The Final Essay

Requirements

• Format: 6-10 pages (roughly 1500-4000 words), with a title and a heading that includes the course number or title, your name, and the date; word-processed; double-spaced; font Times 12 point or similar; preferably laser-printed. Remember that citations should be in parenthetical form at the end of sentences. For short ones, follow the format "quotation" (citation). Example: "Bruce is picky" (24). For quotations of five lines or more, put them in a separate single-spaced and indented paragraph without quotation marks around them, and at the end of them, after the last punctuation mark, put the parenthetical citation. Example:

  Blah blah blah [for five lines]. (18)

  If you're using more than one source and it's not clear whom you're quoting, follow this format: "..." (Simon 10). With multiple sources, you should do a "Works Cited" section at the end of the paper, following a consistent format (check out the MLA Handbook or the Chicago Manual of Style for examples of bibliographical formats).

• Due: by 5 pm Friday, December 18 in the folder tacked to the bulletin board outside my office (Fenton 240); no late papers will be accepted.
• Texts: You may write on any work or combination of works we've read for this class this semester; however, I don't recommend that you write on a work you've already devoted a critical response paper to, unless you make the final essay substantially different from your earlier paper.
• Process: You must schedule an appointment with me to discuss your ideas for the final essay. If you want, you can substitute this face-to-face meeting with a detailed email. Once we've discussed your ideas, either in person or over email, I highly recommend that you show your rough draft to a classmate of your choice and get feedback from that person (presumably, that person would want you to read their paper, as well; you should). You may hand in your paper any time between our consultation and the due date.

1. For your final essay, you must present an argument about or offer an interpretation of at least one of the texts we've read in class. You should have a central question that you are trying to answer in your essay, and you should be working to persuade your audience that your answer is plausible by offering whatever evidence seems most relevant to your argument and audience.

2. I have been suggesting possible topics in class throughout the semester. Keep checking back here for an ever-expanding list of potential topics, although I of course prefer that you choose a topic of your own invention and in which you have the most interest.

• One of the underlying claims of the course has been that all the works we've read this semester respond in some way to social or political problems or issues in American society, even works that seem completely concerned with aesthetics--in short, that early twentieth century modernism should be seen as something of a continuation of, rather than a sharp break with, the realism and naturalism of the late nineteenth century (a Crane/Hemingway comparison might be useful here). You might consider examining how modernist texts engage their contemporary moment, what strategies they use to represent or respond to current events, and to what ends various authors would do this. A contrast between someone like Eliot or Pound (who were pretty conservative politically) and Hemingway or Wright (who were pretty progressive politically) could get you thinking about the relation between artistic strategy and politics.
• Related to the previous topic are the big "themes" of the course--gender, class, religion, race/ethnicity, nationalism--and how the various writers react to events associated with and ideas about these issues and themselves contribute to, respond to, and help shape or revise those events, ideas, and issues.
• Another issue that's been rattling around this semester is just how to identify what's "modern" or "American" or "literary" about the works we've read this semester in a course called "Modern American Literature."
• Thinking in terms of specific works and how they relate to each other can also be helpful. Looking over the syllabus is a simple but often overlooked way of thinking about connections between works. For instance, there's the old "dialect" unit with Stein, Dunbar, Chesnutt, etc. How might Faulkner relate to any of these writers? There's also the old "tradition" unit in which we focused on Eliot, Pound, Hughes, and Cullen. How might any of the essays we read at the end of the course help us see any of these poets differently than we did at the start of the semester? There are unanswered questions from earlier in the course, like the relation between Stein's and Hemingway's works, or between Du Bois's and Wright's works.
• You might instead take the opportunity to focus on a particular work in some depth. Topics like Wright's relation to communism or Toomer's relation to the South or Du Bois's take on race and America or Faulkner's use of multiple narrators or Hemingway's response to World War I or Stein's relation to her main characters in Three Lives--or the relation between Hughes's essay and his poetry, or Eliot's essay and his poetry.

3. The longer length of this paper than the critical response papers gives you a good opportunity to write a comparison/contrast paper or do some outside research. Like the midterm exam, the main purpose of the final essay is to give you a chance to make connections between texts we've read this semester.

Advice

Note: I've numbered the paragraphs in this section to correspond to the numbering in the previous section.

1. For ideas on how to come up with an analytical or interpretive argument, see the reading responses page. Doing this should be familiar to you after a semester of reading responses, student responses, and your two critical response papers. It's natural, though, for you to have questions, and the process is never easy for anyone. So when we discuss your ideas for the final paper, raise any questions you might have about what makes an effective analytical or persuasive essay. I'm here to help!

2. See the critical response paper page and the mid-term examination page (the essay questions in part III) for some of the major questions of the course.

3. The paper length might seem a little daunting at first, but 6-10 pages is really very little space to develop your ideas in depth. Don't give in to the temptation to choose a HUGE topic for fear that you'll run out of ideas before you run out of space. Better to start with a focused topic and let it grow to fill the space. For this paper, you must give yourself enough time to do serious revisions on your first draft before you turn it in. I know how busy the end of the semester is (believe me, I do!), but unless you do at least one major revision of your original ideas, your grade will suffer. Anything you turn in should be your absolute best work, but that goes double for final papers. I don't want to see any careless typos or grammatical errors in your last assignment for this course. This is why I recommend sharing drafts with classmates and peer editing each others' papers. If you go this route, be sure to add an acknowledgements section at the end thanking the kind people who read and commented on your earlier draft.

All right, good luck with the final paper. This is your last piece of work for this course, so make it count and have fun doing it!

EN 336: Modern American Literature, Fall 1998
Last modified: 12/15/98, 5:37 pm