Long Essay #1 – Contextual Analysis

ENG 102
Instructor- Laura Cline

For this essay, you will write about one or two of the stories
from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. You will
approach the story/ies from either a biographical or historical
angle and will use sources to support your analysis. This
means that you will use either the author’s biography or the
history that surrounds the text as a lens for analyzing the
story. Remember, when you are researching history or
biography, your eventual goal is not only to point out
similarities between the time period or the author’s life and
the story. You are trying to interpret and understand the
story, with the information you find about history or
biography as back up to support your analysis. Sometimes it
is easier to be overly simplistic in biographical criticism, so
try to keep in mind that the narrator is not the author even if
there are some similarities.

Some possible angles for your research:

1. The biography of the author

2. Anti-War movements during Vietnam
3. Particular battles mentioned in the text
4. The history of the draft

Requirements:

Sources: You need at least one source for this paper and it
must be from a book or a library databases. I am teaching
you to be responsible researchers in a profession and most
researchers use peer reviewed journals and published books
to conduct the majority of their research. Please remember
to evaluate your sources for credibility and reliability. Also
keep in mind the policies on plagiarism.

Logistics: This essay must be three FULL pages and onto the
fourth. This is a research paper, so you should be able to
accomplish the length requirement. Your sources must be
cited properly in the text of the paper as well as on your
works cited page.