Final Research Project

As you know, you are required to do a final research project (8 to 12 pages for undergraduates, 15 to 20 pages for graduate students). This page gives a rationale for this assignment, some suggestions for developing a topic, and an assignment sheet with possible topics.

What For

This assignment is aimed at helping you further develop and demonstrate your abilities to compare and contrast different authors' literary and political projects and analyze them in the context of the authors' cultures, ethnicities, regions, and historical eras and to identify and analyze patterns in American and world literature (goals 3 and 4 from Part IV of the syllabus--cf. main page). Your in-class writing, critical essays, and group pedagogical projects should have prepared you to choose a topic for, research, and write an extended argument in which you perform a critical reading, thereby showing what you've learned in the course.

How To

The topic and format for your final research project is open, so long as there is a comparativist engagement with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse in it. You are encouraged to develop a topic based on any of the aspects of the course from the course description (Part I of the syllabus--cf. main page) and to choose a format that best allows you to articulate your findings persuasively (possible formats include persuasive essay, pedagogical essay, creative writing, web authoring--see below for more details). The central goal of this assignment should be to analyze the stakes of a relation between Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and some other writer or work from the course.

Final Research Project Assignment Sheet

Due: no later than 5 pm, Monday, August 9, 2004, in my mailbox in the English department main office (277 Fenton) or in the envelope outside my office door (240 Fenton).

Format: for undergraduates, 8-12 pages; for graduate students, 15-20 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 for quotations within a paragraph: "..." (12); blockquote format for quotes five lines or longer--but see below for variations.

Possible formats (meant to be illustrative, not comprehensive or prescriptive!) for your final research project include:

• Critical Essay option: write a critical essay in which you advance an argument analyzing the stakes of a relation between Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and some other writer or work from the course. The goal of this option is for you to incorporate research into secondary sources into the development and support of an argument--and hence to hone your analytical and persuasive skills by entering into an interpretive dialogue with other readers/critics of the work(s) you have chosen to analyze.
• Pedagogical Essay option: write a pedagogical essay on how you'd organize a high school class period (or set of meetings) devoted to one (or more) of the works we read in the course (including at least excerpts from Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse) and on your reasons for teaching the work(s) in the way you described--drawing on at least three secondary sources to help you develop and support your teaching plan. The goal of this option is to show what you've learned in the course about teaching a major author or authors in a high school classroom. Your essay, in other words, should not simply describe what you want to do with your class; it should explain why and justify your choices. Your essay should explain and justify your goals, methods, and modes of assessment--it should make a case for why it's important to teach students what you want them to learn, for why the teaching strategies you plan to use will help you achieve your goals, and for why the assessment methods you have chosen will enable you to tell to what degree students have met your goals.
• Creative Writing option: write a story, play, series of poems, personal essay or other work that is in significant intertextual dialogue with at least one author, work, genre, movement, or issue that we've studied this semester (including Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse), along with an author's note of at least two pages detailing the issues you are addressing and the thought process that went into your composition. The goal of this option is to show what you've learned about literature by writing a work of your own and analyzing it in relation to works and issues in the course. Rather than, say, analyzing how someone else's text works, or arguing for how you'd teach students to do this sort of analysis, as in the previous options, you'd be showing what you've learned about critical, theoretical, and creative writing by "doing it yourself." By entering into an intertextual dialogue with other writers--by relating your text to theirs using any of the modes and devices of creative writing--you will be able to get across your "take" on the other works, on the critical issues they engage, and the narrative/poetic/dramatic strategies they enact.
• Web Authoring option: create an analytical web site devoted to a specific aspect of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and its relation to at least one other writer or work that hasn't been treated well on the web (see the links page for an introduction to what's out there, and to help you figure out what needs to be done) that includes an essay of at least two pages detailing the issues you are addressing and the thought process that went into constructing the web site, and a bibliography of all your sources (both electronic and print). The goal of this option is for you to provide an educational resource for other readers. Your site should go beyond the usual moves (providing biographical and bibliographical information on an author, selecting quality links for further information) to fill a need/niche that is unfilled or undeveloped or not yet well done on the world-wide web.

Criteria for Evaluation: Your grade for this segment of the course will be based on the effectiveness of your comparative response to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, the coherence and validity of the implicit and explicit arguments of the piece, the effectiveness of the piece's structure in conveying your ideas and convincing your audience, and the quality of the piece's writing (including grammar, syntax, and punctuation).

Options: Here are some suggested rubrics for the final essay (the first pair open-ended, the rest less so); you are, of course, encouraged to invent or develop your own topic, even one that doesn't fit within these rubrics, so long as there is some engagement with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! in a comparative context, in your project.

• Consider the course description--In this section, we will consider a selection of writings by the modernist Mississippi author William Faulkner and contemporary American Indian writer Louise Erdrich in historical context, as aesthetic and political interventions in their own times, and for their intertextual relations. How do these very different writers speak to each other, to their own times, and to us? What connections and contrasts can we find between their characters and settings, characteristic themes and figures, central beliefs and values, and literary and political projects?--and develop a response (critical, pedagogical, creative, web-authoring) to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse that explores its relation to another writer or work from the course using any (combination) of the above questions.
• Consider the course goals--ENGL 426 is designed to help students develop their abilities to (1) recognize and analyze relations among an author's characters, settings, and plots in a variety of works: gain a critical perspective on an author's fictional "world"; (2) recognize and analyze relations among an author's use of form, theme, and narrative strategy in a variety of works: gain a critical perspective on an author's strategies of storytelling and "re-vision"; (3) compare and contrast different authors' literary and political projects and analyze them in the context of the authors' cultures, ethnicities, regions, and historical eras; and (4) identify and analyze patterns in American and world literature--and develop a response (critical, pedagogical, creative, web-authoring) to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse that explores its relation to another writer or work from the course using any (combination) of the above goals.

Other options:

• Formalist Faulkner: Style, Technique, Form, Structure, Strategy, Aesthetic: Consider the ways in which Faulkner's narrative strategies, literary techniques, and aesthetic choices changed from The Sound and the Fury to Absalom, Absalom! and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in the most significant of these changes.
• Literary Faulkner: Allusion, Genre, Movement: Consider the range of Faulkner's literary allusions and his works' participation in a variety of genres and literary movements--from the Bible to Shakespeare, from Southern vernacular culture and the plantation tradition to modernism and existentialism--and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in one of them in The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!.
• Revisionist Faulkner: Rewriting The Sound and the Fury: Consider the ways in which Absalom, Absalom! offers a "re-vision" of key themes in The Sound and the Fury and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in one of these "re-visions."
• Familial Faulkner: The Compsons and the Sutpens: Consider the similarities and differences between Faulkner's representations of the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury and the Sutpen family in Absalom, Absalom! and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in the relationship between those representations.
• Historical Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha County History: Consider the different perspectives on the history of Yoknapatawpha County offered by The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! and develop an argument about what's at stake in Faulkner's construction of that history.
• Political Faulkner: Consider the various political issues that Faulkner exposes us to in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!--among them, land and property ownership, the legacies of slavery, the effects of segregation, the construction of race, class and gender in the South, the politics of identities--and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in Faulkner's treatment of one of those issues in both of these works.

ENGL 426: Major American Writers, Summer 2004
Created: 6/29/04 11:35 am
Last modified: 7/12/04 12:26 pm