Assignment Details
Ezra Pound once famously asserted that it should always be the goal of the artist to make it new, to depart from convention and eschew the intellectual and cultural norms one stands to inherit. Making it new, however, can only emerge within a tradition, so newness ultimately matters only in the context of oldness.
For this essay, I would like you to choose one work that we have read in Unit 5: American Multi-Identities or Unit 6: The Future (?) of America and demonstrate how it responds to and revises the ideas of a work from a literary movement or era that we discussed earlier in the semester. Your goal is to provide FOCUSED analysis around ONE specific intersectional point of significance: gender, economic issues, race, art, social class, dreams, community, etc.
For example, Metaphors and Bloodchild both depict pregnancy and childbirth while The Snows of Kilimanjaro and “Queer” tackle issues involving masculine identity, so these are clear points of intersection. The next question would be to consider how Butlers 1995 story or Bidarts 2012 poem build upon, revise, or re-conceptualize the gender and identity concerns Plath raises in her poem in 1959 or Hemingway explores in his 1936 short story. Its also important to take the historical context into consideration as you develop your analysis, so I am requiring a minimum of two secondary sources.
To do well on your essay, you should
Develop a thesis statement that clearly identifies the literary works you will analyze, the intersectional point of significance you will be exploring, and how one work responds to and revises the previous work.
Engage in close analysis of BOTH works. Close analysis requires that you include direct quotations and analyze specific word choice. Provide carefully selected examples from the works that support your view. DO NOT SPEND Demonstrate an understanding of the historical time period and literary movement to which each work belongs.
