Literary Analysis – Promts

Prompts- Literary Analysis

Your second paper will be a 3-5 page literary analysis of one or more of the texts we have covered since our section on emancipation narratives. This paper is NOT a research paper, so no secondary sources are necessary. However, you will need to use MLA parenthetical citation for direct quotes and for passages you paraphrase or summarize. PROMPTS (choose one):1. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “When Malindy Sings” and “We Were the Mask” in many ways represent the writer’s “double-consciousness.” Write an essay that explains W.E.B. DuBois’s notion of double-consciousness and analyze Dunbar’s poetry as an example of this “two-ness.”2. Alain Locke’s “The New Negro” and Marita Bonner’s “On Being Young—A Woman—and Colored” discuss the New Negro Movement from different perspectives.

Write an essay that explores their different takes on urban migration, gender, and creative expression.3. Anna Julia Cooper’s “Womanhood: A Vital Element …” and DuBois’s “The Damnation of Women” outline the challenges black women faced during the Reconstruction era. The contradiction that expectations of respectability and society’s hyper sexualization of black women presented persisted in the New Negro era, as Bonner’s prose piece “On Being Young …” indicates. Write an essay that explores this paradox. Use Cooper, DuBois, and Bonner to support you.4. Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” confronts race, class, and domestic violence in the 1920s. Truly Hurston was ahead of her time in framing black women’s lives through an intersectional lens.

Further Instructions

Write an essay that explores “Sweat” as an early black feminist text. What makes “Sweat” useful for thinking about black women’s lives in southern communities?5. Both Jean Toomer’s “Song of the Sun” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” concern black inheritance. Toomer locates black roots in the South and positions himself as a prodigal son that has returned to claim his birthright. Cullen looks to Africa for affirmation but questions the accessibility of the far-off continent. Explore the issue of inheritance in these two poems. Pay close attention to the natural imagery these poets use. How do both poems express nostalgia or longing for a past that is disappearing or irretrievable?

Attached Files

 |

Powered by WordPress and MagTheme