Final Writing Assignment: The Synthesis Essay
Length: Five to Six Pages

Jazz and Literature
Anne Fleischmann and Andy Jones

In this essay you will combine your skills in observation and analysis in order to support a clear and argumentative thesis about the connections between the two works of literature that you have chosen to discuss. The purpose of this paper is not simply to tell your reader how the styles and concerns of each writer are the same or different. Instead, your synthesis will explain and illuminate each literary text by making the two texts talk to and respond to each other. Think about each writer’s purpose, imagery, characters, themes, tone and writing styles as you evaluate how one would respond to the other. Consider what one can learn from looking at these two texts together. How might one author’s work help us to understand the other author’s perspective or artistic goals, for example? Use passages and quotations from both texts to support your assertions. For your topic, respond to one of the following prompts:

1.     Read the Cain and Abel story in the Bible and comment on the ways in which Sonny's Blues is a retelling, revision or modernization of this Biblical tale. 

2.     In what ways does the singer in Langston Hughes's "The Weary Blues" compare to Sonny?  Make a case for the claim that James Baldwin had read Hughes's poem before writing Sonny's Blues and meant his story to be some sort (you decide what sort) of a comment on or response to "The Weary Blues."

3.     Read the following poems:  "I, Too," "Dream Variations," "Mother to Son," "Harlem," and "Theme for English B," by Langston Hughes and "We  Real Cool," The Rites for Cousin Vit," and "kitchenette building," by Gwendolyn Brooks.  Select a few of the poems.  Then write an essay in which you explore the imagery and messages of the poems (the struggles of the protagonists, the landscape of urban poverty, persisting despite poverty and racial discrimination, etc.) as they compare to the struggles of Sonny and his brother. 

 

 

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