your argument is well supported with evidence and quotations from the works.  When it comes to quoting from the text, comment on the quotes you use and do not simply allow them to speak for themselves. If you have any questions while writing your essays, or if you would like me to see rough drafts, please let me know

Thesis statements:  please email me your thesis statements by March 25th.  This is just for me to make sure that you are on the right path with your paper and that you have had a chance to come up with a clear, coherent, and concise argument that can be pursued in an essay.  I will give feedback on this, as I want to make sure that everyone does a good job with the question and that finds a good angle with which to pursue it. Note: while the thesis is not due until the 25th, I very much encourage you to email it to me as soon as you are ready.  The more time you have to work on your paper with the proper feedback, the better it will no doubt turn out.

Some notes for regarding citation:

I've received some questions regarding how much to cite the novel in Essay 3.  Even though Essay 3 will make use of secondary sources, you must still make use of your primary source, Kafka's The Trial.  This means that you must quote directly from the novel and make use of the primary text in order to aid your argument as we have with the previous essays.  

When it comes to how the novel should look in the bibliography, this is what I would like to see:

Kafka, Franz.  The Trial.  Trans. Mike Mitchell.  Ed. Ritchie Roberston.  Oxford:  OUP, 2009.

While the novel is a primary source, not a secondary one, you are allowed to use the introduction as one of your secondary sources.  If you choose to do so, this is how it should look:

Robertson, Ritchie.  "Introduction."  The Trial, by Franz Kafka. Trans. Mike Mitchell.  Ed. Ritchie Roberston.  Oxford:  OUP, 2009.  xi-xxv.

When quoting Ritchie in the essay itself, it should look this, e.g. (Ritchie xi).   

Some of you have asked about using the lectures as a source.  I hope that you look beyond the lectures as well, but if you do choose to make use of them it should look like this:

Cameron, John.  The Trial.  GERM 1027.  25 Mar. 2019.  Dalhousie University, Halifax.  Class lecture.

Finally, when it comes to citing the secondary sources in the essay itself, the last name of the author and the page in parentheses should do, e.g. (Smith 27), etc.

For the essay theme, I want to take about the first one, justice and injustice,so we need talk about another source ,one article and name is LAW, JUSTICE AND MYTH:
A READING OF THE TRIAL, BY F. KAFKA.

remember, you need four reliable secondary and tertiary sources.