Audience: literary critics intimately familiar with the three works you will discuss
Purpose: to demonstrate the validity of your debatable thesis, supported by close, creative analysis of all three works
Voice: professional and formal (avoid 1st-person pronouns, contractions, colloquial speech, etc.)

Hand-written essays on blue books (bring two blue books) should be 1300-1500 words (equivalent to 4-5 typed pages, double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point Times New Roman).

Your paper should reflect an intimate familiarity with your three selected texts: 1) assigned film, 2) assigned novel, and 3) any other course text of your choice (poem, non-fiction excerpt, additional assigned novel). You have free reign of topic--just be sure to construct a narrow argument supported closely by relevant textual detail. Possible approaches might involve analyses of character, theme, tone, class, race, gender, faith, disability, technology, society, family, government, or Art. (This is a suggestive, not exhaustive, list.) Choose a topic you find compelling, and shape an argument you can enjoy making. We will not use secondary sources in shaping these arguments.

Every student will bring to the three-hour final exam--where they will write out their term paper/exam--an outline of their argument not to exceed two pages (double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font, 1" margins on all four sides). We will peer edit these outlines on Monday, June 5, so be sure to bring them to class: you'll be exchanging outlines with your peers, so I recommend bringing a couple paper copies. I will check these outlines a second time before the exam begins. Outlines must following these guidelines:

1. include a detailed and grammatically correct thesis statement of 1-2 sentences, one validated by Dr. M sometime during Week 10. (Send via email between Monday-Wednesday of Week 10.)
2. excepting the thesis, no claims, statements, or supporting note can be a complete sentence; they must all be sentence fragments of some kind. Get creative! you can pack lots of information into a single line when you're not creating a grammatically coherent sentence!
• example: Robert's tricked-out home: freezers, spare auto parts, noise-proofing
• example: music--lyricism of poetry read aloud, organ music
• example: PBS's view of mutability--clouds, gleam, quiver, darkness, night, lost
3. no piece of information can be longer than a single line; you must start a new bulleted item with each line.
4. you may include up to three quoted passages (w/ page citation), no more. Each should be no longer than a single line of text, and be highlighted in yellow or bold-faced.
• example: "'I'm not attached to gregarious death'" (Children 47).
• example: "[. . .] because her affection was so human" (Machine 53-54).
• example: "'My love for you is involate'" (Last 125).

Possible topics might include but are by no means limited to:

• an examination of the redeployment of buildings and spaces in dystopic societies
• an analysis of how narrative voice shapes tone, theme, or characterization
• a comparison of three similar yet vitally different characters
• the argument that a seemingly unsympathetic voice/character actually deserves reconsideration, or vice versa
• an argument that one author's engagement with a given issue proves more "successful" than others' (be sure to define "success" very narrowly)
• the tracking of a particular motif, symbol, metaphor or other device across a work, paired with a specific argument concerning its significance
• the claim that a given author's work effectively improves or worsens existing social conditions in a particular time period, compared with other authors' works
• a consideration of how form (prosody, diction, sentence length, etc.) informs and either reflects or deviates from content

Please recall the rubric I employ when assessing student writing:

Stonehenge (1825-28)
J. M. W. Turner

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu