Select one of the two pieces of fiction to write about: the short story “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, or the story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Thing Around Your Neck.” Your essay should try to analyze the characters in the story, specifically by applying the ideas in Haidt’s book the happiness hypothesis to try to explain the characters’ behaviors and attitudes. In effect, the questions your essay will be asking are:
Q: What would Haidt have to say about these characters/behaviors? How would he explain them–meaning, the ways in which the characters are content, and/or not content, and what he might suggest about their lives (based on the ideas in the book he wrote)?
The goal would be to illuminate the actions of these characters with Haidt’s ideas, so that we might gain greater understanding as to how they have made themselves happy and/or unhappy.
After an introduction that explains what the essay will try to do, including a thesis (what the paper will argue), the body of the essay should isolate and summarize key moments from the story, and then use specific ideas from Haidt’s book to explain those moments logically, and hopefully insightfully. It’s not possible to write about every event or comment in the story; you will carefully select ideas that you think are most significant. I do want to see a clear thesis–an argument that the paper is making, a claim that could be debated.
Audience for the paper: a general reader, not in our class, who has never heard of Haidt or his work. The paper will need to introduce him and his work and his ideas, when they are applied. Since the paper is literary analysis though, we can assume the reader has some familiarity with the short story, and they are reading your paper in order to help them understand the story better. (I realize this is a tricky concept–this sense of audience.)
Essays should run 4 full pages (1200 word minimum).
