Comparison of Two Works

Write an analytic paper comparing any 2 of the works we have covered in class. This essay should support an original/arguable thesis that illuminates one work by revealing how it is similar/dissimilar to another. The comparison must be meaningful, however. In other words, the two works must have a significant commonality— in theme, form, style, or subject matter— in order for the pairing to make sense. Be sure to structure your paper so that the lines of comparison are clear throughout. You may choose 2 poems, a poem and a story, or 2 stories for this assignment. Spend plenty of time in pre-writing, listing similarities and differences and selecting those that are the most noteworthy for making an overall point about how one compares to the other. Put your ideas into outline form before drafting, following either a point-by-point or text-by-text structure (refer to the “Writing a Comparative Analysis” link). Your completed essay should be roughly 3-4 pages long (750-1000 words), and it must follow current MLA format. Your choices of texts are the following: Stories: “Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner “Hills like White Elephants,” Ernest Hemingway “Cask of Amontillado,” Edgar Allan Poe “A&P,” John Updike “A Handful of Dates,” Tayeb Salih “Stolen Party,” Liliana Heker “Battle Royal,” Ralph Ellison “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor “The Birthmark,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Poems: “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden “Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds,” William Shakespeare “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Emily Dickinson “Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church,” Emily Dickinson “Harlem,” Langston Hughes “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Walt Whitman “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Wilfred Owen “Haunted Palace,” Edgar Allan Poe “Mirror,” Sylvia Plath “Garden of Love,” William Blake “Behind Grandma’s House,” Gary Soto “Snake,” D.H. Lawrence “Love Poem,” John Frederick Nims “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed,” Edna St. Vincent Millay “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed,” Edna St. Vincent Millay