Assignment Descriptions. This page will be updated periodically to reflect new assignments and explanations.

Response writing is a short (2-3 pages) piece that reflects on something we’ve been reading and discussing in class.  You should feel free to incorporate elements from class discussion and your notes in your response.  You should also make sure to refer to specific passages in the text rather than just commenting generally.  Better to quote specifically than to paraphrase.  These writings will be graded on a scale of 1-3 (3 is best).

Response writing #1 (due Feb 13):This is a list of possible writing topics.  You should also feel free to come up with your own topics. Possible topics for short stories (response #1):

• What do “Sweat” and “City of Refuge” suggest about the power of an individual to control his or her own life?  If the individual does not seem to control his/her own life, what does?
• Discuss what the slight ambiguities at the end of both “Sweat” and “City of Refuge” add to the stories.
• Discuss the importance of setting in two of the stories we have read.
• Both King and Poe use first person narrators in the stories we have read.  How do these narrators contribute to the sense of “horror” that these stories create?
• Discuss Flannery O’Connor’s use of violence (psychic, emotional, physical) in either “Good Country People” or “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
• Discuss the presentation of evil in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Oates’s “Where Are You Going…”
• Is there a “spiritual crisis” in Oates’s story that is similar to the spiritual crisis represented in O’Connor’s stories?