Final Project

This page takes on two important questions about the final project you will do this semester in this course: what and what for; it also includes an assignment sheet. My goal is to make this page as useful to you as possible, so let me know if it can be improved. If anything is badly worded, unclear, or missing, please contact me with constructive criticisms and suggestions. Ditto for any questions you may have about any of the options listed below. Thanks.

What

Your fifteen-to-twenty page final project is an opportunity to research and respond to a particular historical "re-vision" in American literature. Possibilities include a research-based comparative essay, a research-based pedagogical essay, a creative writing project with author's note, or an analytical web site.

• Critical Essay option: write a 15-to-20-page comparative essay in which you advance an argument about what's at stake in the relation between any two authors' historical re-visions, drawing on at least three secondary sources to help you develop and support your argument. The goal of this option is for you to incorporate research into secondary sources into the development and support of an argument on a work or works from the course--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. I will be grading this essay in terms of how well you make your case for your argument, how well you base your argument on textual analysis and interpretation, and how well-organized and well-written your paper is. Hence I will be evaluating the coherence, validity, and persuasiveness of your paper's argument, the effectiveness of your paper's structure, and the quality of your paper's prose (diction, grammar, syntax, and punctuation).
• Pedagogical Essay option: write a 15-to-20-page paper 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 and on your reasons for teaching the work 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 the analysis and teaching of historical re-visions in American literature by making a case for the best way of teaching a particular work (or works) 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. I will be grading this essay in terms of the quality of the lesson plan itself, how well you make your case for your pedagogical goals and strategies, and how well-organized and well-written your essay is (including diction, grammar, syntax, and punctuation).
• Creative Writing option: write a story, poem, or play that is in significant intertextual dialogue with an author, work, genre, movement, or period that we've studied this semester, along with an author's note of at least two pages detailing the critical 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 historical re-visions in American literature by doing one 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 some of the previous options, you'd be showing what you've learned by "doing it yourself." By entering into an intertextual dialogue with other writers--by relating your text to theirs on any of modes and devices of narrative fiction (setting, character, plot, point-of-view, theme, figurative language, form, and so on)--you will be able to get across your "take" on the other works, on the critical issues they engage, and the narrative strategies they enact. I will be grading your project on the quality of the fictional work and of the author's note, the inventiveness with which your work engages the work or works and critical issues it is responding to, and the quality of your writing (including diction, grammar, syntax, and punctuation).
• Web Authoring option: create a web information/research site devoted to a specific historical re-vision in American literature (see the links page for an introduction to what's out there, and to help you figure out what needs to be done) from the course that includes an essay of at least two pages detailing the critical 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/critical 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. I will be grading your web site on the quality of its content and design, on the originality and thoughtfulness of approach to the topic you have focused on, and on the quality of your writing (including diction, grammar, syntax, and punctuation).

I encourage you to develop your own form for presenting your ideas about historical re-visions in American literature.

What For

So far this semester you've already done a good deal of writing--ranging from the informal free writing on specific topics in class to your weekly reading responses. You've gotten good practice at noticing things about literary texts and asking questions of them; we've focused a lot in class on making connections between texts and identifying tensions within and between them, interpreting significant passages and image patterns, and considering various answers to questions that you all have posed as well as I. The critical essay gave you a chance to develop a sustained argument on a specific topic and to work with the concept of the stakes of a "historical re-vision." What the final project allows you to do is to return to this concept but to treat it in a much more flexible and in-depth way.

As we noted before, it's worth distinguishing between different kinds of "historical re-visions" and the different historical perspectives they offer.

• One kind of "historical re-vision" involves a reimagining or reenvisioning of a prior literary period by a poet, dramatist, or novelist whose text is published after the recognized end of that period. Good examples of works that do this sort of thing would be Toni Morrison's Jazz and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, which both propose to rethink conventional images and associations of "The Jazz Age" by refocusing our attention on black working class life and black cultural influences, respectively (and rather reductively). Instead of The Great Gatsby and the Cotton Club solely defining the 1920s, Morrison and Reed seek to offer a different view of what was happening in American culture and in black America between the world wars. Even though they do this in literary form, what they're doing is not too different from what historians and cultural critics like Ann Douglas in Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s or George Hutchinson in The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White do--provide a new interpretation of a historical era by taking seriously stories that have been ignored or misinterpreted. Of course, the differences between a novel and a scholarly work are important, and worth exploring, perhaps even in a final project.
• Another kind of "historical re-vision" similarly examines a later's writer's response to a prior period, but does so with the focus on "revision" rather than "reenvisioning." Rather than asking "How does this work help us reimagine the American Renaissance or the Harlem Renaissance, and what's at stake in that reenvisioning of the period/era?" people who choose this emphasis would more likely ask, "What is at stake in X's revision of Y?" where X is a later writer and Y is an earlier work. This kind of "historical re-vision," in other words, focuses closely on the relation between two writers from different periods and specific aspects of their works, in order to figure out what's significant about the later writer's revisions of the earlier writer's works, to figure out why it matters that the later writer made these revisions.
• Another kind of "historical re-vision" would have us focus less on the implicit commentary being made by a later writer on a prior period or work, and more on the implicit commentary the later writer is making on hisor her own time. Rather than the "historical re-vision" offering a new historical perspective on the writer's past, in other words, it would offer a historical perspective on the writer's present. A good example of this kind of critical approach, or at least the seeds of it, can be found in Ralph Ellison's comments in Shadow and Act on American Renaissance writings, Mark Twain's and other later writers' relations to them, and the limitations of what he calls the "hard-boiled" school of modernist writing epitomized by one of his own major influences, Ernest Hemingway. Ellison reads Herman Melville's Mody-Dick and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as commenting on their own times, even when they are most directly in dialogue with other places and times. (This would be an interesting way to read Ellison's own masterpiece, Invisible Man--as a commentary on American Cold War culture. I'm sure it's been done already, but it would be worth following through on in the final project, since Ellison is responding to both the American and Harlem Renaissances in his novel!)

But whereas the critical essay required you to engage one or more of these kinds of "historical re-vision" within the bounds of a thesis-driven persuasive/analytical essay, the final project's only requirement is that your research inform your project, whatever shape it takes. The final project should be something you "customize" to fit your needs, interests, talents. It should involve an issue or question you're curious about, that you want to pursue further, that you want to find out what others have said about or done with it. By giving you the freedom to set your own subject matter, research focus, and form for expressing your ideas, I hope to encourage experimentation and inventiveness. Rather than "just another research paper," I want this to be something that allows you to pull together the major threads (and loose ends) in the course, to put your ideas in relation to other critics and artists who have preceded you, and to play with the concept and practice of historical re-vision.

Assignment Sheet

Due: No later than 5 pm on Friday, May 16, 2003

Format: 15-20 pages, double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins (be warned that barely getting on to the fourth sheet of paper does not a four-page paper make!); 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 the links page for explanations of this style of citation); proper quotation format: "..." (12). for quotations within a paragraph; blockquote format for quotations five lines or longer.

Criteria for Evaluation: See above (under "What") for the different grading criteria for the different options/formats for the final project.

Audience: In general, think of your immediate audience as those who have taken and are taking this class; hence, you can assume that your readers have read the texts you're writing on and you don't have to include the kind of background that someone not taking this course would need.

Draft Policy: I'd be happy to read and comment on rough drafts; please give me a draft no later than the beginning of class on M 5/12 if you want comments on it via e-mail.

ENGL 512: Historical Perspectives in Literature, Spring 2003
Created: 4/22/03 6:39 pm
Last modified: 4/22/03 6:46 pm
Click here for the assignment sheet for the final project in my undergraduate course on American Romanticism, and here for the assignment sheet for the final project in my undergraduate course on the Harlem Renaissance.