ENGL 461
Term Paper

"The riddle of the universe I might solve if I had a mind to, he said,
but I prefer the question to the answer. It serves men like us as a
bottomless pretext for scholarly dialectic” (274).
Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

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

Essays should be 10-18 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" may not be the default margin in Word, so you'll need to change it.) Papers are due by midnight the Saturday of finals week.

Your paper should reflect intimate familiarity with all assigned texts; you need not give equal attention to all the readings, but you should incorporate each of them in some form or fashion. 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.

Possible approaches might involve analyses of voice, characterization, metaphor, tone, identity, aesthetics, faith, 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 can enjoy making, and support your claims with close readings of primary texts.

If you incorporate secondary sources, limit yourself to literary criticism, biography, or historical analysis. Please do not build your paper atop other critics' arguments; instead, use any secondary sources to provide opposition for your own argument.

Whatever primary and secondary sources you use should be listed in your Works Cited page.

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 Pet" (1853)
Walter H. Deverell

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu