Sci Fi Paper 1: Close Reading

The details: 4-5 pages in Times New Roman 12 point font, double-spaced, with page numbers, 1-inch margins and a works cited page. This first paper is worth 20% of your grade. The rough draft is due during class time on 9.18, bring 4 copies to share in small groups, and email me a copy. The final paper should be turned in digitally to me, via email, by 11:59 PM on the due date. You may email your papers to me as attachments of Word or Pages docs, or as Google docs. 

Rough draft due: 9.18.17
Final draft due 10.2.17

This first paper will require you to compose a close reading of a text, or a small portion or aspect of a text, and to consider what implications your careful observations bring to bear on the text as a whole. We will discuss close reading in class and practice it together, but here’s a fairly basic explanation: https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/how-do-close-reading

During this first chunk of the semester, we have read and discussed: Stanislaw Lem’s story “,” Ken Liu’s “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” and “The Paper Menagerie,” Ursula K. Le Guin, “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” and C.G. Jung’s essay “The Shadow.”

As we have discussed and practiced in class, close reading is the practice of paying far greater than average attention to small parts of a text—this includes describing and making observations based on an author’s use of language, metaphor, pacing, character development, description, sentence structure, etc. In this first paper, you will write about one or more pieces of your choosing and use close reading as a way to discuss your perspective on a larger reading of some aspect of the text(s). It is crucial that you come up with your own angle here, but here are a few example ideas, in case that’s of use to you:

Near the beginning of Ursula Le Guin’s “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” she offers a long description of her antihero Osden, focusing on his whiteness. This paper will offer a close reading of that passage, and then move on to close readings of the other descriptions of race in the story. This paper might use these close readings to ask explore questions such as: What do these descriptions indicate about how race is portrayed in this story? 
In “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species,” Ken Liu makes a story out of multiple descriptions of how a variety of species read and write. In “The Paper Menagerie,” Liu’s main character’s mother writes her life story inside a magic paper tiger. This paper will look closely at one or more descriptions of bookmaking/storytelling from the first story and explore ways that connects to storytelling in the second. 

Both of these ideas are little more than jumping-off places: in my experience looking with extreme close attention to one or more passages of text will lead you to ideas. In other words, If I began to write either of those papers, I’m not sure what I would find, but I’m fairly certain I’d find something of note.

Please Write about Paper Menagerie.