Michael Pollan Literary Devices and Rhetorical Analysis Paper

Michael Pollan Literary Devices and Rhetorical Analysis Paper

Michael Pollan Literary Devices and Rhetorical Analysis Paper

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Essay #2: The Omnivore’s Dilemma

This paper should be 5-6 pages long. Please type the essay in 12 point font, double spaced, with 1” margins all around.

 

Limit the scope of you paper. You need to make sure you have a thesis statement, which is a central argument in your introductory paragraph which you support throughout the essay, and which you revisit in your conclusion.

 

No Plagiarism! Do not copy your essay or any phrases in your essay from the web or any other source, unless you use quotations and give proper bibliographic citations.

 

Choice 1: Rhetorical Analysis

What is a rhetorical analysis? See relevant class handouts. You will be analyzing Pollan’s persuasive strategies in the essay, including appeals to the audience through ethos, pathos, and logos, as well as his use of other literary devices, such as metaphor, repetition, or irony to get his point across effectively.

Choose a particular chapter or chapters, or a particular thread of inquiry, such as the cattle industry, the poultry industry, the hidden costs of industrial farming, local vs. industrial organic farming, fast food, the ethics of eating animals, the meaning of food in our lives, etc. (topics thanks to Professor Mikolavich). Michael Pollan Literary Devices and Rhetorical Analysis Paper

As a writer for The New York Times Magazine and a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, Pollan suggests we have become “unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily” (3). He looks into the complex conditions that have grown up around our food consumption, and reminds us, ultimately, that “we eat by the grace of nature, not industry” (411). What persuasive strategies does Pollan use to educate and to influence?

In your analysis, provide a close reading of selections of Omnivore’s and a well-supported rhetorical analysis. You may draw upon your personal experiences with food and your observations of the role of food in our culture to help to illuminate Pollan’s strategies and to assess the effectiveness of his claims. Michael Pollan Literary Devices and Rhetorical Analysis Paper

For this assignment, I would like you to critically and closely read selections from Pollan’s book and analyze Pollan’s argument about the impact of food industries and government policies, assessing how he uses these arguments to advocate that we “eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake” (11).

Take into account what knowledge Pollan assumes the audience has. What values does he assume the audience holds?

Your overall analysis needs to be organized like a conventional, unified essay—with an introduction, thesis that ties together your major points, analysis of quotes from the texts, and a conclusion restating and tying up your thesis.

Choice 2: Research on a “Thread”

Choose a particular chapter or chapters, or a particular thread of inquiry, such as the cattle industry, the poultry industry, the hidden costs of industrial farming, local vs. industrial organic farming, fast food, the ethics of eating animals, the meaning of food in our lives, etc. (topics thanks to Professor Mikolavich).

Analyze this topic as Pollan presents it in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and draw upon two reputable outside sources (ideally from the library or library electronic databases) to further develop on this topic. This topic requires two outside sources in addition to The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

At least half of your essay should draw upon and analyze material from The Omnivore’s Dilemma, such as illustrations of how “the health of these animals is inextricably linked to our own by that web of relationships,” ecological connections and the food chain (81).

Your overall analysis needs to be organized like a conventional, unified essay—with an introduction, thesis that ties together your major points, analysis of quotes from the texts, and a conclusion restating and tying up your thesis.

Choice 3: Prepare a Meal (topic thanks to Professor Fannin)

Pollan culminates his book by preparing and serving a meal that he hunted and foraged from the wild, for the most part. For this assignment, I would like you to critically and closely read selections from Pollan’s book and analyze Pollan’s experiment in self-sufficiency, much like Thoreau’s two years at Walden pond. What does he hope to learn by creating a meal from its natural sources? All in all, I would like at least half of your essay to be drawn from Omnivore’s Dilemma, including specific quotations.

As part of this assignment, prepare your own meal. Unlike Pollan, you do not have to hunt your own wild boar or forage wild mushrooms. Your meal can be just for yourself or a few people, rather than the group Pollan hosts. But I would like you to take this opportunity to investigate the kinds of issues Pollan explores: “What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost . . . we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world” (411).  Part of your essay should give an account of how you prepared and ate your own meal.

Your overall analysis needs to be organized like a conventional, unified essay—with an introduction, thesis that ties together your major points, analysis of quotes from the texts, and a conclusion restating and tying up your thesis. In describing your meal, though, you may venture more into the narrative, storytelling mode.