CRITICAL ESSAY #2: STEPHEN KING
INSTRUCTIONS:
Your first task,
before selecting a topic, is to review King's comments in the introduction to Night
Shift. Then, choose one of the
following topics for your second critical essay. This
essay is primary analysis, so be sure to review
what is required of this kind of essay. As
you are required to document the evidence in this essay from Night Shift and/or
or the short story you choose from that work or The Dark Descent, make sure to
review the MLA pages on Documenting Literary Papers: Prose Fiction.
Remember that without
documentation in the body of the essay, it is not a critical essay, and does not
meet the requirements for the paper. Make
sure to always explain how you know that what you say
is correct, and provide the documented evidence to back you up.
Finally, make sure to meet all General Essay
requirements, as well as those for the topic of your choice.
HAVE YOU CHECKED THE BULLETIN BOARD FOR ANY CHANGES IN THIS ASSIGNMENT?
Using the excerpts from King's comments in the introduction to Night Shift
as your source, explain in the first half of your paper how King defines
horror. In the second half of the
paper, explain how King's approach to horror fiction differs from Poe’s
or
Lovecraft's approach. The essay should be 3 pages in length.
Using Poe's Cosmic Theory, Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature (online),
and King's comments in the introduction to Night Shift, set up a
conversation between the three men in which they discuss the nature of horror
fiction and evil. It will be important that your thesis states what they
conclude about the nature of horror fiction and evil. The essay should be
3 pages in length.,
Using King's short story, "Jerusalem's
Lot" (in Night Shift) as your source, explain how the development of
setting and atmosphere is similar to that found in Lovecraft's
King develops the theme of the horror of
unwholesome survival of indiscriminate evil below the surface of appearances in
many of his works. Again
using King’s short story, "Jerusalem's
Lot" as your source, explain
how this tale
might be considered an example of Lovecraftian influence on King's development
of the characters and plot of the story. The essay should be 3 pages in length.
It is said that one of Lovecraft’s themes deals with the notion that the world
as we see it is illusory (or at least incomplete).
In postulating the narrowness of that portion of the spectrum that humans
can perceive, Lovecraft is well on his way to a more cosmic thematic treatment
of humankind’s feeble position in the universe, a universe that in truth is
not as it appears, and is not partial to mankind.
Using a short story of your choice from Night shift or The Dark
Descent as your source, explain how King goes about making that kind of point in the tale. The essay should be 3 pages
in length.
King, at times, tries his hand at creating horror fiction in which aberrant
psychology is the source of the tale. We have seen the same sort of thing
in a number of other writers, most recently Robert Bloch. The effects of
ultimate disclosure in both are shocking. Use King's "The Man Who
Liked Flowers" (in Night Shift) and Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack
the Ripper" as your sources, and compare/contrast how Bloch and King
achieve the horrific effect at the end of the stories. In both cases, make
the narrators of the stories your focal point of comparison. Try to focus
on answering this question overall in the essay: DOES A COMPARISON OF
BLOCH'S "RIPPER" AND KING'S STORY SUGGEST THAT KING WAS INFLUENCED BY
BLOCH WHEN HE WROTE IT? The essay should be 3 pages in length.
For Poe, effect is everything. The same thing might be said of Lovecraft.
And King says that if necessary, he will go for the "gross out" to
achieve effect. But how does King do it?
Using any of King's short stories in our tests as your source, explain how
he achieves the overall effect of shock or horror in the story.
Focusing on character analysis or setting and atmosphere (or usually a
combination of the two) would probably yield the clearest results. The
essay should be 3 pages in length.
Pick any of King's short stories in our texts, and using the story as a source,
demonstrate how you think King is defining the nature of evil in the story. The
essay should be 3 pages in length.
Pick any of King's short stories in our texts, and using the story as a source,
demonstrate how you think King creates a "bad" or "evil"
place in the story and how the bad place works on those who enter it. The essay
should be 3 pages in length.
Pick any of King's short stories in our texts, any of Poe's, any of Lovecraft's
and using the stories as your sources, explain how King's narrators are
different from Poe's and Lovecraft's. The essay should be 3 pages in length.
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