Literature is an essential part of our culture and how we express ourselves. In this course, you learned how to understand and analyze different types of literature, from poetry to novellas. For this assignment, write an 800-1200-word essay in response to one of the prompts below. Include quotations and textual evidence from the works you’ve chosen and cite them in MLA format. Your essay must be followed by an MLA style References page with at least 2 sources. Do not include an abstract. Including a cover page is optional.

Prompt:
Writers oftentimes create literary works to comment on or criticize aspects of society during the era when they lived. They use literary techniques such as allusion, allegory, and/or satire to veil their criticism in writing. Using either one or two works from your course reading list, write an essay that describes both how the authors used literary techniques to comment about or criticize society, and what aspects of society they focus on.

Course Reading List:

Poetry

    Select two of the following Shakespearean sonnets to read:
        Sonnet 18
        Sonnet 60
        Sonnet 94
        Sonnet 116
        Sonnet 130
    Read all of the following poems:
        ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats
        ‘Annabel Lee’ by Edgar Allan Poe
        ‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning
        ‘Song of Myself’ by Walt Whitman
        ‘Funeral Blues’ by W.H. Auden
        ‘Birches’ by Robert Frost

Short Fiction

    Choose one of the following novellas:
        Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
        Animal Farm by George Orwell
        Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
    Select two of the following short stories to read:
        ‘Story of an Hour’ by Kate Chopin
        ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
        ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor
        ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson
        ‘The Life to Come’ by E.M. Forster
        ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ by Ernest Hemingway

Dramatic Works

    Read all of the following dramatic works:
        Oedipus the King by Sophocles
        Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
        A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
    Select one of the following to read:
        The Crucible by Arthur Miller
        The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
        The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde