For this assignment we are offering a selection of topics that you might explore in either The House on Mango Street, Magic City or My Ántonia.  (Later in the semester we will work on more explicitly comparative topics.)  Select one of these topics and develop an essay that is focused on a clearly defined central thesis and is supported by detailed moments of close reading.  Aim for clear and persuasive interpretation, analysis, and argument; try to avoid summary and ungrounded assertions.  Details convince, especially fresh ones, so in addition to focusing on specific examples and quotations from the text be sure to move beyond any discussion you may already have had in precept (or heard in lecture) concerning a particular image or topic. If you would like to propose a topic of your own, you may  -- but you must consult with your preceptor in advance for approval.

1. In both The House on Mango Street and Magic City, Sandra Cisneros and Yusef Komunyakaa repeat a number of concrete images.  These images do more than simply provide realistic description; they often quite suggestively help communicate the stories' or poems' most important issues.  Choose one of these texts, and then choose a specific image and discuss its significance in that text.  How does Cisneros or Komunyakaa use this particular image?  Why does it appear where it does?  Does the role of this image stay constant in the book, or does it change or develop?  How?  What important issue or issues does this image help to clarify, or perhaps to complicate?  How does it do so?  Keep in mind that the aim of the essay is not to prove that Cisneros or Komunyakaa repeatedly uses a particular image—that's a given—but to suggest how and perhaps why he or she uses that image.  We've selected a few images from each text that you might consider tracing (see below).  Pick one; or you may choose your own image, though if you do so please consult with your preceptor before you begin writing.

--for The House on Mango Street: windows; shoes; stars; trees
--for Magic City: bridges; rivers (or other bodies of water); fire; mirrors

2. In his poetry Komunyakaa frequently brings together apparent opposites, often a conjunction of a positive and a negative: for example, beauty and violence, love and hunger, strength and failure.  Identify such a conjunction and discuss its effect in one or two poems.  How do these opposites participate in each other?  Is the conjunction a stand-off, a kind of stasis?  Or does it lead to something new?

3. Mechanical devices, particularly tools of labor, appear frequently in both Magic City (wood mills, claw hammers, etc.) and My Ántonia (plows, threshers, etc.).  Discuss one of these tools or machines with relation to one of the following: gender and/or sexuality; memory; writing; maturation.

4. In both Magic City and My Ántonia, a striking detail that embodies transgression or "crossing" repeatedly emerges: crossdressing.  Discuss the significance of this motif in one of these texts, especially with regard to broader questions of identity, gender, and/or the process of coming-of-age.

5. Both Magic City and My Ántonia are memoirs -- texts representing lives as explicitly remembered events.  With special attention to formal characteristics like tone, grammar, and register, discuss how one of these texts renders memory and what effects remembrance has on narrative structure and/or on our experience of the narrator.

Due dates:
• Topic & tentative idea/argument (1 paragraph): Tues., 7/31: bring to writing workshop
• Rough draft (3-4 pages) -- Thurs., 8/2: bring to writing workshop
• Final draft (4-5 pages) -- Friday, 8/3: due at lecture

Mechanics: Typed, double-spaced, standard font and 1" margins
 

Click HERE for links to useful electronic handouts on writing
 

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