Prompt and
From the 1999 cult comedy Office Space to the first important work of office fiction, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), directors and writers have associated office work with the experience of alienation—work that dehumanizes both employees and employers. However, each work that we’ve studied in unit 2 represents the experience of alienation differently.
For your second formal assignment, you will build on the skills you practiced in your first formal assignment and write a thesis-driven essay that puts forward and develops an interpretive argument regarding what either Office Space, “Bartleby,” or Personal Days says about the nature and experience of or resistance against alienation in the office.
Requirements
– You must use parenthetical citations for all direct evidence used. You must cite page numbers for texts or the timestamp for films (example: 01:23:20, meaning 1 hour, 23 minutes, and 20 seconds). You do not need a work cited page.
– Give your paper a title that reflects your argument.
– Include your name, your section, and the assignment number in your paper’s header.
– Your essay should be between 1,000 and 1,200 words.
– Your essay should use 12-point Times New Roman font and your pages should have 1-inch margins.
– You must upload a file type that can be universally read (for example, no .pages files). Consult your TA if they have a preferred or required file type.
