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Select from one or more of the following American short story, write a review for your chosen one.       1. Bernard Malamud, “The Magic Barrel”       2. Ursula K. Leguin, “Ile Forest”        3. Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been        4. Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”        5. James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”  Suggested Topics These topics can be used for each paper: 1) Discuss the importance of setting (time and place)  the way in which the time and the place in which each novel is set is a crucial aspect of the narrative.  Include the way in which the setting  determines the reactions and behaviors of the characters in the novel.    2) Short stories are shaped to an unusual degree by their endings. A short story is meant to build to the end, pulling all its material in its final moments, rolling like a snowball into its final form.   Some writers, in fact, think of an end of a story first, a build everything around that.  Select a story (or stories) and discuss it with reference to how it  ends, and the significance of this particular ending.  3) Another important aspect of the short story is its title. Because often it is only at the end of the story that the novel’s title  becomes understandable, a story’s title may be both the first and last words a reader considers. Discuss the significance of the title or titles in a selection o

f short stories.  Discuss how a particular title affects the reader’s perception and understanding of the story.  4) In our short stories, the major character is exposed to people or situations that cause them to doubt their own views of the world, the nature of the assumptions on which old identities are based.  Discuss the experience of disillusionment in one or more stories, and how this sense of profound disenchantment changes the life of the story’s major character. 5)  The idea of the “epiphany” first associated with the work of James  Joyce is now used generally to describe the short story’s ability to produce a revelatory  “moment of truth”  that create a literal or psychological turning point in the narrative. Select the epiphanic moment in one or more short story and discuss its meaning and value. 6) Scottish poet and novelist Jackie Kay has said that  a short story “asks the reader to continue it after it has finished or to begin it before it began. There is space for the reader to come in and imagine and create. “ Imagine what happened before the beginning and/or after the ending in a selection of one or more of the stories on our list.
The post Select from one or more of the following American short story, write a review for your chosen one.       1. Bernard Malamud, “The Magic Barrel”       2. Ursula K. Leguin, “Ile Forest”        3. Joyce Carol Oates, appeared first on Essaybrook.