• Having read and annotated one of the texts from the syllabus, explore a specific theme in mandatory 600-700 words (5 ¶s in a mature font) by focusing on a particular motif that will be an adequate representative of its time period: historical, religious, political, literary, etc., in relation to life nowadays.

• To support your thesis, choose a concept directly discussed or mentioned in the text.

• Make sure that your thesis adheres to one of the three options from the thesis handout (link). The first part of the thesis will be specific to the text itself and the second part will go beyond the text itself to show something more about concrete examples from life nowadays (do not present a generic social/societal commentary). MANDATORY ESSAY ORGANIZATION (link).

• Italicize, bold or underline the thesis statement.

• The first part of each of the argument paragraphs will analyze the text, and the second part will relate that analysis to precise examples from life nowadays (link).

• The introductory ¶ should have only two sentences, one of which will be the thesis statement.

• The concluding paragraph will have one or two sentences.

• This is to be your own, original work, without referring to any outside sources or resources, but this is not an "I" paper.

• Consulting any outside sources or resources might result in forfeiting credit for this assignment.

• Use present tense.

• Do not use "you."

• Do not focus on the literary devices used by the author (e.g., diction, tone, irony, symbolism, metaphor) but rather on the actual content.

• Include a brief heading with your name, assignment, date, course and word count in the upper left corner.

• To be eligible for credit, the completed assignment MUST meet all of the above conditions. If any requirement from the prompt is not met, the assignment will be ineligible for credit. 

• Here are some examples of concepts for this paper:

• The mandatory rough draft must be submitted through the D2L Brightspace assignments dropbox under Rough Major Paper by the deadline for the final draft to earn credit.

• Submit your final version through the D2L Brightspace assignments dropbox under Major Paper by the due date.

• No title page is necessary, but title your essay in an original manner (not the title of the text).

• Detailed feedback about the submitted paper will be provided in D2L.

• The content of the paper will be graded based on its organization, thesis, paragraph structure, quality of arguments, analysis strength and lack of summary. Each type (not each occurrence) of major grammatical errors (e.g., run-on, pronoun-antecedent agreement, fragment, misplaced modifier, parallelism, verb form, subject-verb agreement, 3 x spelling errors) will equal a deduction of 10 points.

• As always, if you have any questions, please utilize the D2L forum.

The texts:

The Author, The Epic of Gilgamesh

Euripides, Medea
Confucius, The Analects (choose one section or three sections)
The Author, The Ramayana of Valmiki

Ovid, Metamorphoses (choose one transformation)
The Qur'an (choose one sura)

The 1001 Nights (choose one tale)
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (choose one tale)
Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

Cervantes, Don Quixote
Machiavelli, The Prince
Shakespeare, The Tempest