TJ Puckett, English 7, Essay #2, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Due Dates:
Blog Entry: 10/7/2012 by 11:59 p.m.
Responses to at least two of your peers’ blogs: 10/11/2012 by 11:59 p.m.
Rough Draft (at least 1000 words): 10/18/2012 by 11:59 p.m.
Peer Editing of at least 2 of your peers' rough drafts: 10/21/2012 by 11:59 p.m.
Final Draft submitted as an RTF through SafeAssign: 10/25/2012 by 11:59 p.m.
Length: 1250 words (approximately 5 typed, double-spaced pages)
Format: All essays should be submitted in Rich Text Format via SafeAssign. In your essay,
you should put your name, my name, the course number, and the due date in the
upper left corner of the first page of the essay. All essays should be typed, doublespaced, and should have one-inch margins. In addition, this essay requires that
you use correct MLA documentation for this essay.
This essay asks that you develop a thesis-driven essay focusing on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? All essays – regardless of which topic you choose – should assert a
central idea that addresses the topic and uses the text for support and development. Every single
paragraph needs to make at least one specific reference to the book (probably in a brief quote) to
help illustrate its idea. Make sure that your ideas are interpreting themes in the book, not
bringing in your personal opinion(s) on the topics or debating the topic outside of the book; you
want to be thinking about how the author, Philip K. Dick, is creating meaning in his novel. If it
seems relevant, you may bring in references from Turkle’s book to help you with your analysis.
I will grade your essays based primarily on the following: (1) your carefully-narrowed central
idea that clearly addresses one of the topics below; (2) the development of this thesis in wellfocused body paragraphs; (3) the originality and complexity of your ideas; (4) your use of and
comprehension of the assigned text; (5) the overall quality of your writing.
Choose One:
Topic One:The notion of “empathy” is explored both in Philip K. Dick’sDo Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? and in the first seven chapters of Sherry Turkle’sAlone Together. In the novel,
androids, because they lack empathy,are perceived as inferior to humans. Androids can be
“retired” when deemed necessary (in spite of the fact that the androids in the novel seem to
possess a sense of self). But the question of empathy in the novel seems to apply not just to
androids but also to humans. For this essay, I want you to write a thesis-driven paper that
explores empathy in the novel:What message(s) might Philip K. Dick bemakingin his novel
about empathy – and more specifically:about humanempathy? Think about the ways that the
humans in the novel show empathy with “real” animals and with “real” humans (and what
motivates this empathy).Think also about how this contrasts with how humans experience (or
don’t experience) empathy with androids. Please go beyond just stating androids can’t feel
empathy because they are machines; the novel is far more complex than this. Make sure you
provide specific examples from the text in your analysis.
Topic Two: While the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is in many ways a novel
about robot technology, in other ways it raises a larger question about what it means to be
human. For this essay, I want you to write a thesis-driven paper that asserts how the novel
attempts to answer this question. Make sure that you don’t just list the differences between
humans and androids. Also, make sure that you don’t just argue that humans are “better” than
androids (simply based on the fact that they are “real” and androids are “fake”). The novel seems
to explore this issue in a far-more complex way, exploring both the good and the bad of “human
nature” and what it means to be a human being.Make sure you provide specific examples from
the text in your analysis.