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.
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?
