Cultural Analysis Essay
This essay will further develop your close reading and analytical skills by applying them to a cultural analysis of another text. Culture is defined as that body of shared beliefs, histories, and experiences of a group that includes knowledge, attitudes, arts, morals, laws, customs, and language. Furthermore, we can also understand culture as a tenuous accomplishment that various members of a society work at explaining, enforcing, exploiting, or resisting—consider some of the many essays we have read so far. A cultural analysis might best be described as the study of historical, political, social, and economic forces that structure the relations within a culture or society. This assignment will challenge you to rethink what Southern grotesque and/or the Catholic novelist culture mean. I want you to explore the relationship between assumptions of these cultures (or prevailing dominant cultural beliefs and values) and how the knowledge you’ve gained in this class might challenge some of those assumptions.
Using O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners as an interpretive lens, choose a particular Southern grotesque short story OR a short story by a Catholic writer to analyze. You will be asked to choose and analyze this secondary text by the standards that O’Connor lays out in Mystery and Manners. It is also required to use other sources to support your reading of the primary text (Mystery and Manners) and the short story you choose.
Simply put, does the chosen Southern grotesque short story hold up to O’Connor’s explanation of the genre? How so? Use specific examples from your chosen story and reference Mystery and Manners and one other source to support your claims.
Short Story and Self-Reflective Analysis
This will be both a self-reflective analysis as well as a textual analysis. The short stories chosen for this particular essay are meant to question or even challenge dominant, mainstream assumptions (you should try to list some of these assumptions before you begin your paper). Furthermore, I have chosen these movies particularly because they form a dialogue with O’Connor’s descriptions about the Southern/Catholic culture, whether they agree with her or not.
Choose one short story from the following list:
“A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner
“Why I Live at the P.O.” by Eudora Welty
“A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud” by Carson McCullers
“The Ugliest Pilgrim” by Doris Betts
“The Flowers” by Alice Walker
Analyze the way the short story challenges or agrees with the culture that O’Connor describes throughout Mystery and Manners. The focus of this particular assignment will be on the cultural context of the text itself. You will look for the text’s relationship to the meaning you create as a reader situated in a particular culture that has reading experiences, expectations, and a personal history as a result of a particular cultural perspective. In other words, this is a self-reflective essay—one that asks you to question how you arrived at that particular reading of the text. How did your life experiences affect your interpretation of the text?
Details:
Write a well-organized, thought-out, critical analysis essay with MLA bibliography. It should be 6-8 pages standard academic format—double-spaced, approximately one-inch margins, 12-point Times New Roman font, and no cover page. Aside from the essays assigned, make use of at least one other source. Make sure to have 2 extra copies for peer critique workshops.
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