Project Summary: Chose a topic for your literary essay (view essay assignment details below) and provide a detailed description of what you hope to accomplish within your paper. For your essay, write a literary analysis on any of the course readings. Come up with a thesis statement or question and support/answer it in a 2-3 paged, double-spaced, typed essay. Use specific examples from the text(s) to support your answers. Utilize proper MLA in-text citation and documentation guidelines. After the second week of classes please email me your essay idea, you must first present it to me for approval before beginning. For examples some ideas may include: Parallels of Pain- Parsing the similarities and differences between J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" and Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis". These two coming-of-age narratives (a novel and an animated film) share many details including urban landscapes, countries impacted by war, main character's intimately effected by death, and meteoric, ambivalent relationships with the opposite sex. However, there are powerful differences between the two tales as well. This essay will carefully delineate these similarities and differences, while drawing on literary criticism for comparisons of deeper meanings. Don't Tread on Me- Three tales of women living with institutional oppression will be compared for similarities and differences of experience, artistic intent, and tone of outcome. Works considered through a filter of Feminist Criticism will be "The Toilet", "Persepolis", and selections from "Don't Let's Go to the Dog's Tonight". Escaping Expectations- This essay will parse the structural and thematic parallels between "The Toilet" and "Wuthering Heights", examining the expectations for women in both cultures and the relative availability of escape. Tip Me Over and Pour Me Out- Verb selection is a critical part of sentence structure, which provides much of the rhythm and tone that bring character and style to literary work. By isolating and examining the verbs selected by multiple writers in this course, it will be possible to examine what the style of verbs selected bring to each author's work, what these words contribute to tone and how these choices morphologically enhance meaning.