FIRST, READ THIS POWERPOINT ON THESIS STATEMENTS

WRITE: Based on a close reading of Ben Fountain’s novel and per the CRRA prompt, compose a thesis statement for the essay. Keep in mind that the thesis should be 1-2 sentences, and should answer the questions of the prompt about genre and conventions as posed below:

From the CRRA Essay Prompt (Thesis questions, which your thesis should answer):

1) How does Fountain’s novel align within a specific genre and its conventions AND subvert (or break) the conventions of the genre? For example, does Fountain both align and subvert within the same genre or does he align within one genre and subvert or break a convention within another genre?

2) How does this combination of both the alignment and subversion of these conventions work to convey his implied purpose and/or message to his primarily adult male, educated audience? In crafting your response, you should also consider how Ben Fountain (the rhetor) acknowledges, uses, manipulates, and responds to genre conventions in his novel, and for what implied purpose and/or message. What might Fountain (as the rhetor) be implicitly trying to say or accomplish through the text?

SECONDLY, write about an essay with your thesis. You will be responsible for adhering to MLA format and documentation style.

DUE DATES:

Working Draft: Tuesday, April 14th, by 11:59 PM

Peer Review is due by Thursday, April 16th, 11:59 pm (instructions to follow at a later date)

Peer Review is required for all essay assignments, and each student will be automatically assigned two peer reviewers once you have uploaded your draft prior to the submittal date and time. If you miss the deadline, you miss peer review, which is part of your Class Community grade.

Final CRRA: Sunday, April 19th, by 11:59 PM (to a different assignment shell)

(1) Upload your working draft/final draft as a Word Document (No PDF files. No PAGES documents) to the Canvas assignment shell. You must upload a DOC. or DOCX. – No exceptions.

(2) Upload the same working draft/final draft to Turnitin.com into the Critical Reading Response assignment folder, and then when it’s available, review your Originality Report for errors in citation.

PRIMARY SOURCE: Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, pages 1-107.

SECONDARY SOURCES:

Wallis R. Sanborn’s “Introduction” and “Epilogue” to The American Novel of War, and “On Satire and Parody: The Importance of Being Ironic” by Roger J. Kreuz and Richard M. Roberts. (These are the only secondary sources that you should need.)

PURPOSE:

This assignment is intended for you to practice the building blocks of effective analytical writing: making claims and providing evidence in the context of a response to Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. In several connected paragraphs, you’ll develop a response to some preliminary questions about genre and conventions. In writing this response, you should demonstrate awareness and understanding of the text’s relationship to the conventions of its genre and/or the context in which the given text was produced, and to demonstrate an ability to analyze the text based on that understanding.

ASSIGNMENT PROMPT:

This assignment begins with the question of genre. In Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, write a thesis-driven essay that answers the following questions:

1) How does Fountain’s novel align within a specific genre and its conventions AND subvert (or break) the conventions of the genre? For example, does Fountain both align and subvert within the same genre or does he align within one genre and subvert or break a convention within another genre?

2) How does this combination of both the alignment and subversion of these conventions work to convey his implied purpose and/or message to his primarily adult male, educated audience? In crafting your response, you should also consider how Ben Fountain (the rhetor) acknowledges, uses, manipulates, and responds to genre conventions in his novel, and for what implied purpose and/or message. What might Fountain (as the rhetor) be implicitly trying to say or accomplish through the text?

IMPORTANT: For the purposes of this class, Fountain’s book may be categorized into at least two genres: war and satire. Thus, you are restricted to addressing the genre of the American war novel and/or the genre of satire. However, consider that this is a very short paper, and as such, you’ll more than likely need to narrow your focus.

REQUIREMENTS:

You are required to utilize at least one of the secondary sources noted above, and you are responsible for supporting your response through careful selection and thorough analysis of textual evidence (specific quotes from Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, pages 1-107). You should not need to perform any additional outside research, especially if you have read the above texts that I’ve assigned for this assignment.

Multiple drafts, peer review and revision are required elements of the assignment. The final essay must be 950-1000 words long, and because this is an academic assignment in the School of Humanities, your manuscript should closely follow Modern Language Association (MLA) formatting and documentation style. The writing should be error-free and the language in the tone of formal academic discourse.

AUDIENCE:

You are writing an academic paper in the School of Humanities, thus your audience is comprised of your peers and the instructor.

FORMATTING REQUIREMENTS:

Basic MLA Format: typed, double-spaced, with one inch margins on all sides, left margin should be ragged right; page numbers should be in the top right corner as such: Student Last Name 1; Use TIMES NEW ROMAN, font size 12; in the top left corner include your full name, date, and class time. Please type your word count at the top of the first page of your draft. While we will discuss formatting in class, also review: OWL Purdue, MLA Formatting and Style Guide.

MLA IN-TEXT CITATIONS and/or attributive tags must be utilized for any summary, paraphrases or direct quotes taken from an outside source. Your in-text citations should have a corresponding entry on a Works Cited page. Your Works Cited page should be on page 4 of the Working Draft. Also include your Working Bibliography as the last page.

FURTHER REQUIREMENTS FOR THE CRRA WORKING AND FINAL DRAFTS

Follow the Conventions of Academic Writing:

? Write in present tense. According to Writing from A to Z, “when you write about literature or other works of art, verbs normally should be in the literary present. This convention is based on the idea that the work continues to exist in the present even if the author, director, or artist is long dead” (Ebest).

? Write using the third person perspective (e.g., specify the subject of every sentence). For example, the following sentence is written in third person: Almond uses an extended metaphor based on religion to convey his message that professional sports has become the new religion in America. Name the rhetors involved. Do not use “I,” “you,” ” we,” or “us” statements. Writing in the third person seems less biased than writing in first person.

? When introducing authors for the first time, write his or her full name; thereafter, only write his or her last name.

? Title: It is a convention of academic writing to title the essay. The title should reflect your thesis, which makes an argument about the use of genre and genre conventions in the text.

Your INTRODUCTION should include the following:

Your introduction is the first paragraph of your essay, and as such, should contextualize or “set up” the topic and text for the reader. Following the hook and the introduction of the author, items 4-7 may be written in any order that you find suitable to setting up your thesis.

? A hook – this is the first sentence of your essay. The hook can be in the form of a brief anecdote, surprising statement, statistic, or fact that catches the reader’s interest in the topic. Please do not use questions as the opening sentence of your essay. The hook should relate to the topic of your essay. If you use a quote for the first sentence, remember to use the Three Step Method for Integration!

? Write a smooth transition from the hook into the rest of the introduction. This may take one or two sentences.

? Introduce the rhetor (Ben Fountain) using his full name, and briefly describe his credentials, and the full title of his text. Hereafter, only refer to the rhetor by his last name.

? Contextualize the novel. In other words, what is the time and place in which the novel is set? What major events are occurring as a part of the novel? (e.g., Iraq war, 9-11, terrorism). In addition, you may need to contextualize an idea or concept.

? Offer a very brief plot summary of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk thus far in the book (to page 107). Write no more than two sentences.

? Briefly define the genre and the conventions of that genre that you plan to address in your thesis. This is a good place to utilize one of the secondary sources such as Sanborn’s “Introduction” to The American Novel of War or Kreuz/Roberts’ “On Satire and Parody: The Importance of Being Ironic.”

? Identify and specifically describe Fountain’s primary audience. This is the same audience to which your thesis and body paragraphs should address and analyze. As we discussed in class, Fountain’s audience is primarily comprised of mature, educated, middle class men who have an interest in both sports and the military.

? THESIS: Your thesis is a part of the introductory paragraph; it should be the last one or two sentences of the introductory paragraph. Do not repeat information in the thesis that you’ve already addressed based on the above elements of the introduction. So once you’ve defined the genre, you won’t want to repeat that information in the thesis.

o Your thesis should answer the questions presented in the CRRA prompt (per the handout). Remember to narrow your focus. Attempting to analyze more than two conventions will probably result in a paper without much substance.

YOUR ANALYTICAL BODY PARAGRAPHS:

? Each paragraph should begin with an assertive topic sentence that makes a debatable claim about how the use of the convention. (We will talk more about topic sentences in class).

? Try to follow “Ingredients for a Good Paragraph”; see AGWR, Chapter 6, pp. 120-122. This was assigned reading, and you should aim towards following this as a template for your analytical paragraphs.

? Follow the Three-Step Method for Integration to distinguish your use of sources from your own writing (see AGWR, Chapter 6, pp. 125-129).

? As a general rule, you’ll analyze one or two brief quotations (or textual examples) per paragraph. The quotations should be an example how the convention works in the novel.

? Analysis versus Summary: Paraphrasing or summarizing the novel (or any text) is not analysis. You must analyze direct quotations as a way to demonstrate your claims about how Fountain utilizes generic conventions in his novel. In other words, provide examples from the novel, and explain HOW those examples demonstrate a particular convention. Make sure to explain in detail HOW the direct quote or paraphrase from a source works to support your claim about the genre and/or a generic convention.

? Summary: On occasion, a summary of the novel does serve a rhetorical purpose. For example, when you need to provide context prior to providing textual evidence (quote). You should briefly summarize the text to show where the quote is situated within the novel. Keep in mind what your reader needs to know and what they might want to know prior to presenting your textual evidence (quote). Just remember that all summaries and paraphrase from the novel must be cited with an in-text citation, which includes the page number.

? Each time you analyze a convention, you should also address how this convention appeals to Fountain’s audience. As a way to analyze the effects on Fountain’s audience, you might consider the audience’s cultural assumptions, socioeconomic class, level of education, particular age, race, gender, religion, etc. Here are two questions to ask yourself as you analyze audience. You will not answer both of these questions in your analysis, but perhaps choose one as a way to help you keep focused on the effect of the convention on Fountain’s audience:

(1) What effect does Fountain intend to produce by utilizing this convention given his audience?

OR

(2) How does the use of this convention influence/move/persuade/convince Fountain’s audience to accept his implied purpose or message?

YOUR CONCLUSION FOR THE CRRA GENRE AND CONVENTIONS ESSAY:

Conclusions can best be understood as complements to introductions. In both, writers are concerned with the essay as a whole more than any given part. Yet, endings are often the toughest part of an essay to write. The easy way out is to repeat what you have said earlier. But this is a short argument (three – four pages), so your readers have not forgotten your main points by the time they get to the end of your essay. Instead, think of a way to conclude that will be emphatic rather than sleep inducing. You want to end on a strong note. That is, do not merely summarize your thesis in your conclusion; do not recap the entire essay in your conclusion. Instead, think about writing something your readers can take away with them.

? Larger Significance Conclusion: Try to write a conclusion that integrates and synthesizes the main ideas of the paper and suggests a larger application or significance as related to the use of rhetoric (genre and conventions). For example, how does Fountain’s use of genre and generic conventions help pave the way for future writers of the American novel of war? If you’re addressing satire, what is the larger significance of Fountain’s use of satire?