Looking Forward to your Final Projects

It's only week six, but we're already taking time to look forward to your final projects. Why? Because we're at a crossroads between our first and second major sections of the semester and that's the ideal time to reflect on what we've already done and how it'll shape the work that follows.

Throughout this first phase of the term we've traced the evolution of English Studies from its origins to the multi-modal approach it takes in the 21st century. Now we're getting ready to look a little more closely at three much-lauded books that share a similar hybrid approach to their chosen subjects. In Maggie Nelson's Bluets, the focus seems like a simple one: the color blue. Yet, in her hands we discover a great complexity behind that singular topic. Claudia Rankine explores contemporary issues surrounding race in Citizen: An American Lyric, and while we know that won't be a simple topic, we marvel at the depth and breadth of her argument. Finally, while the main idea behind Lauren Redniss' Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future seems clear to us, the choices she makes in working through that field reveal a perspective all her own.

These books present a blueprint for the work you'll be doing once we return from spring break, when everyone will workshop two short pieces that work in a similar mode to Nelson, Rankine, and Redniss. Those two short pieces will be part of a longer final paper you'll write that will have similar aims, as I'll reiterate below.

So what should you be doing now?

1. If you haven't done so already, you should start cultivating a short list — two or three items maximum — of ideas that you think you'd be interested in writing through. They can be an abstract idea like Nelson's (a color, a quality, a virtue, etc.), a demographic categorization like Rankine's (gender, age, sexual orientation, class), or a discrete field like Redniss' (baseball, space travel, cooking, etc.). There are lots of possibilities here, and my desire is for you to find something you feel passionate about exploring in diverse ways, and about which you can produce some sort of argument or synthesized conclusion. If you're uncertain if your idea is too broad or narrow in scope, or if you're looking for guidance, please be in touch.
2. You should start thinking about specific cultural artifacts that will serve as facets of your argument, remembering all of the various media we've spent the past few weeks exploring. It'll take a lot of brainstorming and fine-tuning to get a final series of points that will work well together.
3. Keep these last two points in mind as you make your way through our next three books, and think analytically about the ways in which each author goes about constructing their own arguments.

What will the final look like?

I'll post more information about both the workshop round and the final as each approaches. For the workshop round you'll be submitting two pieces in the ballpark of 500 words each, and taken together those will be about half of your final, which should be about 2000 words minimum. If you want to think in five-paragraph essay form, you'll need to have at least three main sections that your essay is anchored by, though these should still be relatively broad sub-topics that can accommodate complex analysis using more than just one piece of evidence. Each of your workshop pieces might correspond to a rough draft of one of those sections. 

I'm not one to split hairs, but roughly speaking, I'd like at no more than 2/3 of your evidence to be literary (i.e. coming from a book), which means that the remaining 1/3 might be a film, or music, or a work of art, a specific object, a word, etc. Conversely, I'd like you to still have some sort of literary focus, so at least 1/3 of your source material should be literary.

The challenge here is two-fold: 1) finding a novel topic capacious enough to provide for all sorts of potential evidence, and 2) to find, analyze, and weave together your evidence in such a way that it produces some sort of cohesive conclusion. The latter might be harder than the former, but that's another very good reason to be paying attention to the way in which Nelson, Rankine, and Redniss construct their books.

Gah! Gah? Gaaaah!?

Yes, it's normal to have questions about this. I'm happy to provide answers today and along the way, and if you're thinking critically and conscientiously about the reading we'll be doing in the next phase of the class, a lot of things will become clearer.