Final Draft Due: Saturday July 31, 11:59 p.m., uploaded to Canvas as a Word document
Length: 5-6 pages plus Works Cited page; there is no need to do outside research
Format: MLA essay format (double-spaced, Times New Roman 12 pt., 1 inch margins)
Value of this Essay: this essay counts for 25% of your final grade
Your second paper must make an argument about Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. You have two options for this assignment. Choose one or the other; do not do both.
OPTION 1 – Develop Your Own Prompt: If you choose this option, you must run your idea by me over email or by text. Identify a set of textual echoes or a productive tension in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Analyze and make an argument about the significance of the textual echoes in and for the text. Perform a close reading that offers a claim in response to the textual echoes you have identified. Your reading must be based on textual evidence, so craft an interpretation that is focused on several selected passages, considering how these passages relate to form (narrative, syntactical, or structural). You cannot, and should not try to take account of every moment in which your key word appears. Instead, focus on a repeated theme, image, or word. This will require you to make choices about which textual data is most convincing for your argument. Be sure to offer a debatable claim (argument, thesis) in response to the problem you have identified.
Here are some questions to consider, which you may choose to address or take another direction. You need not answer all of the questions. These are thinking points to get you started. Alternatively, you may think of your own questions and pursue those instead:
What evidence suggests that these details, passages, and moments are connected, and that we are meant to think of them in connection to each other?
What is interesting or important about each of these textual echoes?
How does seeing them as connected open up new ways to read them?
What’s at stake for the text by including these details, passages, or moments?
How does the key word, textual echo, detail, passage, or moment serve the author’s argument as you understand it?
How does focusing on the key word you’ve chosen suggest a new way of understanding the text?