Write a 3-4 page essay that explores how American identity, American heroes, and American ideals form the baseline of the story’s aesthetics and function to achieve irony, even as he makes a point.

Texts presuppose an ideal reader, but real readers bring their own background, beliefs, fears, political ideology, and interpretative strategies to the text so each reader has a unique experience with the text (this is why you cannot assume your readers interpret the text in the same way you do so you must explain specific scenes and explain how to understand them in connection to your point).

The aesthetic experience is unique, powerful, and significant.

You must research reader responses and interpretations before writing your own. You must understand how other readers have constructed meaning so that you can understand common misreadings or hasty generalizations about the writer or the text. Disagreeing with what has been said is a good writing strategy or using details from the story that have been overlooked but that prove why someone’s interpretation is more valid than another’s is a good critical thinking exercise. In this particular case, one source you MUST use is the D2L article “Models of Agency: Frederick Douglass and ‘The Heroic Slave.” The other required source must come from Galileo.

Investigate the story’s themes, images, allusions, intertextualities to determine and construct meaning. You may draw from the text’s interplay with history, sociology, psychology, gender studies, philosophy, national values and ideology, religion, etc… as you construct meaning for your readers.

Write a 3-4 page essay that explores how American identity, American heroes, and American ideals form the baseline of the story’s aesthetics and function to achieve irony, even as he makes a point. In addition to the primary source (the story), use 2 sources: one from Galileo and the other is the article Models of Agency found on the D2L.

The introduction should include a BRIEF summary of the history of American slavery and how Douglass’s story comes out of American slave culture. You may also discuss American ideals of liberty and freedom and how those ideals were not applied to African Americans. Then form a thesis statement that makes a claim about how Douglass uses American identity, ideals, and/or heroes to illustrate his point (name his point in your thesis).

Each topic sentence should make a claim (not a summary statement) about the aesthetics of the story or what the story teaches.

Form a concluding paragraph that emphasizes your main point.

Cite your sources, including the story—both intext and with a works cited page that follows MLA formatting rules. https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/