• Read
o Introduction, pgs 1-13 (in your textbook)
o “A&P” by John Updike (in your textbook)
• Review Presentation: Introduction to Fiction (Discover)
• Review Reading and Writing About Fiction Notes (Discover)
First, review these guides to thesis statements in literary analysis ess:
• From UTA: Libguide on thesis statements https://libguides.uta.edu/literarycriticism/thesis
• LibreText: Thesis statement guide https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Literature_and_Literacy/Writing_and_Critical_Thinking_Through_Literature_(Ringo_and_Kashyap)/12%3A_Writing_About_Literature/12.06%3A_Literary_Thesis_Statements#:~:text=Contributors%20and%20Attributions-,The%20Literary%20Thesis%20Statement,essay’s%20main%20argument%2C%20or%20interpretation.
Then, think about the stories we read in Module 2
Now, consider these questions:
· How does the story define or depict what it means to grow up?
· According to the story, what character trait or life lesson is essential to have in order to be an adult?
Write a thesis statement over the chosen story. Be sure it:
• Is one or two sentences long.
• Meets the criteria for a thesis statement.
• Includes the name of the story’s author and title.
Reading a story and writing about friction in literature
This site explains literary devicesLinks to an external site.
JOHN UPDIKE (1932–2009) Story (A & P)
The man The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Lit-erature dubs “perhaps America’s most versatile, pro-lific, and distinguished man of letters of the second half of the twentieth century” spent the early years of his life in Reading and rural Shillington, Pennsylva-nia. John Updike went on to study English literature at Harvard, where he also contributed cartoons and articles to the famous Lampoon. Marrying a Radcliffe fine-arts student in 1953, Updike the next year graduated summa cum laude and sold both his first poem and his first story to the New Yorker, whose staff he joined in 1955. Though he would continue to contribute essays, poems, and fiction to that magazine for the rest of his life, in 1957 Updike moved with his young family from Manhattan to rural Massachusetts. In the two years following the move, he pub-lished both his first book, a collection of poems (1958), and his first novel (1959). Updike went on to publish some twenty-one novels, thirteen short-story collections, seven volumes of poetry (including Collected Poems, 1953–1993 [1993]), as well as seven collections of essays, a play, and a memoir. He is best known for the tetralogy tracing the life of high-school basketball star turned car salesman Harry C. Rabbit Angstrom. Begun with Rabbit, Run in 1960, the series of novels includes Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), both of which won Pulitzer Prizes. I n walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see them until they’re over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She’d been watching cash registers for fifty years and probably never seen a mistake before. By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag—she gives me a little snort in passing, if she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem2 —by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the checkouts and the Special bins. They didn’t even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece—it was bright.
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