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Essay Instructions: Eudora Welty's " Why I live at the P.O."
Write a character analysis of Sister, the first person voice of this story. The thesis should make an overall claim that the bulk of the paper is dedicated to proving. The essay should be 5 paragraphs, introductory paragraph( with thesis included), 3 body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph. Follow MLA format, citing parenthetical page numbers, and include a Work Cited page. Do not summarized the story. Instead make a claim about Sister's character, and support it with specific evidence. You may use 4-5 direct quotations to support your claims but they must be sufficient.

Essay Instructions: This is my preliminary thesis with the author and two stories to be used.


As a writer and editor of the twentieth century Eudora Welty prompted one to evaluate themselves from an intrapersonal vantage point, dealing with love, devotion, and spirituality through her concepts in her writings of “A Traveling Sales Man" and “A Worn Path".

Literary Research Paper Instructions

Your assignment is to write a 5-7 page literary research paper. Your works cited page will be a separate page from your research paper and is not part of the 5-7 pages.
Format: The paper must be double-spaced in black ink on white paper. The font must be Ariel or Times Roman in 12 point font. Your name should appear in the upper left hand corner of each page as a header.
Procedure: Your thesis must be approved by me. Your research paper must include parenthetical references in MLA style as presented in the Little Brown Handbook. I will provide instructions on this later.
Choose an author of one of the stories we have read in class and further explore how the theme in that story can be found in at least one other work by the author. This can be a poem, a play, a novel, or another short story. You are not limited to two works and may explore as many works by an author as you wish, but the minimum is two. For example, we read “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway. Another story by Hemingway-“Hills Like White Elephants”- is included in your book. You could use the theme(s) in these two stories as the basis of your research.
You might explore how nature is a recurring theme in the works of Kate Chopin or the idea of blindness in Ellison’s Invisible Man as first presented in “The Battle Royal”. Why does the author return to these themes? What relevancy in our own lives do you see in these recurring themes?
The minimum number of research materials you must have are four. These must include one book (print or e-book), two journals articles (may come from a database such as EBSCO), and one internet source(not a .com). The book requirement does not include the other story, play, poem, or novel you read. These research materials must be the items you use to support your thesis in your paper.

Essay Instructions: This is a research paper in which I want to apply Eudora Welty's work through the perspective of Historical Criticism. Historical Criticism takes into account when and where something was written and by whom. These important considerations include facts about the author's life and status, the larger history around the author and work, and the intellectual paradigms available to the author and the readers. More specifically, I want to illustrate how Welty's upbringing in the South and her homelife affected her writing, and examples from specific works by Welty need to be used. These works are: "The Optimist's Daughter" (use the Vintage International Edition, 1990), "One Writer's Beginnings" (use the Harvard University Press Edition, 2003), "The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty" (A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc.). From "Collected Stories," you do not have to use all of the stories in it; you may choose from any or all in "The Golden Apples, "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Petrified Man, "A Memory," "Old Mr. Marblehall," "Livvie," "Where is the Voice Coming From," and/or "The Demonstrators."
I prefer you not overuse indented quotations. Quoting too many passages over four lines is not graded well, so please mostly use quotations that are applicable, well-written, and blend in well with the sentence behind the idea of the argument or statement. No footnotes are needed since this paper should use MLA format for all citations and the works cited page. On your resources, please use scholarly journals, books, and/or reliable Internet sources for your research. As you probably already know, Ebscohost is a great way to obtain scholarly journals.
This paper should have a clear well-defined thesis somewhere within the first paragraph, and it should provide plenty of textual examples from Welty and be backed up by scholarly resources. However, I would like for the paper to have a personal "feel" to it so that it doesn't seem too cold and purely factual, and so the professor feels like I have injected my own thoughts into it. If you have ANY questions or concerns that I may need to clear up for any reason, or if you are unclear about something regarding my paper topic during the process of writing this paper, please feel free to email me anytime about anything.

Essay Instructions: Write a literary analysis that examines a single poem or short story that you read in Weeks 10-12 (from authors Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Theodore Roethke, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, or Raymond Carver). Support your claim(s) about the text with examples and details from the poem or story. There are several ways to analyze a work of literature. Two of the most common are below: A formal approach--which examines one (or more) of the literary elements in a work and explains how it relates to the whole, thus contributing to a text?s overall meaning or significance. Possible elements to consider include plot, character, theme, setting, conflict, structure, point of view, genre, style, tone, imagery, symbolism, irony, narrator, foreshadowing, paradox, allusion, metaphor, rhythm, rhyme, etc.
Each of these approaches requires careful reading of the primary text, as well as a debatable claim that will need to be supported or "proved" with evidence (direct references, quotations) from the text. Remember, writing about literature is a way to broaden your own understanding and to share your own reading experience. While the second option (a critical approach) will obviously involve some background reading, you should not be going to outside sources with the idea of creating a "cut and pasted" paper of others' ideas. Your primary concern for either approach should be an examination of the work of literature you selected.
Because you are essentially arguing that your perspective is a valid one, you have to support it effectively with evidence from the primary source that you select (direct references to specific quotations, lines, passages, scenes, etc.). Remember that an analysis is not driven by plot. It's driven by the "idea" that you want to communicate about the story or poem. If you consult secondary sources, be sure that quotations from them do not dominate your essay. You are not writing an informational report but rather a literary analysis that requires a close reading of the text.

ESSAY INSTRUCTIONS:
Your essays should be in MLA Style and approximately 2-3 pages (not including the Works Cited page). In the upper left-hand corner of the paper, place your name, the professor?s name, the course name, and the due date for the assignment on consecutive lines. Double space your information from your name onward, and don't forget a title. All papers should be in Times New Roman font with 12-point type with one-inch margins all the way around your paper. All paragraph indentations should be indented five spaces (use the tab key) from the left margin. All work is to be left justified. When quoting lines in literature, please research the proper way to cite short stories, plays, or poems.