We the Animals

The third essay you write for this class will be a 4-page essay.  Anything shorter than four full pages is incomplete and thus your score will be adversely affected.  Your essay will be a close reading of the novel We the Animals, meaning you will spend little time summarizing (I already know what the story is about and what happens in it).  To support your arguments and ideas, you will need to use direct quotations and/or paraphrases, which you will then need to cite according to MLA guidelines.  Because this is such a short essay, you may not use block quotations (any quotation longer than 5 lines).  You must use two outside scholarly/peer-reviewed articles from the OC library resources such as ProQuest, Academic Search Elite, or JSTOR.  Be sure to provide analysis of the outside research you are incorporating into the text and its importance to the ideas you are presenting in order to help the reader better understand your argument.

Also, you are expected to develop an original argument, therefore it IS NOT okay to merely repeat what has been said in class.  Using notes from lecture to support what you have to say is fine, but basing your paper on what we’ve said in class is not original and thus considered plagiarism. Choose one of the prompts below:

Psychoanalyze two of the characters from We the Animals, BUT, one of them cannot be the narrator. Look at Week 6 for help with this. In your paper, do not summarize Psychoanalysis (though you may briefly introduce it) and do not summarize the novel for me; rather, analyze and interpret the characters of your choosing the way a psychoanalyst would (this will require you to do research on psychoanalytical theory. Class notes and what we’ve discussed will not suffice for a four-page paper). Bear in mind that psychoanalytical criticism is based on Freudian theory. Also, it is not enough to simply say, “Here is an example of id,” or “Here is an example of ego” (so forth). You need to take the next step and say why this is important/significant.