Thursday 1 June 2017

I need to create an outline for a compare and contrast essay between Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily" and a film adaptation of the story....

Compare and contrast papers focus on similarities and differences between two things (in this case, Faulker's text, and the 1983 film with Angelica Huston).  Your thesis should make a point about how these different mediums affect your understanding of the story. To me, the big difference between the two is the treatment of time—the story is not told chronologically, while the film takes a more straightforward approach. This difference is crucial; it changes what the audience knows and when, which in turn affects how we think about the characters, the overall tone of the story, and, perhaps most importantly, how we think about the narrator of the story. Faulkner encourages his audience to think about why the story is presented in this chopped up way, while, in the film, the "narrator" (understood as the director, or, perhaps, simply the camera) is pretty transparent. 

To flesh out your outline, begin with an introduction that describes your reaction to the two pieces and ends with your thesis. Your thesis should do two things—describe the most important ways the two are different and explain why that difference is important. Body paragraphs should each consider a separate "difference," as explained in your thesis. This is the place where you specifically show what the difference is (using quotes from the story, quoting dialogue, or describing scenes from the film), and explain how the difference changes your experience of the story. Your conclusion should make a final point about the difference between the two—you could, for example, argue in your conclusion that based on your analysis you think the film misses some vital element of Faulkner's original. Conversely, you could argue that the film's more straightforward narrative style make's Faulkner's story more accessible.


Finding sources is more than simply looking things up online. One thing to remember is that your argument in the paper should be different from what other people have said—it is your argument, after all, not theirs. However, the reason sourcing your paper is vital is because reading what others have said will strengthen your argument, help you consider things you might have missed, and give you a sense for the scholarly "conversation" of which your paper is, by necessity, a part. The MLA bibliography in your library is a good place to start, or, if you have access, JSTOR, an online index of scholarly journals in the humanities. Google Scholar and Google Books can also be good places to find sources. Your library will also have something called a "citation index," which shows you which articles have been cited by other articles. It is a handy way of figuring out which articles have been most influential.

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