Monday, September 21, 2009

AP--Paper on additional short story

In addition to the short essay on the story you have been assigned, your final assignment for our study of short fiction is to research and write a paper on a story you choose based on your own interest. Listed below are the requirements and guidelines for this assignment:

• Your story must have been published for the first time in the last 5 years, that is 2005 to the present.

• Your story must have actually been “published”; no self-published internet pieces by amateur writers, please.

• Since I am asking you to research the author and write an analysis of the story, I strongly suggest that you read several stories,  minimum three, from a variety of sources, then choose the one you enjoyed the most. As you read new stories, I encourage you to post short responses to them as part of your weekly blogs commenting on our assigned short stories.

• Published short stories are not as abundant as they were 50 or 75 years ago. Nevertheless, you may find excellent material in a variety of places: New Yorker magazine publishes short stories regularly, and Mr.Thommen has set over 100 issues out in the reference section of the library. Also, Mr. Thommen has begun a subscription to a periodical called One Story, each issue of which contains, you guessed it, a single short story. The Best American Short Stories series publishes a new edition every year (guest editor for the 2007 edition was Stephen King), and I have ordered copies of the two most recent collections. Finally, literary journals in libraries often contain new stories, and both single-author and anthology collections of stories may be found in bookstores as well. For example, Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake on my summer reading list, has a new story collection called Unaccustomed Earth.

• The written portion of the assignment is a paper of approximately 5 pages (1500 words) in which you cover three key points: your reasons for choosing the story, some biographical background on the writer, and an analysis of the story using the methods and vocabulary we have discussed and practiced in class.

• Drafts of your papers are due in class Thursday October 16. Final papers are due, both hard copy and turnitin.com, on Friday, October 17.