Instructor: Dr. Laura Schechter Due Date: 13 August, 12:30pm (Mountain)
ENGL 339-B1 Optional Extensions to 16 August, 12:30pm (Mountain)
Final Paper
(5-7 pages, double-spaced)
Preliminary Remarks
This last assignment allows you to choose your own adventure, working on whichever combination of skills and writing styles most interest you. This assignment is worth 30% of your term grade, and it is in lieu of a final exam. Your work should conform to MLA 8th or 9th edition for all formatting, direct quotations, paraphrases, and summaries. If you would like to, you can connect your final paper (instead of your roundtable paper) to your annotated bibliography. Please note that your final paper and roundtable paper must take up different class texts and contain substantially different content.
Please note that this assignment makes use of staggered deadlines. If you would like to receive the standard level of feedback on your work, please submit it to me through eClass Assignments by 13 August, 12:30pm (Mountain). If you would like a few extra days to work on your submission and are okay with not receiving any comments (just a grade for the assignment), please submit it on 16 August. If you use the later deadline, you can simply email your assignment to lms3@ualberta.ca, as the eClass Assignments link will close shortly after the first deadline passes. This extension is pre-approved, so no need to ask my permission or notify me before using it.
Please also note that extensions for final essays will be more difficult to grant because classes will have ended. You will need to agree to a specific extended deadline, in writing, and a final course grade of IN will likely be registered in Bear Tracks until the work is submitted or the deadline passes. If work is not handed in by the extended deadline, I will be forced to note an IN (equivalent to an F) grade for the essay, and your final grade in Bear Tracks will be changed to reflect the IN/F essay grade.
If you are in Roundtable 4 or 5 and will be submitting your roundtable essays in the last week of class, I would encourage you to work on this “final” essay earlier in the semester, submitting it by the end of July. This is purely to make workloads and scheduling more manageable, but you can, of course, use the deadline of 13-16 August along with other students.
Please note, too, that the word and page count noted above is a suggested minimum. A +/- 5-10% of that range is perfectly acceptable, and I’ll be happy to read slightly more if you have slightly more to say. The Works Cited page does not count towards page count, nor do longer quotations.
Specific Remarks
You have a variety of options when writing your final papers. The following is a list of potential genres, styles of writing, and loose topics from which you can choose. More detailed for each option can be found on the pages that follow.
1. Research-informed analysis of a class text (or cluster of texts), or research-informed analysis of a key issue that is related to materials covered in class;
2. Thesis-based close reading of a passage from a class text;
3. An article review that evaluates a scholarly secondary source of relevance to a class text or class issue (or two article reviews, on the same text or issue, or on different ones, totalling 5-7 pages);
4. An essay (research informed or not) that takes up a popular adaptation (film, tv, text, art, or other) of a class text;
5. A creative piece and mini-essay (of at least four pages) that outlines your creative response to a specific class text (or cluster of texts);
6. An essay that explores how you might stage a scene (or series of scenes) from a class text.
7. Another relevant assignment of your choice, but discuss your plans with me before getting started.
A Note on Citations and Academic Honesty
When you directly quote a source (be it print, digital, scholarly, or popular), you need to make your use clear by including quotation marks around the quoted material, accurate parenthetical references, and Works Cited entries for the source. If you directly quote material that would be considered common knowledge, please treat it like a quotation from any other type of source: include quotation marks, parenthetical citations, and Works Cited entries.
When you paraphrase, summarize, or otherwise make use of specific arguments or research findings from a source (be it print, digital, scholarly, or popular), you need to make your use clear by including accurate parenthetical references and Works Cited entries for the source. This rule does not include brief summaries of information widely available on a topic–information that would be considered common knowledge or encyclopedic fact.
With few exceptions, electronic texts should be scholarly and accessed through the University of Alberta catalogue or databases. Material accessed through Google Books or an online peer-reviewed journal (or a relevant report published by a governmental agency, etc.) should also be fine, provided that it is of the same quality as something found through the U of A system.
Please note that the syllabus has Works Cited entries for the class editions of required texts.
Expanded Instructions for Each Option
1. Research Essay
This submission would likely be a more formal essay that identifies an important problem, characterization, or issue in your chosen class text(s), and it would present a thesis-based argument that is informed by scholarship in the field. If your essay does not focus on a class text, it should still focus on an issue of relevance to this class, and you could certainly connect your discussion of a class text to another relevant work if you want to move beyond the syllabus for this class.
Given the length of the final papers (5-7 pages), keep your secondary sources to, perhaps, a maximum of three or four. It’s fine to make more extensive use of three sources and then include the odd detail from a couple of more, but keep in mind that the point of the assignment is really to hear your thoughts about the interaction between the selected text(s) and research.
Electronic articles should be scholarly and, in general, accessed through the University of Alberta databases. If an article is available on the internet, it should still be written by an expert in the field and published through a reputable source in that field (a scholarly journal, university, or professional association, for example, if it is open access).
Potential Topics for Essay
The following are some options, if you would like a prompt to follow as you write, but you can also develop your own essay topic. Just ensure that your focus and selected text(s) are of relevance to this class’s general theme of love and marriage in the world of William Shakespeare.
1. Discuss the ways in which Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598/1599) highlights the early modern English culture’s idealization of women’s pre-marital virginity, but also the ways in which the play might give a more realistic view of sexual (or sexualized) activity prior to marriage. What are the potential consequences for women in this play who engage in pre-marital sexualized romance (or are accused of doing so)? Do the consequences change for different characters? How and why? Develop your arguments by examining specific passages or interactions from the text.
2. Consider the range of unmarried men (both bachelors and widowers) in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598/1599), and make a case for why one of them is the most suitable or most ideal candidate for marriage. You can make a case for two characters’ suitability, if you would like. Why do you think your selection(s) are most suited to marriage or are set up to be the ideal romantic partners? What qualities do they have that make them more ideal than others in the play? You might think about one character’s suitability by also considering why one or two of the male characters would be especially unsuitable for marriage in contrast.
3. Titania and Oberon’s fight over the changeling sets the entire natural world into disorder in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595), indicating clear relationships between the fairy domestic sphere and other orders (environmental, in this case). Place Titania and Oberon’s antagonism within a broader presentation of battles between the sexes in the text, and suggest how these battles connect to the larger world of social, familial, and/or romantic relationships.
4. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595) opens with Egeus demanding to use “the ancient privilege of Athens,” (1.1.41), that being, the right to “dispose of” his daughter by choosing her spouse or putting her to death (1.1.42, 43-5). Egeus’s claim to this legal right is outlandish to modern audiences, but it would have been so even to early modern audiences, particularly given the reality that most sixteenth-century couples largely dictated the terms of their relationships without excessive parental intervention. Only in cases involving substantial wealth or important sociopolitical connection would family members be expected to take an active role in deciding appropriate partners for their children; generally, however, couples often found that parental consent was easily granted when requested, particularly given that many people were in their twenties before they married. A standard aspect of courtship was the “night-visit,” which often included the exchange of gifts and which could occur with or without the direct knowledge of parents. Indeed, parents might have some knowledge of their child’s evening visits with a suitor (which might entail, for example, discussions through an open window), but they might not know all the details, especially when such visits were in the early stages of a romance. Early modern romances also often developed out of two common social groupings: first, the homosocial bonds of childhood and adolescent friendship that usually gave way to heterosexual pairings; and second, public, mixed sex merriment at festivals–dancing, kissing games, and Maypole festivities.
With this background in mind, explain why Hermia’s romance with Lysander is entirely unremarkable for early modern audiences and their conception of marriage as a social institution, OR make a case for why Egeus’s social position makes his interventions more understandable and the relationship between Hermia and Lysander more unusual in the period. Are Egeus’s demands at all reasonable or understandable? How do other characters misrepresent Hermia and Lysander’s romance? Why the mischaracterization and to what ends?
5. Develop an argument about why Olivia is unbothered when she finds out that she married Sebastian, not Cesario (a.k.a. Viola) in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (c. 1602). What are the specific qualities that Sebastian and Cesario share, and why does the Countess so easily mistake one person for the other? What qualities does Sebastian have that might make him an even more suitable partner than Cesario?
6. Discuss the place of Antonio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (c. 1602). How do you characterize his friendship with Sebastian, and how might this friendship connect to early modern homosocial bonds? Does your sense of Antonio change once Sebastian meets Olivia and reunites with Viola? How or how not?
7. Make a case for the ways in which Malvolio’s desire for Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (c. 1602) connects to early modern anxieties about social mobility and the gentry’s (or the middling sort’s) changing membership. Support your analysis by examining specific passages from the play, and tying this analysis to a larger discussion of shifting social identities in early modern England.
8. If we consider Romeo + Juliet (dir. Luhrmann, 1996) as a narrative that is explicitly focused on teen desires (perhaps within a larger context of adolescent social groups), how do key plot details become more comprehensible? How does the romance of Romeo and Juliet become clarified once their status as young teenagers is considered, in other words? What sorts of cues does the film give for considering both Romeo and Juliet as young, and how does their youth impact their other relationships in the film? Develop your points by making use of specific examples from the film.
9. While building a larger argument about the film Romeo + Juliet (dir. Luhrmann, 1996) as a tragic romance, examine the ways in which race and ethnicity work to develop the lovers’ prominence in the film. Given the film’s setting, why does racial and ethnic visibility make a great deal of sense? How are these logical, perhaps expected, visual and behavioural cues for race and ethnicity then used in the film, and to what end? How does Mercutio’s queer identity connect to race and larger plot concerns? Support and expand your arguments by making clear reference to key examples from the film.
10. Contemporary readers frequently highlight the issue of male sexuality and same-sex desire in Marlowe’s Edward the Second (c. 1592/1593), but do readers do injustice to early modern understandings of sexuality in the process? Explain how Edward II fits into early modern discourses on sexuality and desire, analyzing specific passages to ground your ideas and focus your thesis. How have readings of sexuality in the play changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and why are these changes important to your understanding of key characters in the text?
11. Discuss the importance of the king’s two bodies to Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second. How does this political theory inform the playwright’s treatment of male friendship or the issue of political influence in the play? Make reference to specific examples from the text in order to strengthen your points.
2. Thesis-Based Close Reading
This submission would likely be a more formal essay that identifies an important problem, characterization, or issue in your chosen text, working through an interpretation of how that element–or how a cluster of related elements–operates in a key passage and to what effect. You could make use of some secondary sources in this essay, or you could just practice your close reading skills if you really enjoy that reading strategy. Work to develop a new reading of your selected passage; in other words, do not simply rehash material from class discussion.
With close reading you develop an argument focused on specific wording, imagery, metaphor, and/or grammar in a passage of your choice. How do some of these elements enable, further, highlight, develop, or complicate the text’s larger presentation of an issue or characterization? You present introductory remarks, a thesis, and supporting points, and you then develop those supporting points in separate paragraphs, making use of extensive interpretation of the creative work(s) to develop your arguments. You then present concluding comments in a final paragraph.
I would suggest that you choose a passage of approximately thirty lines or, if you want to do something comparative, a couple of passages that are approximately 20-30 lines each. Slightly longer passages are also fine, but keep the excerpt relatively short. You can briefly reference other moments in the text, in order to highlight your point about the excerpted material, but the bulk of your analysis should focus on the selected passage.
You are asked to work methodically through your chosen passage, and to analyze or interpret the multiple meanings found in specific words, phrases, images, and metaphors, although other textual issues may also be of interest (choices made with regard to grammar, punctuation, rhyme scheme, or line breaks, for example).
You do not have to discuss EVERY word in the material, but find specific textual choices that assist your overall reading of the passage’s central theme or effect, and examine those textual choices closely, analyzing the multiple connections and levels of interpretation that they offer individually and in tandem with other textual choices.
Close reading usually involves a great deal of direct quotation from your primary text, so be sure to smoothly integrate your quotations into your own sentences. You may find that if the author repeats certain words, you will refer to earlier analysis and discuss how the second (or third) use of the word enriches, changes, or complicates the prior line.
Close Reading and the OED
To get a better sense of early modern English, please use the Oxford English Dictionary to show the multiple definitions available for specific words (and those most likely for the context of the passage), and to get a sense of how the words may have been used when the text was produced. The OED is available through the University of Alberta’s database system, and it is very user friendly. Please note that the OED is NOT the same as dictionaries published by Oxford that are freely available online.
The OED has a feature that allows you to export properly formatted Works Cited entries. Look for the “Cite” link at the top right of each entry, and simply copy and paste or export the Works Cited entry developed by the database.
Parenthetical references for definitions 1 and 2a of “travel” as a noun would look like one of the following, depending on the context of your sentence. You can use the following possibilities as you create your own references:
(“travel, n.” def. 1 and 2a) or (def. 1 and 2a)
A Works Cited entry for the section on “travel” as a noun can follow this basic format:
“travel, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/
205267. Accessed 11 November 2020. [change to your date of access].
3. Article Review(s)
Choose a scholarly article or book chapter (or a professionally written document that has been published by a reputable governmental or professional organization) that in some way discusses or connects to a class text or cluster of texts. If the secondary work does not specifically address the class text, it must in some way critique or address an issue relevant to at least one piece discussed this semester.
This article or book chapter should be found through the University of Alberta’s catalogue or database systems, although similar material found through open access sites is also fine.
Provide a critical response to the secondary text’s treatment of the class’s primary text(s) or the class’s broader issue(s). Consider how the secondary source supports, develops, challenges, troubles, complicates, or clarifies your understanding of the class’s primary text(s) or issue(s).
The article review could be imagined as a more thoughtful, more developed annotated bibliography entry, and you could do two article reviews totalling 5-7 pages if you would like to. Your paragraphs would give some introductory context for your overall assessment and key points of interest, some discussion and evaluation of the secondary source’s main arguments, and some concluding thoughts. If you do more a couple of shorter article reviews, they could focus on the same class text or different ones.
Please note that this assignment requires more than a simple book report. You are asked to briefly summarize main points in order to give context to the critic’s arguments, certainly, but you must take a position about the relevance and rhetorical success of the critic’s ideas, tying the secondary source’s treatment of the class text to your own responses to the primary text. All these things should be done with a critical eye.
Consider some of the following questions
What is the author’s thesis?
What central points does the author use to develop and support their thesis?
Is the organization of the information of relevance?
Is the article or chapter completely persuasive?
Are there weaknesses in the author’s arguments or examples?
Do you have questions that remain after reading the secondary text?
Please include clear parenthetical references and Works Cited entries for all texts quoted or paraphrased, as you would normally. At the very least, your article review will have references for the class text(s) and the selected secondary source, but any other research used MUST also be used honestly.
Please do not repeat reviewed material from your annotated bibliography. You could continue to research the same issue, but you will need to evaluate new sources for this assignment.
If you would like a model for a book review, feel free to refer to this 2015 review that I completed, but please note that the citation at the top of the entry follows a different house style: http://appositions.blogspot.com/2015/08/laura-schechter-queens-dumbshows.html. Book reviews by other authors can be found in most academic journals.
4. Response to a Popular Adaptation
This option is similar in its goals to the article review, but your focus would be on discussion and critique of a popular adaptation (film, tv, text, or some other media) that connects in some way to materials discussed in this class. Several films and tv series inspired by Shakespeare’s work can be found through EPL and NEOS, although Netflix and other streaming sites would also be good sources. This might be an especially fun option for those of you interested in film studies, comic books, young adult fiction, video games, etc. There are fewer choices available to those of you interested in adaptations of Marlowe’s work, but Derek Jarman’s 1991 film adaptation of Edward II is a remarkably campy and inventive option. You can access it through the NEOS catalogue.
Focus your response to the popular adaptation by tying your discussion of the adaptation to the corresponding representation or issue in a class text. For example, how does your popular adaptation handle a key characterization or issue in a class text, and how does the class text take up that same characterization? What are the similarities and differences, and why do those similarities and differences matter to your understanding of both works? Without guessing at intention, what are the effects in terms of representation when you consider the changes made in the popular adaptation?
Develop your arguments by analyzing key scenes and examples from your selected works, and include clear parenthetical references and Works Cited entries, as usual.
5. Creative Writing + Explanatory Mini-Essay of Four Pages
Write a creative piece that in some way responds to a class text (or cluster of class texts). This reply could take the form of fictional prose, poetry, a dramatic work (one or two scenes would be fine), an editorial to a newspaper or magazine, a pamphlet, a series of Tweets or texts, or another literary form altogether. You could also include some sort of visual or musical piece, if you have talents in other artistic fields. The length of your creative piece will vary, so there is no minimum page or word count for the creative component.
Please also submit a brief essay (minimum 4 pages, double-spaced) that details how your creative response interacts with key issues in the class text(s), making direct reference to the class text(s) and your own creative work in your critical response. The grade for your work will be based on the mini-essay, since this is not a creative writing, visual arts, or performing arts class with a workshopping component.
Some possible creative topics are as follows:
Fictional diary entries or letters from the perspective of a character or figure in a class text, or perhaps diary entries or letters from the perspective of someone whose voice is somewhat marginal in the original work;
A section from a conduct, travel, or political leadership manual inspired by a class text or texts;
A promotional pamphlet or brochure for some sort of campaign (political, social, environmental, religious, etc.);
A piece that imagines a pre-history or alternative ending to one of the class texts, or a piece that imagines a parallel experience as told by another character;
An online dating profile or series of tweets (or IM/Gmail Chat sessions, etc.) written in the voice of a character from a class text;
Slash fiction involving characters from different class texts;
A podcast with discussion of a class text or texts;
A section of a graphic novel or comic book adaptation of a class text
Another creative response not already suggested by me.
Your mini-essay should still work through key points in organized paragraphs, but you may only have a few sentences to “introduce” the response. While you very well may not have a thesis in your explanatory essay, you should still have a focus (i.e. how your creative piece connects to the class text in specific ways).
See below for details on citing outside sources in your creative piece.
Citing Outside Sources in Your Creative Work
Quotation marks and parenthetical citations would probably look odd in your creative text, so you could show your use of class or other texts by italicizing or underlining that quoted text. The mini-essay would allow you to take up those intentional creative overlaps in more specific ways. Please include clear parenthetical citations and Works Cited entries for any published material referenced in your mini-essay (be it print, online, or other), including your class text(s).
6. Staging a Key Scene or Scenes
Suggest how you might stage a key scene in a class text, making reference to early modern staging techniques or modern staging techniques as necessary. You might want to imagine how staging your scene would change from an early modern theatre to a modern one, or you might want to focus on one era. You could also consider how different stagings of the same scene would potentially change a viewer’s understanding of a character, a relationship, a scene, or an entire play.
Given that you will be imagining how to stage a scene, or perhaps various ways to stage a scene, you may find that your work here is somewhat conceptual or hypothetical in tone (rather than consistently argumentative). Depending on your paper’s focus, you may not have a developed thesis, but you should clearly identify issues of interest, and those issues should guide your writing. You should still organize your points or arguments into paragraphs, in other words, and the paragraphs should build on each other to give an overall sense of your staging.
This option could require some research into theatre tech or staging techniques, depending on your background knowledge. If you do decide to make use of research, do not allow the research to take over your own voice. The focus of this paper should be your thoughts on how to stage a scene, not a summary of research on staging techniques, in other words. Your research would really only have to give you something of a critical vocabulary in terms of stage directions and techniques, so that you could then relay your imagined staging with clarity and precision.
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