A response paper offers an opportunity for you to expand upon your initial thoughts and reactions to a text and to begin a more in-depth analysis of the literature we discuss in class. Each response should be between 600 and 900 words.
To begin, you should select a literary text from our readings. The text you choose should be a text that we have read for class during the week the response is due. Your response should describe how the author depicts one or more important themes from our class discussion and reading so far. In doing so, you should consider one or more of the following questions: How does the text engage or deal with the history, politics, and culture of its time and place? What kinds of assertions does the text seem to make? How is it designed or structured (think about details of the plot, the development of character, the use of dialogue, the point of view of the narrator(s), the structure (or organization) of the story or narrative, important symbols or imagery, the author's writing style, word choice (diction), the arrangement of words (syntax), and any other details that seem to you to be significant), and what does that design contribute to the text's meaning? What does the text have to say about the relationship between literature and politics? You can focus on any of these questions (you need not, of course, respond to all of them) or any other aspects of the text that seem to you to be thematically or aesthetically significant.
A response should...
clearly identify the author and title of the work, following the typographical conventions for doing so
clearly articulate at the beginning your topic for the response
not spend more than a sentence or two summarizing a plot
closely analyze specific passages (or just a passage) that are relevant to the stated topic, explaining at length how the passage helps you to articulate your response to the reading
if we have discussed the particular topic or theme you are writing about in a discussion thread, your response should clearly expand upon or diverge from the substance of our previous discussion
Story : MAGGIE - A Girl of The Streets