Choose from the following short stories:
The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner
The Dead, James Joyce
The Veldt, Ray Bradbury
Hills Like White Elephants, Ernest Hemingway
The Cask of Amontillado or The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allen Poe
Or, any poem we have discussed in class or read for class.
Below are some examples. I do not require you to choose one of these topics. They are just here to give you an idea of the type of approaches that will work for this essay.
- Philosophical analysis: How do the stories by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus reflect the philosophy of existentialism?
- Socio/cultural analysis: What opinion about marriage and gender roles does Hemingway advance in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”?
- Historical analysis:: What social dilemmas faced by African Americans in the 1960s might have inspired Toni Cade Bambara to write “The Lesson”?
- Biographical analysis: What events in Salman Rushdie’s life might have influenced the events in “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers”?
- Psychological analysis: How is John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” a metaphor for the psychology of addiction?
