Reference no: EM132281428
Literary Reader Response Essay Assignment for College Composition
Objectives: To become familiar with literary concepts and devices, to practice identifying literary devices, to analyze a specific literary text and trace your response, to respond to a text with your emotional, mental, and cognitive response; to think critically about a text, to practice the writing process.
Literary Analysis is another tool in the college writer's wheelhouse that helps build analysis skills. However, literary analysis is different than straight rhetorical analysis because the essay can focus on literary devices like plot, characters, themes/motifs, dialogue, etc. This essay can analyze a text through reader response.
For this assignment, you will be responding to the text The Circle by Dave Eggers. Your goal will be to discuss the text's use of literary devices and your response to the text, either in terms of theme or tone.
Your literary reader response should respond to the following questions:
• What is the title of the work and the author and the basic plot?
• What is the purpose of this text? Why/When was it written?
• What 2-3 literary devices does the author use well, or stand out to you throughout the text?
• What themes does the text bring up that you can respond to?
• What outside contexts can you make connections with in the text?
• What are your emotional, mental, and cognitive responses to the text?
Your response to the text, and if you would recommend it to others to read, will serve as your thesis statement for this essay. Feel free to use your Circle Journals as inspiration for your essay's paragraphs, but do not copy them word-for-word.
Your essay should keep in mind the technical readings from our textbook and should be 5-7 pages in length and be completed in MLA format.
You should use direct quotations from the text to illustrate your examples, and include an MLA works cited page at the end of the paper and use appropriate in-text citations.
Papers with multiple errors in grammar and mechanics that make the ideas unclear or unreadable and/or disregarding MLA format will not be accepted.