ALIS Thesis Statements with Literary Theory

• Two helpful hints:

• Your essay can have 2, 3, or 4 body paragraphs; just make sure your thesis clearly sets up your structure.

• Use the language of your literary theory in your thesis statement.

Two motifs leading to a common theme

• Mark Twain presents both a blackface comedy and its inversion—a “whiteface” spoof—in order to satirize his 19th century society’s hollow, pretentious definition of “race.”

• Paragraph 1: Blackface—society’s anxiety and shallow preoccupation with race

• Paragraph 2: “Whiteface”—society’s hollow definition of race goes both ways

Two motifs leading to a common theme

• F. Scott Fitzgerald suggests that happiness in a capitalist society is a stealthy and deadly illusion that distracts the wealthy citizens from their consciences and destroys the poor with its repressive intangibility.

• Paragraph 1: Wealthy have no conscience because they think they can buy/own happiness

• Paragraph 2: Poor are left shattered and poor because they are repressed by the upper class’s obsession with material happiness

Cause and effect (2 paragraph)

• The hellish furnace of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel serves as a metaphor for the Freudian conscience, exposing to the reader that when left unchecked by the ego or the superego, the id self destructs in a frenzy of socially inappropriate desires.

• Paragraph 1: The furnace, like the characters, slowly releases the ego and superego

• Paragraph 2: The furnace, like the characters, consequently self destructs

Cause and effect (3 paragraph)

• In The Village, Ivy’s journey through the woods reveals that in order to achieve the final feminist stage of self discovery, women must shake themselves free of their deceptive innocence and protest their society’s imposing standards.

• Paragraph 1: Dangers of innocence—importance of knowledge

• Paragraph 2: Society’s imposing standards and the need to protest them

• Paragraph 3: Enlightened stage of self discovery