Flannery O′Connor ″A Good Man is Hard to Find″

Essay Two (Fiction) “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. For your second assignment, consider all the short stories we will read this semester (Carver, Updike, Hemingway, and O’Connor) and choose ONE of the following topics for your essay I picked: Flannery O′Connor ″A Good Man is Hard to Find″ 1. Theme Analysis: Using evidence from the text, make an argument for what you believe one of the themes is for any ONE of the stories we have read this semester. Remember that you need to support your analysis with evidence from the text. Look at the diction, including the denotation and connotation of the words chosen by the author, look at the imagery, look at the figurative language, look at the conflicts faced by the characters, and look carefully at the plot to determine what observation the author is making. Remember that a theme is not the same as a moral.[unique_solution] Papers should develop a strong, specific, cogent argumentative thesis statement supported by evidence discerningly chosen from the text and research sources (secondary sources are not required for this essay). Keep in mind as you compose your essay that a literary analysis should deal with analysis of the text and the experiences of the character(s) as opposed to your own similar life experience. In other words, the paper should incorporate specific evidence from the story to support your argument—not personal anecdote. In addition, the paper should be an analysis of the story, not the story’s author. When writing an analysis essay, it is assumed that your reader has already read the story you are analyzing; while a brief summary of the story is acceptable as part of the essay’s introduction, the rest of the essay should not contain any summary. As you develop and draft your paper, remember that any well-crafted essay has a clearly articulated, cogent thesis. The thesis of your paper should respond directly to the topic that you have selected in a very specific manner—one of the primary contributions to the strength of any thesis is specificity. Papers should be composed utilizing MLA formatting and MLA style citation for any sources (primary or secondary; secondary sources are not required for this essay). Papers should be written in 3rd person. Please double-space, use 12 pt Times New Roman, and use one inch margins throughout the paper. (Microsoft Word does not default to these settings so you will have to manually change the settings for your document.) Completed papers should be between 400 and 600 words (not including any words on the Works Cited page) as determined by Microsoft Word’s word count tool. Completed assignments should be submitted via D2L as Microsoft Word documents (.docx or .doc). Any other file type will automatically earn a grade of zero