English 150: Final Essay Guidelines
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English 150: Final Essay Guidelines
Important Dates
Friday, May 31: Final Essay of 8 double spaced pages due to me by the end of lecture (30% of your grade for this course)
Friday, May 17: *optional* Essay Topic Proposals due to me by the end of lecture
Friday May 24: *optional* Essay Workshop, 10-11:45 PM, Location TBA
This could be the most exciting and interesting paper of your undergraduate experience! For this essay, you are asked to use a variety of resources in order to construct a thoughtful essay in some way related to the themes and texts we’ve covered in this course.
Essay Requirements
- 1. Your paper must be based on a passage of text from the course no longer than one page in length. If you choose to write on a longer poem such as "Clearances," you should plan on focusing on a few stanzas rather than attempting to explicate the poem in its entirety. You are welcome to use a clip from Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game as the basis for your paper, but if you chose to do so, you must keep the clip under two minutes in length and juxtapose the film with written textual sources that you’ve uncovered in your research.
- 2. Your paper should include at least three critical sources of information regarding your topic of discussion. For further assistance, ask one of the extremely friendly and helpful research librarians who are usually stationed on the first floor of Davidson past the information desk and down the short flight of stairs by the computers.
- 3. Contained within your paper should be a review of at least one of the articles you have uncovered during the course of your research and your opinion of the article. For example: "Jane Smith argues that James Joyce’s Ulysses is ‘stupid and boring’ (59). However, Smith’s statements seem over simplistic. Smith fails to take into account the subtlety of Joyce’s…. etc."
- 4. Find a piece of pop cultural evidence to support your argument and integrate this evidence in your paper. This evidence could be a piece of art work, a political cartoon, an advertisement, a magazine or newspaper article, a song, a map, a guidebook or anything along these lines. Please see me if you have any questions about your evidence or would like to get some ideas where you might find evidence to support your claim.
- 5. Find a visual image or representation that you think supports your claim. Include this image in your essay and discuss it.
- 6. You are strongly encouraged to turn in a paper topic proposal to me in lecture by Friday, May 17. I will turn back any paper proposals I receive in lecture or in my box by Friday, May 17 at 5PM on Monday, May 20 in section or lecture. Any paper proposals turned into me after that time will probably not be given back to you very soon. A paper topic proposal should be paragraph or so explaining your proposed topic and the general question that drives your research forward. You should include in your paper topic the books that you propose to study and any other resources (articles, pop cultural evidence, etc.) that you are planning on using.
- 7. Please use Times New Roman, not Courier or any other large type font for your final paper.
- 8. Please use MLA format for your essay and INCLUDE A WORKS CITED PAGE! I reserve the right to withhold a grade from any student that does not include a works cited page in their essay. See me for questions regarding MLA formatting and what should be included on a works cited page.
- 9. Late papers will be docked 1/3 of a letter grade for every day that it is late.
- 10. Please use me as a resource to help you with your essay. Come by my office hours or attend the paper-writing workshop for assistance with your essay or to talk about ideas for your paper.
Research Sources and Starters
Some very general resources to get you going on your research:
- Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, by Terence Brown
- The Hidden Ireland and Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, both by Daniel Corkery
- The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790, and A Short History of Irish Literature, all by Seamus Deane
- Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said
- The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
- Nationalism and Minor Literature and Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment, both by David Lloyd
- Colonialism/Postcolonialism, by Ania Loomba
