British & American Literature 1865-1914
Term Paper

“Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
to laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man . . ." (ll.37-39)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "A Musical Instrument" (1860)

Audience: literary critics intimately familiar with the Path 2 works you have read
Purpose: to demonstrate the validity of your debatable thesis, supported by close, creative analysis of all of your group's Path 2 readings
Voice: professional and formal (avoid 1st-person pronouns, contractions, colloquial speech, etc.)

Essays should be 6-8 pages in length, and follow MLA guidelines for formatting, in-text citation, and creating appropriate citation entries in a separate Works Cited page. Use a Times New Roman, 12 pt font with 1" margins top, bottom, right and left (1" is not the default margin in Word, so you'll need to change it.)

Your paper should reflect an intimate familiarity with all of the Path 2 texts you have been reading this quarter. You have free reign of topic: just be sure to construct a narrow argument, supported closely by relevant textual detail. You may think the length provides you the freedom to ramble: think again. Every sentence should be packed with meaning, and each word used should be the most exact, powerful word possible given its context. Your claims should explode off the page. Please recall the rubric I employ when assessing student writing.

Essays should engage all of your Path 2 texts, and touch briefly on relevant Path 1 readings that help set up or refine your argument.

Possible approaches might involve analyses of voice, characterization, metaphor, tone, gender, faith, aesthetics, or philosophy. You can also approach your texts through a biographical, historical, or theoretical lens. Just insure that you choose a topic you find compelling, shape an argument you will enjoy making, and support your claims with close readings of primary texts.

Incorporate two secondary sources, limiting yourself to literary criticism, biography, or historical analysis. Please do not build your paper atop other critics' arguments; use these other sources to provide opposition for your own argument. (I require this not to encourage combativeness, but creativity.) These references may appear wherever you think best: they need not appear in the opening or thesis.

I encourage you to search the stacks and databases available through the Robert E. Kennedy Library as you look for secondary sources. You may draw on journal articles, book chapters, introductions to your novels, or professional online resources. I have a few authoritative biographies in my office, along with select critical texts tackling some of your authors' works; you are quite welcome to drop by, grab a book, and plop yourself on the office couch. Whatever sources you do use should be listed in your Works Cited page along with the novels you have read, as well as whatever Path 1 texts you cite.

Topics might include but are by no means limited to:

• an analysis of how narrative voice shapes tone, theme, or characterization
• an incisive look at the significance or "meaning" of a strange, unwieldy passage or scene
• a comparison of two similar yet, in some way, vitally different characters
• the argument that a seemingly unsympathetic voice/character actually deserves reconsideration, or vice versa
• a consideration of how form (prosody, diction, sentence length, etc.) informs and either reflects or deviates from content
• the claim that a given author's work effectively improves or worsens existing social conditions in a particular time period
• an argument that one author's engagement with a given issue proves more successful than another author's
• a close look at the historical or biographical conditions informing particular works
• the tracking of a particular motif, symbol, metaphor or other device across a work, paired with a specific argument concerning its significance
• the argument that an author's works prove inconsistent when certain important elements of those works are compared
  

"The Pet" (1853)
Walter H. Deverell

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu