Senior Seminar Paper Assignment
Your major writing project for this class will be a 3-part document that performs a three-part analytical task. As I originally conceived the assignment, I envisioned your writing two critical evaluations of the same work, a text by a woman writer, with a third, shorter part in which you would reflect on the process of approaching the work from two different perspectives. For example, you might write a critique of Austen's Pride and Prejudice from a Marxist perspective and a critique from a feminist perspective, each about 10 to 12 pages long; in the third part, about 5 pages long, you would consider how each critical approach enabled you to say something of value about the text and discuss any challenges posed by each of the two approaches adopted. This writing assignment still seems to me to have merit.
However, I am expanding the topic options, to allow you more latitude in choosing a topic that interests you. The required element is the same three-part structure. One option might be to use the same critical approach to two works by the same author; this may be particularly useful if you have read another text by a writer whose work we are considering in class. Since Orlando is in many ways atypical of Virginia Woolf's novels, you may want to write psychoanalytical critiques of Orlando and To the Lighthouse, then add a reflective commentary in which you discuss the value and challenges of applying this method to the works under discussion. Another option, that would require more reading unless you are already familiar with one of the texts, would be to compare and contrast novelistic approaches to the same subject matter by two different women writers, anchoring your commentary in a particular critical school. Such a discussion might be fruitful if you wished to write a cultural critique of Buck's The Good Earth and Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife, followed by a reflective commentary that might bring out an element of personal response as well as some comparative evaluation of the literary merit of the two texts.
Of course, the primary work for your paper may be a substantial selection of poetry or short stories or a drama as an alternative to a novel.
With some reservations, I am also willing to consider your writing a critical text and a well-designed, selective Web site (containing text, graphics, and links--see my work in progress on Virginia Woolf) about the same text, again adding personal commentary, which in this case would address the conceptual differences embedded in the contrast of print and electronic venues.
I am open to other possibilities as well, so if you have an idea for a project that does not conform to the above guidelines, please feel free to suggest it to me. I would like this project to be personally meaningful, and I expect it will take a good deal of time and thought. To facilitate that thought, I have scheduled two writing workshops (Dec. 10 and Jan. 7) for peer response to drafts. This project will also be the foundation of your final oral presentation.
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Reading and Writing Schedule or Syllabus.Updated December 11, 1998.