Project description
The Assignment
Based on the close reading and research you have already completed for the Research Guide, write a well-supported, carefully-researched, and claim-driven 5-6-page researched analysis of the novel you have selected as your case study for this semester\’s adaptation project. Your research question (or your prompt for this essay) is the question that closes the research guide assignment you have already completed. Put in other terms, your prompt is: Describe how this novel advocates a key issue, idea, or solution to a problem to its primary audience. How does the novel accomplish its goals in the context of its writing and its distribution to different audiences? In other words, delve into the deeper implicit and symptomatic meanings of the novel: articulate a clear claim about how the novel develops its key issues, ideas, problems, or themes for its audience, and support that claim with specific evidence derived both from the language used in the novel and from the research you have completed.
Tips for Writing and Revising
More than a thumbs-up/thumbs-down evaluation, this researched analytical essay will draw on your ethos as an expert on this novel: this essay will demonstrate your engagement with, and ability to apply, course vocabulary to a text in order to determine how the formal elements of literature meet the purposes of a rhetorical situation. The goals of the assignment are for you to develop (a) your observational and analytical skills with respect to the formal elements of novels; (b) your research skills into the context surrounding the novel; (c) your research and unpacking of the larger generic, historical, and ideological resonance of a novel as it reaches its audience over time; and (d) your ability to translate that analysis and contextualization into a cogent, thoughtful, and well-written essay that makes an argument about what these formal elements mean and why they might matter in a broad social manner.
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Added on 18.11.2016 21:18
Your writing for this class is expected to be a process that will undergo several phases of brainstorming, drafting, and revision. A general guideline for this process is as follows:
Actively read your selected novel, taking detailed notes and taking care to re-read passages that you feel are especially interesting, strange, or important.
Research key aspects of the novel and its context. What do these aspects of writing and distribution reveal about how these ideas, issues, themes, or problems connected to a larger audience? What does your research reveal about why the representation of these issues in this novel might matter?
Research key aspects of the novel\”s genre and the ideological assumptions that this novel appears to represent and subvert in its specific formal choices. What do the typical conventions of the genre reveal about what this novel is doing? How does this novel reflect or respond to specific historical events and trends that were culturally important at its moment of production? What have other critics in the past argued about the ideological and social importance of this novel?
Brainstorm by ranking the details and research that you think are most significant and essential to the meaning of this film. You cant write about everything in a 5-6-page essay, so youll want to prioritize details early in the process.
Continue brainstorming by asking key questions about the observations that you make. (This is not the time to begin writing an essay or review yet: remember that observations are not the same as analysis!) What themes, issues, or ideas does this novel develop? How do the formal elements that you have observed advance those themes, issues, or ideas? Why does it matter that it uses these specific strategies to advance those themes and ideas? Why does it matter that it was marketed in this specific way? Do some free-writing that answers these questions.
Transform your observations into a clear, pointed, complex argument about what this novel means, how it develops that meaning, and why that matters: this is your rough thesis statement, and it will guide the structure of your entire essay!
Use your thesis statement as a basic roadmap for the remainder of your essay, helping for easy readability for your audience.
Support those claims in well-organized paragraphs: use specific evidence from the novel and from your research to support your claims about what this novel means and why it matters. Remember that the evidence you are using to support your claims includes all of those terrific observations that you wrote down as you were reading the novel. Moreover, be sure to explain how those details produce the meaning: \”how\” questions are the key to excellent analytical essays!
Revise. And always remember: Revision is Re-Writing!
Instruction files
fst220_research_guide.docx(18,30 KiB)