PURPOSE:
This assignment is intended for you to practice the building blocks of effective analytical writing: making claims and providing evidence in the context of a response to Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. In several connected paragraphs, you’ll develop a response to some preliminary questions about genre and conventions. In writing this response, you should demonstrate awareness and understanding of the text’s relationship to the conventions of its genre and/or the context in which the given text was produced, and to demonstrate an ability to analyze the text based on that understanding.
Fountain’s book may be categorized into at least two genres: war and satire. Thus, you are restricted to addressing the genre of the American war novel and/or the genre of satire.
ASSIGNMENT PROMPT:
This assignment begins with the question of genre. In Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, write a thesis-driven essay that answers the following questions:
1) How does Fountain’s novel align within a specific genre and its conventions AND subvert (or break) the conventions of the genre? For example, does Fountain both align and subvert within the same genre or does he align within one genre and subvert or break a convention within another genre?
2) How does this combination of both the alignment and subversion of these conventions work to convey his implied purpose and/or message to his primarily adult male, educated audience? In crafting your response, you should also consider how Ben Fountain (the rhetor) acknowledges, uses, manipulates, and responds to genre conventions in his novel, and for what implied purpose and/or message. What might Fountain (as the rhetor) be implicitly trying to say or accomplish through the text?
***Please write the essay based on the thesis I wrote (please make improvements on the thesis if necessary): The novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, written by Ben Fountain illustrates current political and social problems in war. This novel falls under both the genre of war and satire. However, Fountain purposely aligns with the conventions of a satire and subverts the conventions of American novel of war such as war as central action, man as animals, and violence. This combination of both alignment and subversion convey an irony between the common beliefs of war shown through misleading media and the reality of war behind those pictures.
I will attach sources explaining the conventions of war and satire.
Please use quotes from two mandatory sources:
PRIMARY SOURCE: Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, pages 1-107.
SECONDARY SOURCES:
Wallis R. Sanborn’s “Introduction” and “Epilogue” to The American Novel of War, and “On Satire and Parody: The Importance of Being Ironic” by Roger J. Kreuz and Richard M. Roberts.
***I will need a lot of evidences and quotes from these two sources. also include evidences from three outside sources, preferably articles.
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