The essay will focus on defining the term “anti-hero” based on our readings ( I will upload fill what we read). You will need to reference and quote from at least two literary texts read in class as examples in support of your definition. You will also need to conduct research in literary journals and be required to reference and quote at least one literary journal article about the texts and/or the term “anti-hero” in the essay. The essay should follow the formatting requirements given in the Assignments Overview and Grading section of the course menu.
You may choose to focus your thesis and essay as a response to one of the following questions, but you may choose to deviate from these prompts, as long as you discuss the definition of anti-heroism and our readings in some way in choosing your topic for the essay. Please read the handout on Literary Writing Tips for information on how to construct a thesis argument for a literary analysis. The thesis should be argumentative but valid (meaning that there is room to debate and disagree with your arguments but that you can prove your argument to be a possibility with evidence from the literary texts and journal article). The thesis should go at the end of the introduction paragraph. The rest of the paper should build that thesis argument with evaluation of specific evidence (scenes, dialogue, quotes, character examples) from the literary text, and/or quotes from the journal article.
Possible Essay Prompts:
1. How do politics help shape the anti-hero? What characteristics of political leaders are admired in various time periods and why? What makes political figures less heroic and more anti-heroic? (You could compare and contrast “The Prince” with Oedipus or Creon as kings, for example.)
2. Discuss whether a character has to be “different, Other, or not normal” in order to be an anti-hero. How do anti-heroes set themselves apart from the cultural norms? Is that deviance the reason why they are anti-heroes OR does the fact that they are anti-heroes make them different? You should clearly identify what makes each character different, and your outside research might be articles on the cultural norms of the time.
3. How does gender influence how a character becomes an anti-hero (or how an author creates one)? AND/OR, how does sexual desire or romantic love create conflict, and therefore, create a reason that characters are deemed anti-heroic rather than heroic?
Tip Sheet for Literary Critical Writing
What is a thesis?
You may have been confused in the past by professors who insist that you have no thesis when you could have sworn that you did. Comments like “this is summary, not analysis” in the body of the paper are common ways of trying to explain what is actually a very tricky distinction.
A thesis is really just one main idea around which you are structuring your whole paper. A reader recognizes it as such because the rest of the paper goes on to support that one idea.
Many of you have received/will receive comments from me indicating that your points/ paragraphs in the body of the paper do not support your thesis, which is the most common problem with the structure of arguments. You should then use the thesis as a guideline, asking yourself if each paragraph you write is supporting and/or developing that thesis.
What makes a good (valid) thesis?
I said above that any statement could conceivably be called a thesis. While this is technically true, there must be a certain level of uncertainty that surrounds your thesis in order for a professor to consider it an acceptable. For example, answering the question “Why does Odysseus continue to struggle?” by arguing that ‘Odysseus struggles on because he longs to return home’ is not a statement that would generate much debate. A good way to gauge the argumentative potential of your thesis is to try to imagine arguing the other side. Could one argue that ‘Odysseus struggles on because he does not long to return home’? Or ‘Odysseus does not struggle on because he longs to return home’? Obviously not. You can begin your thinking about a text with such an answer, but then you must push yourself further in order to generate a good thesis, for example: ‘In struggling to return home Odysseus yearns to return to the self-identity he, as a Greek, feels is preeminently natural: that of husband, king and father.’ Remember, there are three ways to add validity to your arguments: 1) asking “why” or “how” your argument is important after you make your thesis statement, 2) making a value judgment about the literary devices, and 3) considering the rhetorical appeal and impact for the reader.
So what a thesis should do is make a claim about the text that you can imagine provoking debate if it were read aloud to the class. The best theses are the ones which cause your readers to think about the text in a new way, to consider some new angle or interpretation that they hadn’t thought of before.
What is convincing specific evidence and what is unconvincing generalization?
Once you’ve developed a sufficiently argumentative thesis, you’ll have to go about the more difficult task of proving it. Having an interpretative argument in your thesis means that you have to be prepared to prove the claims you are making with evidence from the text.
Convincing evidence and points are those that use elements in the text that I can go look up. Anyone can use them; you are trying to use them in such a way as to convince me that they support your argument about the text.
You’ve no doubt noticed that many professors include warnings to be specific, or in other words, not to generalize. This is really a matter of understanding how to use literary evidence, and what kinds of things count as convincing evidence in a literary critical paper.
What Not to Use as Support:
Generalizing statements, which ignore the text in favor of claims based on common sense or popular knowledge, or something you might remember about a historical period that you apply in such a way as to lump huge amounts of time, peoples, texts, etc. into one undifferentiated mass. For example: “everyone misses home when they are far away” or “all women in Biblical times were oppressed”. There is little, if any, absolute consensus in human reactions to situations, because both human beings and situations are infinitely variable; the same applies to historical periods, which are infinitely variable and complex. Besides which, unless you have read far more about a historical period than I think any of you (or I) have done, then you have no authority to make such a claim. Besides, they’re simply not convincing. Dozens of contradictory examples immediately spring to mind when I read such generalizing statements; personally, I like being far away from home. A quick test to catch generalizations is to ask yourself: could I have made this statement without ever having read this text? If the answer is yes, it’s a generalization.
Plot summary versus argument points
One of the most common things I come across in the body of papers is a lot of plot summary. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s basically a waste of space that could otherwise be used to further your argument. You only have 500 words in which to convince me of your argument; don’t waste 100 of them summarizing a plot I already know. Assume that your reader already knows the text quite well and therefore doesn’t need any rehashing of the plot.
The key difference between a paragraph of plot summary and a paragraph of argument is the structure. In plot summary, there is no one point that the paragraph is clearly meant to prove; instead it reads like a narrative, with no prioritization of one sentence over another.
A paragraph of argument begins with a Point sentence (or two) that 1) clearly supports the thesis, and that 2) is supported by the rest of the sentences in the paragraph, either with 1) Information (a quote from the text) followed by an Explanation of the connection between the quote and the point, or 2) with further explanation &/or development of the point itself.
Quick tips for a tighter argument structure
Avoid the common problem of using evidence in the body of the paper which doesn’t support the stated thesis.
I almost always end up proving something different in my papers than what I started out thinking I was going to prove. Literary Analysis is a way of thinking that is different from both your stream of consciousness or from oral/Facebook discussion. It forces you to think more precisely and thoroughly about your meaning. The reason for this is usually that writing about your evidence makes you analyze it more closely, and often what you find doesn’t actually match what you thought you were going to find. This happens to everyone; the important thing is not to ignore it. This is why editing/ rewriting is so important. Thus, the best way to correct for this phenomenon is:
1) Go back and reread your paper. Does it make sense to you?
2) Double check the logical structure of the paper by making an outline headed by your thesis idea and with each succeeding paragraph summarized under a letter. If the point of your paragraph doesn’t actually support or develop your thesis (or you can’t determine the point), you need to change either your point or your thesis (or figure out the point of the paragraph).
3) Your final paragraph should display a logical development from the thesis idea presented in your opening to a more complex understanding of the topic. Needless to say, if they are radically different, or display an illogical movement from one to the other, your argument has shifted in the course of your writing.
If you’ve ascertained that your structure is logical and coherent, great. If you notice divergences (and you probably will), reevaluate whether you can eliminate or change a supporting paragraph, or if it makes more sense to alter your thesis. Feel free to change your thesis idea after you’ve written the paper if it will better match what you’ve proven in the body.
Miscellaneous Tips
Come up with a clever title that inspires me to read further. “Essay #1” is the assignment, not the title. Academic titles usually use a two line format. The first line displays your creativity and wit, and the second gives us the facts such as author or title and what literary device/theme you will be discussing. The two lines are centered after your heading and are separated by a colon, like so:
Fear and Loathing:
Why Achilles in Homer’s The Iliad is an Anti-hero
Use present tense throughout the paper. When discussing literature, the text itself never changes and therefore remains is permanently “present.”
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