Modernism Text Assignment | Online Homework Help

Essay Paper on a Modernism Text – Formulating a Strong thesis and essay

This essay should follow all MLA 8 guidelines. It should be 12pt font, times new roman, double spaced and your source should be cited. This assignment is based on the novel Swann’s way – Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One written by Marcel Proust. You will ONLY be having to concentrate on the “Overture” section. The narrator, for the most part, goes unnamed, but then we come to find out his name is Marcel. It follows this one narrator throughout his boyhood, into his adolescence, and into his middle-age and it holds a lot of social commentaries as he hangs out with aristocrats, middle-class people, and even working-class like his chef who he was close with as a young boy. It is written during a time when the aristocracy is in decline and there is an emergence of this modern-urban middle class, which Swann who is the character we meet in this section is a good example of. He is like a middle-class but a very rich person that is able to interact with the aristocracy but let’s say he is newly rich in his family. One of the ways modernist writing is different than realism works is that it kind of breaks the container of a novel. In this reading, there is a multiplicity of perspectives that are shown — we stick with the narrator the whole time but he shows us how other characters think, feel, and act. An example of this is the way his different aunts and his grandmother, and grandfather all have different world views that come into conflict or mesh. The mother is sympathetic, the father is this figure that he actually compared to Abraham, the figure who almost sacrificed his son — so a very unsympathetic character. The first part is very introspective, a lot of it happens in his head — which is typical for modernist writers. Later we come to find out that we are in his childhood, we are in this active childhood space of memory — he uses “involuntary memory” in his writing. We have a sense of not knowing where we are in time and space. To bring it back to his childhood, we have this boy who wants his mother, who will kind of do anything to get that goodnight kiss from this writer. Habits are important to Proust.

That was a little background on the text for your reference and understanding. You must read the entire “Overture” section and truly comprehend what it is about, the characters, and Proust’s writing techniques. This paper’s goal is to explore a modernist text.

For this assignment, you MUST write FIVE pages based on this reading and more specifically zoom in on the “Overture” section. You must formulate a GOOD thesis statement, something that is not obvious and that is a bit of a stretch. It must be a COMPELLING thesis statement — you can make a statement about the narrator, etc — primarily anything you want, it just has to be concrete and it has to be something that can be proven using evidence. Make sure you include some modernist aspects in your explanation then. You may concentrate on as little or as much of the text as you like. Just start by introducing the book showing that you have general knowledge about it and then clearly focus your thesis on whatever point of the “Overture” section that you’d like to analyze more closely. Your thesis statement must be GOOD – something good to argue about in the text. Your paper must then support your argument (thesis) using evidence from the section, make sure you cite them.

It should be your standard essay paper. Strong compelling introduction where you introduce and give a general understanding of the book — ending with a concrete argument (Thesis statement) about some aspect of the “Overture” section, your body paragraphs (3), and your strong conclusion. You MUST also include a counter-argument.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7178/7178-h/7178-h.htm#link2H_4_0001

Only read “Overture” and base your thesis and entire essay on some component of this modernist text.

Must be well-written and demonstrate a good understanding of the text throughout the entire essay – use evidence and cite it from the reading. Ex – (Proust).