Tortilla flat analysis

Essay #2: Literary Synthesis Background: In Unit One, all of the stories and poems we read depicted some aspect of the social order breaking down. In Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck explores the same sphere of human experience, but from the opposite direction. Rather than investigating what it looks like when communities are fractured, Steinbeck asks what a community looks like in a state of perfection. In Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck develops his philosophy of the phalanx, which claims that individual humans in a group can act much like cells in an organism; each cell is an individual, but at the same time they all work in concert toward a common purpose. As Thomas Fensch writes, “Steinbeck was interested in the birth, survival, and ultimate death of the group, a ‘phalanx’—the ‘I’ which becomes ‘we.’ In Tortilla Flat, he imagined the ideal birth, life, and death of the phalanx.” To develop a deeper understanding of communities and their literary representations, you’re going to compare, or synthesize, two texts, Tortilla Flat and one of the readings from Unit One. Main task: Write a 5-7 page (1500 words minimum) essay that synthesizes two texts, Tortilla Flat and one of the stories from Unit One. Your thesis statement should answer the following question, and the proof paragraphs should support your answer: How do these two texts relate to one another on the subject of community? In other words, how do the two writers convey similar or different ideas about communities and/or what behaviors, values, etc. make them fractured or ideal? In your conclusion paragraph, evaluate the claims about communities made by the writers—to what extent do these seem to be accurate or productive portrayals of community? *You can certainly synthesize Tortilla Flat with the story you analyzed in Essay One, though you don’t have to. Strive for focus and specificity: Your essay will be deeper and more cohesive is you find a specific point of comparison. How do the two texts represent a specific aspect of community in similar and/or different ways? An entire essay, for example, might be written about how the two communities in the two texts address how materialism shapes communities. On Finding Similarities: Because the readings from Unit One are so different from Tortilla Flat—the Unit One texts were bleak, often dealing with the misery in communities, while Tortilla Flat is often quite joyful—it will be tempting to only see different ideas about community in the two texts you synthesize. It’s perfectly fine to explore differences, but also think about how the two texts might be proving the same point in different ways. For example, perhaps some essential aspect of an ideal community in Tortilla Flat is absent from the fractured community in a story from Unit One. If this is the case, the writers might be making similar points about what makes a community thrive or fall apart, but from opposite directions. To prepare: I have designed the daily reading responses in such a way that you should be able to use them as a starting point for the essay. You can begin to develop ideas for your essay by developing the ideas in your reading responses. Similarly, our class discussions will be geared toward helping you develop ideas for the essay, so I recommend returning to your class notes for essay ideas as well. Finally, be sure to invest time and effort in the writing-process assignments. Don’t just summarize or describe the texts—ANALYZE and INTERPRET them: For both texts, use inductive reasoning and analysis to move from the specific to the general, to identify what this specific text suggests, more “universally,” about social phenomena. In other words,