Final Paper

Here is the schedule for the final paper:

1. This week and early next week we will have our final round of conferences. I will return your annotated bibliographies to you. You should bring to this conference two items: an outline and an introductory paragraph.

2. At our last class meeting (Tuesday, Dec. 1st), we will have our peer review session. For this session you should bring a complete draft of your final paper.

3. Please note that failure to attend your conference or the final peer review session will adversely affect your grade for this paper.

4. The final draft of your paper will be due no later than Friday, December 8th, at 5:00. Place your paper in my box in the English department (Humanities 240). Do not submit your paper via e-mail.

Your final draft should be at least ten to twelve pages, should follow MLA format, and should include a complete works-cited page.

Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography is simply a list of sources with descriptions. For this assignment, you should follow the following steps:

1. Go through your sources and take notes on their relevance to your topic.

2. Create a bibliography, listing all of your sources according to MLA style. (Use the formatting instructions which begin on page 491 of your LB Brief.)

3. Below each entry, write a paragraph in which you briefly describe your source and explain specifically how you think it will be useful for your project.

This assignment will help you as you prepare to write the final paper. Not only will it help you to organize your sources, it will also help you to anticipate potential problems. For example, you may find that there are gaps in the information that you have gathered or that the sources you have assembled may suggest a slight change in the direction of your project.

A first draft of your annotated bibliography will be due November 12th. The final draft will be due November 17th.

Remember, we are having conferences instead of class on Tuesday. If you cannot make your conference time, please contact me, and we will reschedule.

Research Paper Topic and Proposal

For the rest of the semester we will be working toward your final research paper. In preparation for this culminating project, we will complete two preparatory assignments: a proposal and an annotated bibliography. We will talk about the annotated bibliography soon, but for the moment, you should concentrate on the proposal, which you should complete through the following steps:

1. You should have a general topic in mind when we visit the library on October 13th. Our capable reference librarians will show you how to use the invaluable databases and other resources that our library offers.

2. Your initial reading should help you to hone and narrow your topic into something more specific. For example, a general topic might be The Vietnam War. This, obviously, is too large a subject for you to deal with in your research paper, so you will need to narrow it. After doing some initial research on Vietnam, you would choose a narrower topic. For example, you might decide to write on The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

3. After honing your topic, you should write a two-page proposal for your research project. You should describe your topic and explain why it is important and interesting. You should explain what kinds of sources are available and how you plan to use them. You should explain what sorts of questions you are interested in answering with your project.

4. After you turn in your proposals, I will meet with each of you to discuss your topics.

The proposal will be due on Thursday, October 22nd.

Reminder: Drafts for Paper #2

Remember that a rough draft for your second paper is due on Tuesday. Try to make your draft as complete as possible; that way, you will get more out of the review session. Here are a couple of things to think about as you work on this paper:

–Imagine that you are explaining Foucault’s “Panopticism” to someone. This means that you will have to decide what you think are the main ideas and focus on them.

–This focus also means that it is probably not a good strategy simply to go through the essay and summarize paragraph by paragraph (as we did in class). Foucault, after all, doesn’t really get to his main points until the second half of the piece. You may, instead, want to introduce and explain his main ideas, and then explain his arguments and examples.

Foucault, part 2

On Tuesday, we will continue our discussion of “Panopticism.” The second part of the essay is a bit denser than the first part, so we will continue to go through it, section by section, to make sense of it.

The draft of paper #2 will be due on Thursday. We will discuss this assignment extensively in class.

Questions for Tuesday, 9/15

Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful and engaging discussion of Errol Morris’s film that we had on Thursday. We will continue that discussion next Tuesday.

We will also be discussing the first half (pages 207-22) of Michel Foucault’s “Panopticism.” This is a difficult but important piece, and you may find it hard to read. One way to help yourself understand it is to try to summarize for yourself the essence of each paragraph in a sentence or two. After you have done this, look back at your summary and consider the larger implications of the ideas presented here. Do they change the way you view your position as a student, as a citizen, as a subject? How so?

Questions on McNamara

I would like you to come up with your own questions and ideas for discussion about Errol Morris’s film The Fog of War and Sidney Blumenthal’s article “McNamara’s Peace,” but here are a few to get you started thinking:

–Do you think Morris (the filmmaker) and McNamara have differing agendas in the making of this film? If so, what about the film suggests this and how?

–Does your reading of Blumenthal’s article change the way in which you view the film?

–Have we learned anything from Tompkins or Griffin which might inform our response to the film?

Please write down your responses to these questions as well as your own ideas and questions, and bring them to class on Thursday. On Thursday I’ll also be discussing the next writing assignment. I will return your first essays next Tuesday.

Reading for Thursday, 9/3

For Thursday I have asked you to read Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature.” For class, write some notes on the following issues:

–What does Percy mean by “sovereignty”? How does this concept relate to his specific examples?

–If we agree with Percy’s construction of experience (and we certainly don’t have to agree), then what is the role of education?  Can we imagine an educational model through which the “sovereignty” of the learner might be maintained? Percy’s own solutions seem ultimately quite modest and perhaps not as revolutionary as his argument might suggest.

Remember: your final draft of your first essay is due next Tuesday, September 8th. Please following the formatting described on page 521 of the LB Brief. Remember to turn in your rough draft and your peer-review sheet with your final draft.

Assignment for Thursday, 8/27

As I said in class, for Thursday you should write a paragraph, which will serve as a kind of proposal for your first paper. Your proposal should somehow incorporate both Tompkins and Griffin, should include an arguable thesis, and should be a topic that you will be able to treat in four to six pages. The topic is up to you, but you might consider some of the following ideas:

–In both pieces race is a secondary but important theme. How does it relate to Tompkins’s and/or Griffin’s main ideas, and what larger conclusions might we draw from this?

–Consider the relationships the two pieces posit between history and the individual.

–Does Tompkins help us to read Griffin? How so?

You will not be turning in your paragraph, but you may be circulating it among your peers and/or reading it aloud, so be prepared for those possibilities. This paragraph will serve as the basis for you first paper, the rough draft of which will be due next Tuesday, September 1st.

Susan Griffin’s “Our Secret”

For next Tuesday I have asked you to read Susan Griffin’s “Our Secret.” You will realize early in your reading that this is not at all a traditional essay. There is no directly stated argument, and the connections between the various sections of the text are not clear. It is, therefore, up to the reader to do some work.

What is Griffin doing here? What connections do you find between the sections? How does your reading of Tompkins affect the way you approach this piece?