On the Final Essay

Assignment Sheet

Due: Friday, December 22, 2000 by 5 pm in my mailbox in the English department office (Fenton 277) or in the envelope outside my office door (Fenton 240). No late papers will be accepted. Missing this deadline earns you an automatic "I" (incomplete) for your final grade. See below ("Requirements") for other deadlines along the way.

Format: 9-12 pages, double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins; title that indicates main argument of paper; heading that includes your name, the course name or number, and the date; bibliography and citations in MLA style (see links page for explanations of this style of citation); proper quotation format ("..." (12). for quotations within a paragraph; blockquote format for quotes five lines or longer).

Purpose: Whereas the other assignments in the course emphasize other kinds of analysis and writing (whether the "making observations/asking questions" mode of your reading responses, the "summarizing/analyzing/commenting on a critic's arguments about a work's 'landmark' status" mode of the in-class presentation, or the "opinion-stating and -supporting through textual and self-analysis" mode of the personal response essays), this assignment requires you to plan a research project and craft a sustained argument based on that research. You are encouraged to find or develop a research project that relates to your major, career plans, or intellectual interests.

Requirements: The final essay or project is meant to involve a significant amount of research, planning, and analysis. Hence, you must email me as soon as you narrowed down some possibilities for your final essay/project and notify me of what you are considering as your focus for it. The sooner you do this, the sooner I can give you advice on how to proceed. You must have sent me this email before we return for classes after Thanksgiving Break--although if you wait this long and therefore save all your research until after the break, you will have a very busy December. We must meet at least once after Thanksgiving Break to go over your progress on the essay and make plans for its completion.

Options: Here are your options for the final essay. In each of these options, your job is to come up with an argument that you are trying to prove by using textual and other evidence to persuade your readers of its validity.

• Your first option is to choose your own topic or question to pursue in depth. If you choose this option, you must make an appointment with me as soon as possible to discuss your topic and your research plans. In coming up with your own topic or question, you would do well to consider the presentation and discussion topics raised in class over the course of the semester--pretty much any of them could form the basis for a great research paper or project. Remember that you also have the option of putting together a web site or using some other medium than print to get across your "take" on one of the following topics or the topic of your choice. If you want to explore this way of structuring and disseminating your arguments, you must see me as soon as possible. I can provide some help in web authoring, but you will also have to pick up some of these skills on your own or in concert with the Media Center. (I can point you toward good software and tutorial/advice web sites.)

  The rest of the options listed below are meant to give you a sense of the main emphases of the course and might help you generate your own topic for a research paper or analytical essay. Feel free to revise any of these options, combine them, or make them more specific--whatever helps you generate a topic to which you want to devote a significant amount of time and work.

• Please see the presentations page for loads of ideas that could be developed into a final paper or project. Also look over your notes on people's presentations for possible approaches or critics to draw on or model your paper after.

• One mode of criticism we've been emphasizing in this class is contextual or historical analysis. Topics like Herman Melville's warning to 1850 America or Mark Twain's perspective on the end of the Reconstruction era in America or Ralph Ellison's riff on segregation-era America are only three examples of the many kinds of historical/contextual approaches you could choose. These kinds of arguments--about relevant historical contexts for a given "landmark" of American literature--are particularly conducive to the web authoring option for the final project. (Just imagine what a really good website that puts Moby-Dick in historical context would look like!)

• You might choose one of the works we read in class and write a research paper on some aspect of its reception. There are many possibilities here:
  • You might analyze changes in critics' views of the work or the author over a span of time (for example, you might contrast how people were reading Whitman in the 1920s with how Leaves of Grass was being interpreted in the 1990s). Your goal for this kind of paper would be to draw some conclusions about what's at stake in the contrasting views over time of what makes the author or work an "American landmark."
  • You might choose to focus on one "landmark" critic's reading of a given work in order to analyze his or her emphases, blind spots, biases, and what's at stake in them. Questions you might consider as you are working on this research paper include: what kinds of arguments (explicit and implicit) is the critic making in order to persuade his or her readers that the work in question is an "American landmark"? What kind of image of the writer or the work is the critic working to rebut, revise, or reframe? Is the crafting of these arguments partially explainable by reference to cultural or political issues of the critic's time, place, social location, or school of literary criticism? What do you see as the limitations of the "frame" within which the critic places this "American landmark"? What kinds of consequences do you see following from the "framing" of the work in this way? What alternative interpretations of the work would you put forward that have been foreclosed by the critic's "frame"? If you choose this option, you should see me for examples of essays or book chapters in which these kinds of questions and issues have been taken up.
  • You might do a more "cultural studies" version of the "reception" analysis and analyze your peers' responses to a given work. From reading responses on the listserv you've already seen a piece of this, but your task if you choose this option would be to craft a questionnaire, interview students, and use other methods to gain a sense of how your peers interpreted the work, what their reading experience was like, whether they think of the work as an "American landmark" or not and why, and other questions of your choice. Your goal would be to find patterns in student responses to the work and to make an argument about the significance of those patterns. If you choose this option, you should see me for examples of essays or book chapters in which these kinds of questions and issues have been taken up.

• Instead of focusing on a work's reception, you could instead focus on the question of canon formation: the process of institutionalization of an American literary canon in high schools and colleges in the United States. Again, there are many possibilities for this option:
  • You might address the question of the continuing appeal of one or more of the works we're reading in the course for American readers and critics. What is it about the work in question that makes it continue to be an "American literary landmark"?
  • You might do a research paper in which you integrate scholarly research on "the making of (say) Faulkner's reputation" or "the canonization of (say) Moby-Dick," produce a synthesis in which you give an account of how and why a particular author or work came to be seen as a "landmark" of American literature, and analyze what that story reveals about changes in U.S. society, American self-conception, or the academy.
  • You might do your own version of Arac's "hypercanonization" argument and make a case for a different basis than "landmark" texts for defining the American literary canon.
  • If you are planning to become a teacher or professor of literature, it could well be instructive for you to choose an area high school or college, gain permission to look over syllabi or reading lists for American literature courses, and choose a focus for an analytical essay in which you make an argument about what's at stake in the changes (and continuities) in that school or college's conception of what American literature should be taught to its students. (For instance, you might contrast syllabi/reading lists from three different time periods--say, the '40s, the '60s, and the '80s--to see what they reveal about each teacher's sense of what works of American literature students ought to have read. Or you might focus on a particular decade and try to put together an account of how the school's American literature canon changed during that decade, along with an argument about the significance of those changes. Or you might track a particular author's or work's appearance or disappearance over time in high schools and colleges. These examples are meant to be illustrative--they don't come close to exhausting the possibilities for a syllabus research focus.) If you choose this option or a variant of it, please see me as soon as possible. We'll have a lot to discuss about which school to focus on, how to get access to course syllabi, and what your particular research focus will be, as well as how to do the research involved and develop/craft your arguments about the significance of what you've found.

• Instead of a focus on reception or canon formation, you might instead choose to emphasize intertextual connections between two of the works we've read in the class and make comparative analyses of them. Again, there are many possibilities for this option:
  • You might relate two works we've read in the class and write a comparative essay in which you craft an argument about what's at stake in their relation--or pair one of the texts we've read in the course with one from outside the class. I've phrased this option so generally because there are so many ways of doing it, among them:
  • You might choose an idea/ideal often associated with America--individualism, freedom, opportunity, democracy, enterprise, pragmatism, "the American dream," etc.--and contrast two or more works from the course on the means and ends of their engagement with this concept/abstraction.
  • You might choose to focus on how a particular author we've read has influenced another writer or group of writers.
  • You might choose to focus on how a later writer has used one of the works we've read as a "source" and analyze how and to what ends he or she has revised, transformed, or recontextualized the "source" text. Your goal would be to make an argument about what kind of implicit points the later writer is making through the way in which he or she changed the "landmark" text. Rather than simply summarizing changes, you should be striving to get at the significance of those changes. For instance, you might explore how one of the twentieth-century writers we've read in the course responded to and transformed one of the nineteenth-century works we've read. Or you might choose a post-WWII work that is a response to one or more of the texts we've read in the course.
  • A variation on the previous option would be to choose a film version of a given novel from the course (there aren't too many film versions of Whitman's poetry, so you're limited to novels on this one!) and analyze its implicit interpretation of the novel by attending to the details and patterns of its transformation from text to film. Your goal in this option would be to draw some conclusions about the significance of changes to the novel--to make an argument about what version of the novel is being offered to the audience at the time of the film's making and what "cultural work" the film version is doing in the society at large of the time. This option gives you another way to track changes in a book's or author's "public image" over time--but instead of focusing on different literary critics' readings of the work, as in one of the "reception" options, for this option you'd be focusing on how a given filmmaker reimagines a "landmark" of American literature and what's at stake in that re-vision of the novel. (If you wanted to be very ambitious, you could choose two contrasting film versions of the same work--perhaps from different time periods--and turn this into a doubly comparative essay, on what's at stake in the different versions of the novel each film offers.) (Another variation on this topic would be to contrast Hollywood's version of a classic novel in a given time period with the academy's most influential interpretations of that work from the same time period. What's at stake in the different "visions" of a landmark novel by academics and filmmakers at a particular time?)

• These options are just the tip of the iceberg. If you have any questions about this page, please contact me during my office hours or over email.

Advice

This is the final assignment of the course, so you should choose or invent a topic that matters to you and that you care about, while keeping in mind that it's your job to show me what you've learned during the semester in your paper.

more to come!

EN 399-03: American Landmarks, Fall 2000
Created: 10/16/00, 11:31 am
Last modified: 12/8/00, 2:52 pm