Literature is an essential part of our culture and how we express ourselves. In this course, you learned how to understand and analyze different types of literature, from poetry to novellas. For this assignment, write an 800-1200-word essay in response to one of the prompts below. Include quotations and textual evidence from the works you’ve chosen and cite them in MLA format. Please cite any Study.com lessons you use as resources (including lesson title and instructor’s name). Your essay must be followed by an MLA style References page with at least 2 sources. Do not include an abstract. Including a cover page is optional. Assignment Prompts Your course reading list includes literary works across three categories: short fiction, poetry and dramatic works. Choose two works from within one of these categories (two poems, two plays, etc.) that have similar themes and compare and contrast how they’re treated and explored. Do the authors use the themes to deliver similar or opposing messages? Use examples from the work you’ve chosen to support your claims. Writers oftentimes create literary works to comment on or criticize aspects of society during the era when they lived. They use literary techniques such as allusion, allegory, and/or satire to veil their criticism in writing. Using either one or two works from your course reading list, write an essay that describes both how the authors used literary techniques to comment about or criticize society, and what aspects of society they focus on. Reading list Reading ListPoetry Select two of the following Shakespearean sonnets to read: Sonnet 18 Sonnet 60 Sonnet 94 Sonnet 116 Sonnet 130 Read all of the following poems: ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats ‘Annabel Lee’ by Edgar Allan Poe ‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning ‘Song of Myself’ by Walt Whitman ‘Funeral Blues’ by W.H. Auden ‘Birches’ by Robert Frost Short Fiction Choose one of the following novellas: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Animal Farm by George Orwell Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton Select two of the following short stories to read: ‘Story of an Hour’ by Kate Chopin ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson ‘The Life to Come’ by E.M. Forster ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ by Ernest Hemingway Dramatic Works Read all of the following dramatic works: Oedipus the King by Sophocles Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry Select one of the following to read: The Crucible by Arthur Miller The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
