Critical thinking and analytical skills
Paper details: I would like to use “The Babysitter” by Robert Coover, The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino, and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut to explore the idea of failure or impossibility of telling a story. Specifically, I would like to explore how fabulation in all three stories plays a role in their disjointed nature and inability to effectively tell the whole truth. This is a Postmodern Literature course, so it is very abstract. I have copied and pasted the instructor’s guidelines below:
Title and Topic: use title effectively: definitive and playful
Clarity of writing. Transcribe sublime ideas into presentable and appropriate form.
Clarity of ideas and logical argument, focused topic, development, and relevance.
Focus on one theme or issue in two novels or two novel and a short story. (not the entire book or everything in the novel nor single author, but a specific topic represented by three different authors) Avoid general coverage of everything.
Interpretation and analysis, not retelling the story but critical analysis of it. Critical thinking and analytical skills.
Personal perspective and personal voice: originality and your position
Themes or issues of postmodern narratives: history, memory and forgetting; multiple narrative structure; reading as rewriting; failure or impossibility of telling the story; representation and displacement; absence and narrative;
Reference: 3 references—“secondary,” critical/academic/scholarly materials. (To frame an argument, to contextualize a topic, to have a dialogue with other voices, etc.)
MLA style of writing, documentation and quotations
10. 5 pages of writing, plus the works cited page.
