Depression and paranoia.

After reading Poe’s biography (by the editors) and the text by the author, (pp. 731-735, pp. 762-772), you now have some freedom in this week’s Paper Topic. We’ve delved into literary terminology (https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_terms/index.html) and theory a bit, so work to create your own analysis of Poe’s text based on information of your choosing – you can apply his biography to the text, choose a literary theory to use as a lens through which to assess his piece, focus primarily on applying literary terminology (which highlights how Poe writes, rather than what he writes about – the what tends to be more under the umbrella of theory).

Let’s do this in a mini-essay format that follows the five paragraph scheme – a single introductory paragraph that sets up your argument/analysis and includes a thesis, three supporting paragraphs that directly pull from the author’s story and uses quotes as support, and a concluding paragraph that can move in different directions (depending on how you want to close your ideas – some of you may tie all your ideas from the paragraphs together, some of you may want to point out additional questions you would ask if given more space/time, some of you might want to provide an overall assessment of the piece – you have freedom here and everyone will do something a little different with their closing).

Your goal here is to really show understanding on more than a summary level – work through the text in a particular way that you establish in your thesis (to review thesis statements, click here).