Research Paper

Your research paper will be at least five pages (not including the works cited page) written about a specific short story. (Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Short story by Joyce Carol Oates)

Your research paper will require you to use Modern Language Association (MLA) documentation format to incorporate secondary sources (criticism, biography, analysis) into your writing to support your ideas. You will use parenthetical references throughout the paper to indicate citations which will be listed on a works cited page.

Important Research Paper Requirements You must use at least five outside sources (in addition to your assigned short story). All must be from the library or the library database unless you have permission from me. Note: Below is a list of unacceptable sources. Summaries of your story are also not acceptable for your research paper. You are looking for criticism of your story, not an explanation of it. Your paper must show appropriate integration of quotes. In other words, you must have at least one quote from each of your sources, including the story, in your paper.

Use any 5 of the following quotes i have gather for you from the library sources she spoke of in the directions. Make it work doesn’t have to be perfect..

“Throughout this story, Oates uses the traditional association of breath and spirit, in a manner appropriate to a story “rich with the imagery of life’s deceptions and perils,”to help delineate Connie’s progress in her understanding of the evils of the world and the consequent growth of her soul” (Slimp 17 ).

“As the story opens, Connie is shallow and vapid, believing among other things that the height of human suffering is the annoyance she feels at her mother’s chiding. So shallow are her emotions that she responds to her mother’s corrections by saying that she would like to die, that is, literally to lose her breath.” (Stephen Slimp 179)

This interrelation of the physical and spiritual–in a story that Oates herself has described as “realistic allegory,” “a mode of fiction to which I am […] partial” –is illustrated in the author’s handling of an old trope common to many languages and many views of reality: the equation of physical breath with spirit. In Greek, for example, one word for spirit is πνεuμα, which happens also to be the word for physical breath and, at times, for wind. (Stephen Slimp 179)

“This view also injures the story itself for it diverts our attention from the fact that the evil she portrays is all to real and renders ineffective the pointed criticism Oates makes of the American Dream, which is the larger purpose of her story” (Tom Qurik 413)

“One cannot help but pause and ponder Oates Dedication of this story to Bob Dylan. However, it is a mistake.” (Tom Qurik 417 )

“It is Naïve to suppose that this story is about the dangerous effects of rock and roll; rather, the music is emblematic of the tempo of American life generally. And the questions in the title-where are you going,where have you been?—are addressed to America itself.”(Tom Qurik 417)

“Fifteen-year-old Connie’s acquiescence to Arnold Friend’s threat-ridden seduction is an appropriate finale to Joyce Carol Oates’s “ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” in a narrative which, upon careful analysis, suggests existential allegory.” (Mitchell and Urbanski 200)

Many critics have classified Oates’s work as realistic or naturalistic, whereas Samuel J. Pickering categorizes her short stories as subjective romanticism to a fault. (Mitchell and Urbanski 200)

“In the seduction which Friend engineers, Connie is merely the personification of the female he wishes to dominate, to be taller than, to despoil. The phrases he delivers from his musical repertoire are not even tailored to Connie” (Mitchell and Urbanski 200)