The Yellow Wallpaper

This paper needs a rough draft and an In text cittation .English 104: Suggested Topics and Advice for Writing the Literary Analysis Paper
An important component of this course is learning how to write evaluations and interpretations
of literary works. Whether you are writing about short stories, poems, or plays, you must offer
an opinion (an argument) about the literary work and you must back up that opinion with
evidence (facts from the literary text).
Each essay should be approximately 1,000 words in length, double-spaced, and typed with
standard font size and margins. The essay will be evaluated based in part upon your use of a
good thesis sentence, the support of the thesis through textual evidence, and your ability to
offer thoughtful analysis rather than plot summary. As always, your paper should be written in
standard academic English, be substantially free of grammatical and mechanical errors, and
should conform to the standards set out below.
1. The paper should not have a separate cover pager. Write your name and date of the
assignment in the upper left corner. Center the title of the essay, without underlining or
using quotation marks.
2. Your first paragraph will engage the reader’s interest as it narrows to a thesis. If, for
example, you write on the topic of initiation, you might begin the essay by stating
something about the popularity of initiation stories, what initiation means, and then
narrow to the point (thesis) of your essay. (Ex.: “In this short story, initiation serves to
____”).
3. The thesis should clearly state the topic of the essay and the point you will develop. Do
not make announcements, such as “This paper will be about . . .” Instead, boldly state
your point, such as, “Through the use of the speaker’s home as a symbolic prison, Frost
indicates that the lost child is not the only one who has been buried.” Or “Browning
uses dramatic monologue to reveal the Duke as a murderer” or even “Jig has beaten the
American in the end of Hemingway’s story and will keep her child.” These are
statements which offer an interpretation of one part of the poem or story, an
interpretation which will need evidence from the poem or story to support it.
4. Each paragraph will develop a single point that develops your thesis. Make references to
the text, but do not simply re-tell the story/poem/play. Remember, your reader has
also read the story/poem/play. If you quote from the literary work, be judicious and
make sure that the quote develops the support you are developing for your thesis. At
times a paraphrase may also be effective. If you are incorporating lines of poetry into 2
your paper, write the poetry as a standard sentence with a (/) used at the end of a line
or stanza to let the reader understand the structure of the poem. At the end of the
quotation, use the line number as indicated in your text. For example, “He had enough
of life/to know that he wanted no more” (1-2) indicates the line break of the poem and
which lines are quoted. Please refer to the sample essays in your text for further
clarification on how to incorporate references from literary works in your own essay.
5. Always write in the present tense unless there is a clear reason to use past tense.
Literature is a living text.
6. Do not refer to any writer by his or her first name. Unless you and William Shakespeare
are close, personal friends, refer to him as Shakespeare.
7. The conclusion will restate the idea of the essay and may make some general comments
or conclusions., If, for example, you were writing a paper about the image of death in
two poems, you would remind the reader about the comparison or contrast your found
in this image in the two poems, and then you might write something about the value of
understanding imagery in order to gain insight into a poem’s meaning.
8. If you are using sources, you must properly document the sources both within the paper
as parenthetical citations as well as provide the necessary information about the
sources on an accurately formatted works cited page. Use MLA format.
9. Unless they appear in something you are quoting, do not use “I, me, my, mine” or “we,
our, us, let’s,” as these are meant to be formal, academic essays. Instead, use only third
person, for example: “one, they, them, the critic, the reader,” and so on.
10. All essays must be submitted online in the appropriate assignment folder.
Below are some suggested themes, but you will want to use them to create a more specific
focus for your own essay. Some examples of narrowing the topic are included for the first three
themes. Alternatively, you may develop your own topic, though you may use only texts we
have read in this course. If you do so, make sure that you share the topic with your professor
before you begin to write.3
1. Define the key elements of a literary movement: Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, etc.
and decide whether a poem, story, or play belongs to one or more of those movements
(or perhaps doesn’t belong at all). For example: Was Robert Frost a modernist?
2. Provide a detailed character analysis of any two characters in a story or stories we have
read for this class. For example: Are Louise Mallard and the unnamed narrator of “The
Yellow Wallpaper” symbolically the same woman?
3. Our lives are often shaped by forces beyond our control. Choose any two works and
contrast how this message is conveyed. Are we victims? Do we give up responsibility for
control? What kinds of forces are at work? The supernatural? Nature? Society?
4. Compare and contrast how two stories develop a similar theme. (Be very specific here—
for example, the theme of imprisonment in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and
“A Rose for Emily.”
5. Explain the ways in which an author’s background influences the way we ought to read
their work. For example, explain the ways in which the South is an important element in
Faulkner’s stories. Or discuss how Emily Dickinson’s background with religion influenced
”Some Keep the Sabbath.”
6. Discuss the importance of setting in any two works. Show how two authors write about
very different times and places yet convey the same idea about the impact of setting on
thoughts and actions. For example, how does the landscape convey meaning in “Hills
Like White Elephants” and “Trifles”?
7. Explain how a fictional text or poem actually offers evaluation or criticism of a cultural
institution. For example, how is No Child is a commentary on the No Child Left Behind
Act? In what way is Wit is a commentary on the medical profession and/or the culture of
higher education? State what that commentary is and then support it with evidence
from the text.

In-Text Citation Exercise
Using the MLA resources available to you through Leatherby Library, please choose one paragraph from
our reading this term and use it in three different ways as though you were using it in an essay (you may
use a portion of your current essay to complete this assignment if you wish).
1. Use the passage as a block quotation.
2. Use the passage as integrated quotation (within a paragraph).
3. Summarize the passage and cite it in-text.
Main resources page: http://www1.chapman.edu/library/reference/guides/
MLA citation handout: h

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