Significant Brit. Writers: Virginia Woolf
Term Paper Guidelines

Audience: literary critics familiar with the works you discuss
Purpose: to support a debatable thesis with close, creative analysis of the works in question
Voice: professional and formal (avoid 1st-person pronouns, contractions, colloquial speech, etc.)

Essays should be 9-12 pages in length, double-spaced, and follow MLA guidelines for formatting, in-text citation, citation entries in a separate Works Cited page, etc. Use a Times New Roman, 12 pt font with 1" margins on all four sides. Paper due via email, as Word doc, by midnight on Thursday, March 21 of finals week.

Your paper should reflect an intimate familiarity with a number of the fictions we have read this quarter. Please employ the following prescription as you consider which works to discuss:

• include at least one of the following: Jacob's Room or Orlando
• include at least two of the following: The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves
• include at least two of the short stories by Woolf
• include at least two secondary sources: critical articles, biographical or historical material, etc. (see below).

You have free reign of topic: just be sure to construct a narrow argument, supported closely by relevant detail culled from close readings. Depth is more important than breadth, and concision far more valuable than loquacity. Length will not necessary correlate positively with the grade awarded. Write as much as you need to in order to convince your reader.

Possible approaches might involve analyses of voice, characterization, metaphor, tone, theme, biography, gender, faith, aesthetics, sexuality, genre, philosophy. You may apply a particular critical/theoretical lens to the subject, though I neither expect nor prefer such an approach. Choose a topic and approach meaningful to you.

Be sure to incorporate--however extensively or briefly--two secondary sources. Biographies, sources drawn from STEM fields or the "soft sciences" of sociology and psychology, may accompany or replace more traditional literary criticism. If you choose to employ literary criticism, it must provide a foil for your own claims. Whatever sources you do use should be listed in your Works Cited page along with your primary texts.

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 few "problem" passages or scenes
• a comparison of two similar yet, in some way, vitally different characters
• the argument that a seemingly unsympathetic voice/character actually deserves reconsideration, or that an apparently sympathetic voice/character needs to be challenged.
• a consideration of how form (prosody, diction, sentence length, etc.) informs and either reflects or deviates from content
• the claim that a given text effectively improves or worsens existing social conditions in a particular time period
• an argument that one text's engagement with a given issue proves more successful than another text'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 Woolf's works prove inconsistent or contradictory when certain important elements of those works are compared

term paper conference (5%): students will construct a detailed outline, send this to Dr. M as a single Word doc file, and attend a one-hour paper conference with Dr. M and their tailored tenth group members to discuss these materials. Conferences will take place Mon, Mar. 11 thru Fri, Mar. 15. Students who do not complete this requirement cannot turn in their term paper.

"Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon" (1907)
Pablo Picasso

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu