God of Carnage – Dramatic Analysis
Here’s why you do it:
The first major writing project in English 180 is aimed to satisfy these crucial course objectives:
Write well-developed thesis-driven literary analysis papers, some of which incorporate research.
Write clear, grammatically correct sentences in well-organized paragraphs, applying the conventions of MLA formatting and style.
Evaluate the merit of literary works, formulate a stance on readings, and defend it through text, personal experience, and/or current and historical events.
Discuss in writing two or more texts and authors in relation to each other.
Use the basic critical vocabulary and toolset for engaging in literary analysis.
Apply critical theories in both discussion and written work; utilize critical cultural lenses, among them gender, race, ethnicity, class, language, and national identity.
Here’s how to do it:
Use Word doc or docx. You need to provide in-text citation and create a “Works Cited” page in MLA style for all the ideas and texts that you didn’t author.
Here’s what you need to do:
Write a 1500-1750 words literary essay with these purposes in mind:
To interpret Yasmina Reza’s The God of Carnage. Your goal is to explain the play’s possible meanings.
To evaluate Yasmina Reza’s The God of Carnage and Roman Polanski’s Carnage. Your goal is to assess Polanski’s choices as a director rendering Reza’s play for the big screen.
Follow these steps in your work on the project:
Write a thesis statement. A thesis statement is an idea, usually expressed in a single sentence that the rest of your essay will support.
Create an outline to help you organize your ideas before you begin to draft. This is one of the possible ways to structure your essay:
Thesis statement.
First main idea
Supporting evidence or detail.
Supporting evidence or detail.
Second main idea
Supporting evidence or detail.
Supporting evidence or detail.
Etc.
Write an essay using formal English, properly citing sources in MLA formatting style.
A few aspects of the play that you need to cover:
Title. What are you expectations from the play on the basis of its title?
Characters. What are their names, socio-economic status, race, etc? Are there characters that are not physically present and yet are crucial to the play?
Plot. What is the setting of the play? What happens in the play? Do we understand that time has passed, and events have occurred offstage and between scenes?
Style. What do you notice about how the play is written? What is the style of the dialogue? Are the sentences and speeches short or long? Is the vocabulary simple or complex? Do characters ever speak at the same time, or do they always take turns? What is the tone or mood?
Theme: What does the play mean? Can you express its theme or themes?
Staging. What information about staging is specified in the stage directions? Does Polanski use this information? What information about staging is suggested by the play’s dialogue? What is left to the imagination? What decisions does Polanski make that change the play? What props are important in the play? Do they have symbolic meaning? What music does Polanski use? What role does it play in the plot development? What events occur offstage? How are they suggested?
Here’s what your literary essay needs to include to qualify for 25 points:
A title that reflects the content of the essay. Avoid generic “Project 1” title.
Thesis statement that states clearly the claim that the essay will try and prove.
An analysis of Yasmina Reza’s play and Roman Polanski’s movie.
Logical organization of text with the help of paragraphs of 150-200 words in length. The majority of paragraphs need to have topic sentences. It’s a sentence, often at the beginning of a paragraph, that states the paragraph’s main point. The details in the rest of the paragraph should support the topic sentence.
Literary terminology that we have already studied in the course.
A conclusion that doesn’t simply repeat the introduction but reveals the discoveries that you have made in the process of analyzing the literary text(s).
[1] Portable Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. 9th edition. Stephen R. Mandell. Cengage Learning, 2016.
