Description
you will be asked to close read a specific extract from a text. Choose
one excerpt to analyze from the three passages below. This will allow you to use the skills
that you have gained in the course along with the themes we have discussed to come up with an
argumentative thesis based on a close reading of the selection. Your essay should primarily focus
on the excerpt at hand. Your thesis should address the form of the passage and why it is
significant to the overall text. How do its formal elements shape its meaning? What kinds of
literary devices and narrative/theatrical strategies does it use?
Passage 1: “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981)” by
Hai-Dang Phan
Reading Ransom’s “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,”
a poem about a “young girl’s death,” as my father notes,
how could he not have been “vexed at her brown study /
Lying so primly propped,” since he never properly observed
(I realize this just now) his own daughter’s wake.
Lấy làm ngạc nhiên về is what it means to be astonished.
Her name was Đông Xưa, Ancient Winter, but at home she’s Bebe.
“There was such speed in her little body, / And such lightness
in her footfall, / It is no wonder her brown study / Astonishes
us all.” In the photo of her that hangs in my parents’ house
she is always fourteen months old and staring into the future.
In “reeducation camp” he had to believe she was alive
because my mother on visits “took arms against her shadow.”
Did the memory of those days sweep over him like a leaf storm
from the pages of a forgotten autumn? Lost in the margins,
I’m reading the way I discourage my students from reading.
But this is “how we deal with death,” his black pen replies.
Assume there is a reason for everything, instructs a green asterisk.
Then between pp. 896-97, opened to Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,”
I pick out a newspaper clipping, small as a stamp, an old listing
from the 404-Employment Opps State of Minnesota, and read:
For current job opportunities dial (612) 297-3180. Answered 24 hrs.
When I dial, the automated female voice on the other end
tells me I have reached a non-working number.
