Critical Analysis: Close Read Passage Analysis

Instructions:

Choose 2 passages from the readings in the list given belown. Which ever you are most familiar with. You don’t have to identify entire pieces, but just a paragraph or two. (See passage samples below.) The passages may come from the same author, but must come from two different pieces. (Certainly you can analyze two passages from two different authors.) Analyze the passages explaining the passages’ significance and their relationships to the larger work from which they were taken:
•What is the passage about or what does it suggest?
•What themes from the larger work are evident in the passage?
•How does the passage bring up or develop those themes?
• How does the passage relate to works by other authors of the same time period? Of different time periods?
• How does the passage relate to works by the same author? (if applicable)
•And most importantly, how does the passage reflect the societal/ political/ ideological struggles of the time period?
Passages may come from any of the following:
~Zora Neale Hurston- “How it Feels to be Colored Me” , “The Gilded Six-Bits”
~Langston Hughes- “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” , “Mother to Son”
~Richard Wright “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald- “Babylon Revisited”
~William Faulkner- “Barn Burning”
~Ernest Hemingway- “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (826)

 
To write this paper well, you should:

Be sure you include the titles and the author(s) in the introduction to your essay(s).

Not summarize the passage. Instead, you must provide analysis of the passage by answering the questions above.

Consider looking at the use of rhetorical devices in the passage and their effects on the passages.

Engage specifically with and analyze each passage, and should not stray from the quoted passage. In other words, if you identify a passage from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, do not provide a general discussion of all the themes or ideas one can find in Douglass’s text. Instead, use your response to analyze how the specific passage reflects particular themes and ideas from Douglass’s Narrative.
Use correct MLA formatting.

 

Details:

You may write one large essay that incorporates the two passages, or you may write two shorter essays that discuss the two passages individually. Turn the two shorter essays in together as one document.

The two passages do not have to relate in any way, except that they are from the same time period.

The two passages may come from different genres, but do not have to.

Please do not conduct any outside research. I want only your well-supported opinions.

 

~1500 words long total (~750 words per passage), 12” font, double spaced, Arial or Times New Roman, use correct MLA formatting and documentation, provide a works cited page that is not part of the 1500 word count. Please remember that the passages themselves are not part of the word count.

 

Passage Sample 1 (from Thomas Pynchon, “Entropy,” p. 2819):

But for three days now, despite the changeful weather, the mercury had stayed at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Leery at omens of the apocalypse, Callisto shifted beneath the covers. His fingers pressed the bird more firmly, as if needing some pulsing or suffering assurance of an early break in the temperature.

It was that last cymbal crash that did it. Meatball was hurled wincing into consciousness as the synchronized wagging of heads over the wastebasket stopped. The final hiss remained for an instant in the room, then melted into the whisper of rain outside.

 

Passage Sample 2 (from Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” p. 2953-2954):

Nosotros los Chicanos straddle the borderlands. On one side of us, we are constantly exposed to the Spanish of the Mexicans, on the other side we hear the Anglos’ incessant clamoring so that we forget our language. Among ourselves we don’t say nosotros los americanos, o nosotros los españoles, o nosotros los hispanos. We say nosostros los mexicanos (by mexicanos we do not mean citizens of Mexico; we do not mean a national identity, but a racial one). We distinguish between mexicanos del otro lado and mexicanos de este lado. Deep in our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in. Being Mexican is a state of soul—not one of mind, not one of citizenship. Neither eagle nor serpent, but both. And like the ocean, neither animal respects borders.
Textbook that all readings can be found in and should be referenced is: Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. C-E. 8th edition. New York: Norton and Co., 2012.

 

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