Historical Context Essay: 20% of final grade

Resources

Due Dates

  • Central research question due by class on Monday, March 25 (submit via email)
  • Essay due Friday, March 29 by the end of the day (submit via Canvas)

Requirements

  • ~1500 words (5-6 pages double-spaced), not including Works Cited or Bibliography.
  • MLA or Chicago citation style.
  • Turn in essay via Canvas; doc, docx, or pdf.
  • Include an AI Writing Tools statement. See the “Course Info & Policies” page under “Academic Integrity and AI Writing Tools” for more information about what this statement should look like.

Your third writing assignment in this class is to write an essay exploring the historical context of one of our course literary texts. You will historicize this text (we will talk in class about what “historicize” means). This can mean highlighting a historical event, document, concept, policy or figure mentioned explicitly or alluded to implicitly in the text, and/or an event, document, concept, policy or figure important to the creation/production of the text and that you believe shapes our understanding of the text (i.e., an event, document, concept, policy or figure important to the historical moment in which the text was written or to its reception history, whether or not it’s mentioned or alluded to in the text itself). This historicization will be based on your research on this historical event, document, policy, or figure. Ultimately, your historical context essay should make a claim about what this history allows us to understand differently about the text you are writing about.

What is a Historical Context Essay and How Do You Do It?

In your first two essays in this class, you practiced close reading, an essential skill for researchers in the humanities and for literary scholars in particular. But literary scholars don’t only analyze works of literature in of themselves; they also seek to understand these works within the historical contexts in which they were written and within which they have been received. This often means working with primary sources from that time, such as the policy documents and newspaper and magazine articles we are reading in this class. This research can also involve reading reviews of literary texts from when they were originally published, and/or investigating the papers, letters, and other unpublished works by the author of your selected text or other artists or writers connected to them. There are many other options as well. This assignment introduces you to some of the skills involved in conducting this research and in using it to formulate an argument about the literary text under consideration.

Writing a successful historical context essay means 1) formulating a central research question about your selected text (such as, “How does John Okada’s No-No Boy reflect/challenge/critique ideas prevalent at the time of its publication about Japanese-Americans as a ‘model minority’?”); and 2) answering this question in the form of an argument using evidence from your selected literary text and from at least one historical source. Once again, you don’t have a ton of space, so you should eliminate throat clearing and cut right to the chase. You are not required to cite sources other than the text about which you are writing and your historical source(s). However, you may cite secondary scholarship or criticism about your selected text and/or historical context, or any of the essays we’ve read in class (such as those assigned for Wed, Feb 28 or Mon, March 4), if useful for your argument. While you may include historical documents or articles assigned in class in your essay, your essay should also range beyond just these documents or articles (i.e., you must include at least one historical source not assigned in class).

Selecting Your Literary Text

You may write about any of the literary texts we’ve read in class so far. You should select one literary text to focus on; if writing about poetry, you may select up to 2 poems. These texts include:

  • Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground
  • Okada, No-No Boy
  • Morrison, Home
  • O’Brien, “How to Tell a True War Story”
  • Any of the poems assigned for Wednesday, March 6
  • Silko, Ceremony

I encourage you to write about a text you haven’t yet written about in your close reading essays, but you are not required to. However, if you select a text you’ve already written about, your essay should include all new material (i.e., it should not incorporate evidence or writing from a previous essay).

Formulating Your Central Research Question

After selecting the text you want to write about, you should formulate a central research question that will guide your investigation of your selected text. This question should mention the specific text you will be writing about as well as the specific historical event, document, concept, policy and/or figure – the “historical context” – you will be discussing. It should be only 1-2 sentences long. Again, one example of this kind of question is “How does John Okada’s No-No Boy reflect/challenge/critique ideas prevalent at the time of its publication about Japanese-Americans as a ‘model minority’?” In addition to your question, you should send me citations and links for the historical source(s) you will be discussing. If your historical source(s) is not available online but is available via the library, please include links to information about this source in the library catalog.

You should submit this question to me via email by class on Monday, March 25.

Conducting Research

On Wednesday, March 13, Fred Muratori from Cornell University Library will lead our class in a discussion of how to utilize library resources to conduct research for this assignment. He has prepared a library research guide for our class, which you can find here: https://guides.library.cornell.edu/english3630lt. This guide includes a wealth of information about how to find primary and secondary sources relevant to your research question, including information about databases that might be useful for learning about relevant primary sources, including still and moving images, as well as how to find secondary sources such as scholarly books and articles.

There are also a few general strategies you can employ when formulating your central research question and investigating this question further:

  • Conduct further research on an event, document, concept, policy and/or figure we read and/or discuss in class, or that you know about from another class.
  • Explore the secondary scholarship and criticism on your selected literary text to see how scholars have contextualized this text. Select an historical event, document, concept, policy and/or figure discussed in this scholarship to learn more about.
  • If applicable, explore the Cornell Library’s Special Collections, particularly the Rare and Manuscript Collections to discover relevant historical sources. For example, if you wanted to write about The Man Who Lived Underground and surrealism, you may be interested in exploring the library’s holdings related to surrealism. You can find a digital exhibition featuring some of these holdings here: https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/surrealismandmagic/exhibition/introduction/index.html.

I am happy to brainstorm further strategies and/or discuss how to find information related to your topic with you.