Yunhong Li
FIQWS 101008 &100008
Prof. Elisabeth von Uhl & Prof. Alyssa Yankwitt
12/9/2019
Reflection of The True Self Behind Trauma and Pressure
This essay “The True Self Behind Trauma and Pressure” is a critical researched paper of mine. In this essay, I analyze the behaviors, words, and thoughts of the anonymous narrators in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “Eight Bites”, and use the Freudian concepts of displacement and condensation as support to show how social influences shape their sense of self. The genre of this essay is critical researched literary analysis. So for writing this paper, I need to use two scholarly articles as outside sources to prove my thesis. My motivation for writing this essay is that I want to explore the anonymous narrators’ sense of self through the Freudian lens and show my view of how society affects the two unnamed narrators and why they are being anonymous. I hope to use this essay to prove that I combine what I have learned in class with scholarly articles to clarify my point of view, and make my essay more persuasive, then let readers identify with me. My first readers will be Pro. Yankwitt and Pro. Von Uhl. The potential audience will be the people who have read “The Black Cat” and “Eight Bites” and are interested in exploring the two protagonists and the two stories deeply. My essay will lead readers to review and think about the two stories in different ways and realize how the pressure and trauma from the society build a person’s sense of self.
This isn’t the first time I have written this type of essay, but I still have a lot of difficulties. At first, I got stuck in finding scholarly articles that can support my argument, because I always focused on finding the articles that talk about the stories, and those articles don’t have a connection with my view. That causes me to waste some time. Until I talked to my tutor and Pro. Yankwitt about this problem, they suggested me to find some articles that relate to the topic of the story, like for “Eight Bites”, I can find an article that talks about the bariatric surgery or the beauty standards of society. In this direction, I found an article about middle-aged women’s attitudes toward cosmetic surgery. It helps me to prove my statement well. This experience let me know that I shouldn’t only look for articles that directly talk about readings, some articles can also be used indirectly as strong evidence.
I have gained from writing this critical researched paper. For example, I think my analytical skill has been well-honed, because In writing this essay, I have to analyze the details of the stories, and illuminate and prove my opinion by connecting with the researched articles. Also, I received a lot of valuable comments and feedback from classmates during the peer review. The classmates helped me corrected some grammar mistakes and pointed out what is unclear in my essay. I will learn from these experiences and reflect better writing skills in the future.