Genre Analysis
This assignment asks you to write a driven interpretation of the rhetoric an assigned text, guided by an analysis of key genre conventions and complemented by secondary sources.
Your argument should define your assigned text as an example of a specific genre and/or sub-genres according to one or more key conventions present in this text, and analyze how the text employs, reinterprets, or subverts those conventions in order to elicit a certain response, or set of responses, from a specific audience.
Your argument should also explore why the text does this. In other words, what does the text want from the audience?
For our course, your analysis should focus on the use of horror genre (or sub-genre) conventions and rhetorical choices within that genre, and your argument should focus on how the text uses these conventions and rhetorical choices to impact the audience and explore concepts/themes related to the family.
Because form and content are inextricable, your analysis should focus on the text’s language and stylistic choices, as well as its ideas or narrative (this will be true for both the stories and the films).
Secondary sources should be used to present context and background information, and to engage with other people’s arguments about a text or the genre.
Requirements
1500-2000 words, typed, double-spaced, and formatted in MLA style.
Sources: A minimum of two (2) secondary sources, not including the primary text, must be used to develop the
essay. The list of secondary sources from which you can choose is below.
Process: Multiple drafts, peer review, and substantive revision are required elements of this assignment.
Secondary Sources for the GA
Booker, “The Horror Film: An Introduction”
Chloe Carroll, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”: Female Persecution and Redemption in The Witch
Noel Carroll, “The Nature of Horror”
Gauchelli, “Horror and Mood”
Gill, “The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher, and the Family”
Lane, “The Witch Review”
Lukic, “Dreading the White Picket Fences: Domesticity and the Suburban Horror Film”
Reyes, “What, Why, and When is Horror Fiction?”
Wickersham, “Mothers, Martyrs, Damsels, and Demons: Women in Western Horror from
Romanticism to the Modern Age”
