Research Paper

For your final paper, I will be asking you to write a 12-20 page essay on one or more of the texts we have studied in class. Your essay should present an in-depth, analytic argument about a particular theme or idea, and it should use at least 4 peer-reviewed secondary sources (i.e., sources taken from the MLA Bibliography). The goal of this assignment is for you to present a unique and complex argument about your text(s): as such, I will be assessing these essays based on the originality of their argument, the depth of their textual analysis, and their ability to develop and sustain a complex argument.

The annotated bibliographies that we compiled as a class should serve as a starting point for your research. Review the bibliographies on the class wiki carefully to find articles that pertain to your chosen topic. You may also use any of the optional readings listed on the class syllabus. And, of course, you should search around in the MLA Bibliography for other sources about your topic.

On Writing:

If you have any questions about how to write an effective college literature essay, I have uploaded several useful documents to Blackboard, including an essay writing guide, a handout on common pitfalls of literature essays, and two strong sample essays. I would highly encourage you to look these documents over, especially the essay writing guide. Strong literature essays need to develop complex arguments and to support those arguments with close readings of the text, and the essay writing guide will help to explain how to do so.

A Note on Using Sources:

Many students ask me how they should incorporate sources into their essays. In general, secondary sources are important insofar as they provide you with ideas about the text that you can either: 1) use to further your own argument; or 2) argue against in your reading. As such, the most important work that they perform is conceptual: these sources will help you to see what other critics think about the text and will help you to start thinking about how your own views about the text relate to the views of other critics.

When writing the paper itself, there are two different ways you can engage with these sources:

You can deal with them right up front, in an initial body paragraph or two. In this case, you will be using these ideas as a starting point from which to formulate your own argument about the text. For example, you might explain some of the common ways that critics have interpreted the text you are looking at, and then explain how this approach is not able to answer some important question that you will be trying to answer over the course of your essay. (The same goes if you are using the more general theoretical and historical sources about British literature: you can use these articles to set up an initial set of ideas that you are interested in exploring, but your essay should then use these ideas to develop a unique question of its own to answer.)

You can incorporate these sources into your close readings. For example, if your essay was discussing Woolf’s approach to British nationalism, you might note in passing how Rebecca Walkowitz interprets one particular scene in the novel. When you do this, however, you should explain both what you agree with in Walkowitz’s argument and where you differ from her (or what new insight you will be adding to her reading). What you don’t want to do is simply cite these sources as authorities and move on: the goal in this essay is to enter into conversation with these authorities, and so you will want to make sure that you emphasize how your perspective is both similar to and differs from theirs.

The sample essay that I have uploaded to Blackboard does a good job of engaging with secondary criticism. I would encourage you to consult this if you have any questions about how to use secondary sources.

Guidelines for Literature Review

A literature review is an important step in the writing process: it is where you begin to take the research that you have done and evaluate it. As such, a literature review is less of a source-by-source summary of what you have found, and more of a holistic overview of the research that has been performed on a given topic. Your goal is to try and draw some broad conclusions about what scholars have said about a particular topic, as well as to think about how your essay will contribute to this scholarly discussion around this topic. What are the major debates that are present in your chosen field? Is there a general consensus about certain aspects of your topic? And how would you position your own ideas with respect to these debates and accepted truths?

In order to get at these issues, I will be asking you to perform two related tasks in this assignment. After having identified at least four secondary sources that you plan to use in your final research paper, you should:

survey the scholarly conversation (the “literature”) around your topic or field of inquiry (~1-2 pages),

and

identify how your own paper will constitute an original contribution to this conversation (~1 page).

In the “survey” section of these reviews, you should consider a number of things. How does each of these authors demonstrate his or her argument using evidence? What commonalities do these sources share, and where they are in disagreement with each other? Do all scholars of your topic focus on a particular set of issues, returning over and over again to the same set of questions? Are the scholars whose work you have read divided on a central issue—is there a debate that rages in your particular field of inquiry?

At the end of your literature review, you should then include a substantial paragraph or two on how your own paper will constitute a contribution to the critical conversation surveyed in the body of the literature review. How do you plan to intervene in this critical conversation and on why your intervention is original and important. How is your research different from what has come before? Are you synthesizing diverse materials that no one else has put together yet? Are you disagreeing with a dominant viewpoint? Or are you filling a “gap” in the existing research?

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