English 120

paper #3

Literary Analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale

Length: 4-6 pages

As a dystonia novel, the Handmaid’s tale imagines a nightmarish future in which a totalitarian theocratic government subjugates and enslaves women for the purpose of sexual reproduction. Published in 1985, the novel confronts many complex themes still relevant to our culture today, including the relationships pf power to sex, gender, language, religion, memory, and love, just to name a few. For this paper, choose a recurring idea, image, or theme in The Handmaid’s Tale and make an argument about its role and relevance to the novel as a whole. In order to make your argument, you will need to enlist at least two outside sources that offer clarity of insight into your argument and synthesize them into your paper-adding other academic voices to depend and complicate your argument.

Audience: Imagine writing to an intelligent person who has read The Handmaid’s Tale but who may not understand the role, relevance, or meaning of your particular subject matter.

Goal: Help your audience to understand the complexity of your subject matter, both through your own reading of The Handmaid’s Tale and through your use of except outside sources.

Below you will find some necessary questions to consider before beginning to write this paper. Please take some time to think about them.

1. What element of The Handmaid’s Tale most interested you? What would you feel most passionate about exploring in this paper?

2. Where might you go to find credible sources? How will these sources enter into conversation with your own ideas-to support, deepen, or complicate them?

3. What might your paper’s thesis look like?

4. What will your body paragraphs look like? How will you synthesize credible outside sources to support, deepen, or complicate your own ideas?

5. What is the primary goal in writing a literary analysis paper like this? What are you attempting to show your audience?

Grading Rubric:

1. Does the writer present a clear, coherent, and intelligent argument about a specific of The Handmaid’s Tale? Is the topic focused, defined, and developed through the course of the paper?

2. Does the writer properly introduce the topic and offer necessary context for readers to enter the conversation?

3. Do the body paragraphs employ clear topic sentences, textual examples, and work to explain and interpret the relevance of the chosen subject?

4. Do the body paragraphs introduce, contextualizes, and integrate at least two credible sources into the conversation? Does the write work to make connections between the sources and his/her own ideas? Does the writer include a Works Cited page?

5. Is the paper mostly free of mechanical and grammatical errors that might interfere with a reader’s understa