Instruction
Your analysis of an assigned text listed on the Course Schedule might focus on some of the topics from one of the many stories you read this semester. For example, you can look at the unfairness of social-economic status (“The Lesson”), racial identity (“Recitatif”), materialism (“The Necklace”) body image (“The Birthmark”), racism (“Barn Burning”), recidivism or life after imprisonment (Imperial Dreams-film), marriage and oppression (“The Story of an Hour”), etc. Note: These are just a few of many ideas! You may write about any text we will read this semester (as long as your topic focuses on engaging and significant social, cultural, racial, (etc.) issue.
Appropriate Secondary Sources
Students must properly integrate material from three secondary sources into their analysis in a way that gives credit to the authors whose ideas and the language they are incorporating. This is not a research paper or a summary of the work of literature, but a paper in which you draw on secondary sources to communicate an interpretive argument about your chosen text.
Scholarly books or book chapters (it’s a good bet a book is scholarly if it’s published by an academic press, such as Duke University Press; if you’re not sure, ask your instructor)
Scholarly articles (e.g., academic articles published in peer-reviewed journals; you can find citations for these articles by using the MLA International Bibliography database, JSTOR, or Project Muse—all of which UTA’s library gives you access to online)
National newspapers (e.g., New York Times, HuffBlackVoices, USA Today, Houston Chronicle)
Print magazines (e.g., New Yorker, Essence, Newsweek)
Online magazines (e.g., Slate, Salon)
Students interested in using a source that isn’t listed here should check with their instructor. Wikipedia, Sparknotes, Shmoop, sites that summarize the text, are not appropriate secondary sources.