Topic 1 Instructions (600 Words)

Pick one of the texts that most interests you. Use this text as the subject of your “Weekly Discussion.” Typical page length for your original post should run 750+ words. Your original post should respond to one of the prompts below.  Please do not respond to all of these. Choose one. As you respond, use summary, paraphrase or quotations from the text to explain your ideas. Make sure to include page number citations and works cited citation at the end. The goal of these literature journals is to interact with the text’s big ideas, so please do not just summarize the reading. The prompts below are intended to help guide your personal responses and interactions with the texts you read.

1. What do you feel the historical notes at the book’s end add to the reading of this novel? What does the book’s last line mean to you?
2. What topics or issues does Atwood use in this dystopian novel to investigate or attack?
3. What other books, films or plays do you know which also discuss moral choices and dilemmas?
4. How far do names help to define one’s identity? Why might Atwood choose not to reveal explicitly the real name of Offred?
5. How does Offred describe the sound of her beating heart? What imagery comes to mind from this description?
6. Atwood is always alert to nuances of language and the importance of being aware of shades of meaning. In Chapter forty, Offred says that using the clichéd language of romance, such as that used in old movies, was a way ‘to keep the core of yourself out of reach’. What does she mean by this?
7. Did you like the way Atwood ended the story?
8. Note that The Lord’s Prayer is satirized in Chapter 30. Describe the tone of this version of the prayer, using specific lines to support your analysis.
9. Have you seen the Hulu version of The Handmaid’s Tale? Is the film version similar to or different from the novel? In what ways? What is gained or lost in the translation of the text from print to film?
10. The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in the 1980s, and — whether or not it is feminist — is arguably rooted in at least some second-wave feminism (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. Does considering it in that context change your reading of it at all?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Topic 2 Instructions (900 Words)

For this assignment, your task is to complete an analysis of the novel The Handmaid’s Tale using one of the three prompts below. This means that you will need to make an argument/construct a thesis statement and support it with textual evidence from the novel and outside sources when appropriate to your claim. Feel free to use any research/source material in writing this essay; you may want to find out about the author’s biography or background or what other scholars are saying about the text. You need to cite and properly document and information that is not your own. Be careful to follow the writing prompt below, avoid summarizing the plot; instead focus on the specific claim you intend to make. Your paper will be 900 WORDS, WITH PARENTHETICAL CITATIONS AND A WORKS CITED PAGE.

1. Option 1: Many works of literature, including The Handmaid’s Tale, deal with political or social issues. Write an essay in which you analyze how The Handmaid’s Tale uses literary elements to explore political and social issues.
2. Option 2: Throughout The Handmaid’s TaleOffred considers the multiple meanings and connotations of specific words. What might Atwood be suggesting about the flexibility or lack of specificity of language? What does this obsession with words convey about Offred’s character or situation?
3. Option 3: Explore one or more of the themes and motifs in The Handmaid’s Tale:
   • Identity— No one is referred to by their real name in The Handmaid’s Tale, but their identities have been stripped in many other ways as well. Women are grouped into classes, and the body, especially a fertile female’s body, is more important than one’s personality and mind are.
   • Femininity— Women are repressed and forbidden from working outside the home, reading, and spending money. Their minds are denied, their bodies concealed, and the few fertile women are used as empty childbearing vessels.
   • Love— Many of the characters’ past connections and relationships have been cut off; strong emotions, such as love, have become just memories that are recalled in fleeting moments. Even when characters do have feelings for each other, they try to repress these emotions.
   • Freedom and Confinement—Pretty much everyone in the novel leads a restricted life, but the handmaids are the most confined—rarely permitted to leave their bedrooms and trapped by both their low social status and their fertility. If they do get pregnant, likely by men they do not love, they become trapped in a different way as they are forced to give birth to children they are not allowed to keep.

 

 

 

Assignment Objectives:

Learning objectives are statements that define the expected goal of a curriculum, course, lesson or activity in terms of demonstrable skills or knowledge that will be acquired by a student as a result of instruction. A successful demonstration of skills will show that students are able to:

1. Demonstrate critical thinking and reading skills in discussion and in essays.
2. Understand relationships between meaning in literature and language manipulation, including literal and figurative language, denotation, and connotation.
3. Analyze and evaluate relationships between meaning and the use of literary forms and strategies, including parody, satire, irony, etc.
4. Identify unstated premises and assumptions arising from social, historical, moral, cultural, psychological, or aesthetic contests in which primary texts and applicable criticism exist.
5. Explore a line of inquiry and limit the topic appropriately.
6. Establish and state clearly a unifying thesis or proposition.
7. Select examples, details, and other evidence to support or validate the thesis and other generalizations.
8. Use principles of inductive and deductive logic to support and develop ideas.
9. Avoid logical fallacies in the presentation of an argument.
10. Organize the main parts of an essay and define a sequence that contributes to clarity and coherence.
11. Use precise diction to communicate unambiguously.
12. Correctly use the systems of documentation and bibliography (MLA)