The Sorrows of Young Werther Textual Analysis

For this assignment, your task is to write a longer analytical paper (6-8 pages) on a single text that we’ve read thus far in the course. Your challenge here is to translate your close reading skills that you’ve developed over the last several weeks to sustain an argument. This paper, then, should still, at its core, be primarily based on your closely reading the text you’ve chosen. The difference between this assignment and the previous ones is its grounding in an interpretive claim.

An interpretive claim  a thesis statement, more or less is an original idea about a work that you will support throughout your paper with textual evidence. Your claim should be based in the observation of a pattern or a problem that presents itself at various points in a text. Patterns can wear a diverse set of “disguises” you might be interested in formal elements of a text, for example: narrative/perspective, setting, characterization, even something as seemingly minute as the repetition of a single word in different contexts. You could, alternatively, focus more on the content of the text: from the “big” conceptual terms like gender or race to the perhaps smaller-scale representation of affects, feelings, etc.