writing essay about literary analysis paper imperialism

“What I argue is that this is one episode in a century long history of American expansion that began in 1898, went through World War II, the Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, and now into Iraq and Afghanistan.” “The importance of a sense of shared suffering….it is the notion of being able to build an affinity with other people’s suffering and oppression and exploitation that is really the beginning of political consciousness and political alliances.” – Viet Thanh Nguyen, at Yale University “Curiously, though, so influential has been the discourse insisting on American specialness, altruism, and opportunity that imperialism as a word or ideology has turned up rarely and recently…but the connection between imperial politics and culture is astonishingly direct” (8) -Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

The second section of our Multicultural Literature course has centered on American imperialism. The books we are reading tackle important ideas like sexual and imperial domination, shared suffering and the rise of political consciousness, the role of anger in chronicling American intervention, and the relationship between culture and imperialism. For this assignment, you will be asked to write a literary analysis paper, 4-5 pages long, Times New Roman, size 12 font, and double- spaced. You will be graded on clarity, content, focus, rhetoric, organization, and attention to all requirements of the assignment.

Prompt : talking about the sympathizer

A literary hero often goes through tremendous conflict and adversity, before ending with triumph or reward. The character trajectories in Brother, I’m Dying and The Sympathizer considerably complicate this kind of heroic trajectory. In Brother, I’m Dying, how does Uncle Joseph embody heroic qualities, and what kind of messages does Danticat convey by delineating this character’s trajectory over the course of the memoir? OR Alternatively, in The Sympathizer, how and why does the narrator establish and trace an alternative kind of psychological trajectory over the course of the novel?