Final Essay Assessment

You will write individual answers to the questions rather than one essay. In order to keep up with your word count, though, please don’t repeat the questions. Just number your discussions to correspond with the questions.

You may look up quotes from the reading assignments to help with your answers, but you should use only a minimal number of quotes in your answers. For the most part, paraphrase and summarize what you have read. These discussions should reflect your own writing and your own reasoning process.

Don’t forget that you need to answer the questions, and you need to be analytical. Use summary from the stories to show that you know the stories, but go beyond summary into analysis to show that you understand the importance of the ideas in the stories.

1. Analyze the literary technique of the unreliable narrator in at least two stories by Edgar Allan Poe. An unreliable narrator in a piece of fiction is a narrator we aren’t sure we can trust to tell us the truth, either because the narrator is lying or because the narrator is incapable of understanding the truth. How do unreliable narrators contribute to the sense of mystery is Poe’s stories? How is the story changed by being told from the point of view of a villain?

2. What’s Stephen King’s explanation for why we crave horror? How can this apply to an Edgar Allan Poe story such as “The Tell Tale Heart”? What are the elements of psychological horror in this story or in other stories by Poe or Irving that could be considered early examples of horror fiction?

3. Pick a poem that you have read for class this semester by Emily Dickinson to explicate (analyze line-by-line). Analyze the meaning of the lines, how they relate to the overall meaning of the poem, and how they relate to what you know about Emily Dickinson and her poetry overall.

4. Analyze the text of Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and/or his “Second Inaugural Address.” What are the most important concepts in these speeches?