You have all made one significant step towards your “Final Project”: the informal text selection and rationale assignment. That assignment offered a low-stakes opportunity for you to begin thinking about the text you might want to write about for the “Final Project.” Now, it’s time to commit to a text. Aim for 300-400 words.
- In the first paragraph, begin by introducing the author and the target text. Make sure you indicate the kind of text it is (poem, novel, film, memoir, etc.), its more specific genre or mode (romance, horror, epic, pastoral, young-adult literature, utopian, etc.), and when it was produced. Next, offer a brief description of what the book is about and what its central concerns seem to be. This is a key distinction. Giovanni’s Room is about an American protagonist who travels to France to escape a problematic past and finds himself deeply implicated in a web of romantic entanglements that end in tragedy. Its concerns include navigating queer identity in different contexts, what it means to authentically love another, how past experiences form and haunt us, how individuals process trauma, how gender roles constrain our choices and desire, and so on.
- In paragraph two, write more about your unique approach to this text. What do you hope to explore, and what theoretical concepts or methodologies do you find most applicable and fruitful in relation to you text? Think of the ideas from LCT as idea engines–concepts that we can place alongside a text and that then begin to spin out a range of possible readings and approaches. What kinds of research do you see yourself gathering? Critical articles and books about the text? Historical documents? Books representing other areas of knowledge that you might bring to bear on the text (history, psychology, philosophy, geology, etc.)? Try to be as specific as possible about what you hope to find, and use the BEAM approach to think through the kinds of sources you might want to locate (Argument, Method, Background, etc.). This paragraph should conclude with an initial research question–a question that will be refined as you continue to read and research. Most simply, a research question is the engine for your project: the question anticipates the argumentative sources you might engage, the background information that will support your project, and the methods that will inform it.
- Please begin exploring specific CofC library Catalog (for books in particular) and databases (MLA International Bibliography, Academic Search Complete, Film and Television Literature Index, and Communication & Mass Media Complete) to get a sense of the materials you might begin to explore once we initiate the formal library research phase. You should also make use of Google Scholar. Take a both/and rather than an either/or: search broadly in various databases using a range of keywords.
- Finally (this may or may not be its own paragraph) explain why you have chosen this text in particular. Are you already familiar with it? What are you most excited or anxious about in terms of research and reading and re-reading process? What is it about this text that you think will really sustain your interest? And why do you think it is an important project more broadly–that is, why should your reader care?
Though this assignment does allow for slightly more informational responses at the conclusion, please understand that this as a formal writing assignment, and your writing should reflect that.
How research questions evolve:
- At the start, a question might be rooted in something you find notable and curious about a text. For example, you might reading Giovanni’s Room and ask: What does all of the repeated imager around blackness and whiteness (and related terms) signify in Giovanni’s Room?
- As you continue to research and research, you push that research question forward–focusing it, framing it in relation to a certain critical ideas, and/or framing it in the context of what Baldwin accomplishes. For example: “How does Baldwin use imagery around blackness and whiteness to unsettle long-standing foundations of racism in western society?
There might be a number of steps between those two questions, but note how the second is informed by the kinds of research and analysis that the first one jump-starts.