You will write a paper of interpretive literary criticism on The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. Essays of literary criticism should aim to enrich the reading of others by identifying and explaining aspects of the reading that you find significant. This does not necessarily mean you will reduce the story to a simple meaning or message. Instead, you will show how the story creates meaning through its crafting of elements of fiction that may include character, setting, plot, point of view, language, and style.
This essay of literary criticism also requires that you make use of the Tyson chapter on Marxist theory, and this will help you decide which significant aspects of the story to focus on. You need to apply to the story Marxian concepts such as: socioeconomic classes like the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, ideology, false consciousness, class consciousness, hegemony, alienation, commodification, othering, double consciousness, cultural hegemony, and repressive ideologies like imperialism, consumerism, colonialism, individualism, etc. You may also make use of Tyson’s chapter on Postcolonial criticism. You do not need to include all of these. In fact, you will probably focus mostly on just one, such as depictions of imperialism and the colonized or the bourgeoisie and proletariat or false consciousness and repressive ideologies or social Darwinism. Use of good compositional structure means that you will have ONE main idea with sub-points subordinated to it. But since all these terms are interconnected, I will require that in the process of focusing on one concept, you make some use—perhaps limited, perhaps extensive—of at least two more terms.
As always, you must quote both the literature and Tyson’s chapter extensively, using MLA style citations and formatting.
2018051617164818_1sp_1b_03_war_of_the_worlds_and_marxism(1)
20180516171659the_lottery_marxist_criticism(1)
20180516171656wal14_socio_hist(1)