Bible as Literature Final Paper
Your Mission
Choose a work of literary merit and analyze it for biblical resonance, using the work we’ve
done in class as well as the perspective offered by Richard J. Foster in the excerpts of How
To Read Literature Like a Professor.
As Foster points out, we are not biblical scholars... BUT you have a benefit that most
students don’t have—you’ve gotten a solid overview of the bible and the major stories in
the bible over the last trimester.
Your Limits
1. This is an independent project, not a group effort.
2. The work you choose must be a novel, novella, short story or film from the lists
below.
Short Stories and Novellas
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“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery
O’Connor
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The Awakening by Kate Chopin
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“Jacob: the Story of a Faith-Healing Priest” by
Bessie Head (Botswana)
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“A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka
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Anything by Flannery O'Connor
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“Triumph” by C.L.R. James (Trinidad)
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"A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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"The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World"
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by
Ursula LeGuin
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“Araby” by James Joyce
Films
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Shawshank Redemption
Dead Man Walking
Hotel Rwanda
Tree of Life
The Fountain directed by Aronofsky
The Truman Show
The Life of Brian
The Matrix Trilogy
Magnolia
Brother, Where Art Thou (almost anything by
the Coen Brothers)
The Silence of the Lambs
The Star Wars Trilogy
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
Ben-Hur
Films OR Books
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LOTR
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Harry Potter
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Narnia
Novels
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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
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Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Of Mice & Men by John Steinbeck (anything by
Steinbeck, really)
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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
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A Separate Peace by John Knowles
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Old Man & The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
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Beloved by Toni Morrison
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Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
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Moby Dick by Herman Melville
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Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
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East of Eden by John Steinbeck
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Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
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Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy
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The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
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The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
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The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
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Silence by Shusaku Endo
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Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
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A Passage to India by EM Forster
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Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
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The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
(almost anything by Greene)
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All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
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This Side of Pardise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
(almost anything by Atwood)
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The Fifth Mountain by Paulo Coelho
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Light in August by William Faulkner (almost
anything by Faulkner)
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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel
Garcia Marquez
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Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
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The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing (also The
Golden Notebook or Briefing for a Descent Into
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Hell ... really all of Lessing)
Herzog by Saul Bellow (or Humboldt's Gift ... a
lot by Bellow, but not usually more recent
ones)
Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (a lot by
Hardy would work well)
How It Is by Samuel Beckett
The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain
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The Confidence Man by Herman Melville
Anna Karenina, Fathers and Sons, The Brothers
Karamazov
The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Second Coming by Walker Percy (anything
by Percy)
Organization
 You will need a thesis statement with a “what” and a “so what” in it (see Thesis Help
section below).
 Each body paragraph should contain:
o a topic sentence that supports the thesis
o evidence (examples, quotes, etc) that supports the topic sentence
 Your conclusion should help to tie all the ideas of your paper together for your
reader, and should explain the conclusions you’ve come to from your reading and
thinking.
Thesis Help
What
What you’re arguing, what you’ve noticed.
Format it with the title and a simple
statement.
So What
Why it matters
Format it by highlighting why the AUTHOR
makes the decision to do the thing you’ve
noticed in the text.
“Araby” recreates the story of the Fall.
Joyce suggests that every person’s loss of
innocence is epic.
Becomes this thesis: In “Araby,” James Joyce recreates the story of the fall in order to suggest
that every person’s loss of innocence is epic.
Formatting
Please use MLA style formatting for both the paper and the Works Cited Page. You can find
a link to a very reliable MLA formatting guide on the class blog
(mrsbbibleaslit.wordpress.com).
Due Dates
Thesis statement and outline
First typed draft
Works Cited page
Final draft (including revisions, final WC
page)
Due by February 15
Due by February 17
Due by February 22
Due by February 24