Final Research Paper (30% of final grade)

Due

  • By our class’s assigned final exam day during finals week (TBA)

Requirements

  • ~5000 words (18-20 pages double-spaced), not including Works Cited or Bibliography.
  • MLA or Chicago citation style.
  • Turn in via Canvas; doc, docx, or pdf.
  • If you use AI writing or research tools for any part of the writing process, a statement about how you used these tools and why. See the “Course Info & Policies” page under “Academic Integrity and AI Writing Tools” for more information about what this statement should look like.

You may write your final research paper on a topic of your choosing, but this topic should be related in some way to the topics, concepts, scholarship, and histories we have discussed throughout the semester in this class.

What you write about and how you do it is up to you, but I can imagine at least 4 different ways of approaching this assignment:

  1. Write about 1-2 literary texts – either texts we read in this class or texts we didn’t – that are about, feature, reimagine, or relate to social media in some way.
  2. Write about “literary” social media and/or a “literary” aspect of a social media platform or platforms (e.g., reviews on Goodreads, book reviews on Amazon, BookTok, BookTube, etc.).
  3. Write about both a literary text and a social media platform/posts, together (e.g., It Ends With Us and BookTok).
  4. Build on and expand your reception analysis. If you select this option, you should make sure you do the following:
    • Significantly revise, rework, and/or expand on the argument you made in your reception analysis. You may include parts of that essay in your final research paper, but the final research paper as a whole should represent a significant revision, reworking, and/or expansion of your reception analysis. Your final research paper should NOT include large portions of your reception analysis that have just been copy and pasted into it. Reworking and/or expanding your ideas might mean incorporating a reception analysis of another literary text into your paper, whether from this class or not, and revising your argument to incorporate this new text; or, if you stick with the same text/reception history, building on your argument or otherwise complicating or expanding it with new textual evidence and/or ideas you didn’t have time or space to consider in your reception analysis or that were not fully developed in that assignment. It will also mean incorporating significant secondary sources into your argument.

No matter how you do it, your final research paper must:

  1. Be focused on a topic related in some way to this class;
  2. Include an original argument about your selected primary text(s);
  3. Incorporate scholarly (secondary) research. I ask you to provide citations for at least 3 secondary sources in your final essay proposal, and for at least 5 secondary sources in your research synthesis and bibliography, but there is no magical number of sources that you must cite in your paper itself. You should engage with the secondary sources you need to engage with in order to demonstrate your knowledge of the topic and to build your argument.

Selecting Your Topic

Use this opportunity to write about a topic, a question, and/or a text(s) that fascinate, puzzle, or confound you. You should write about something you are genuinely curious about, and about which you don’t already have a lot of answers. Think about what we have read and discussed in this class so far, and look ahead on the syllabus to what we will be reading and discussing in the second half of the semester. What interests you? What do you want or need to know more about? Approaching this assignment in this way will not only help you to hold your interest in your paper for several weeks; it will also help you, ideally, to find some answers to your questions and to build and explore your own intellectual interests.

Conducting Research

You will need to be able to find and access scholarly sources about your topic and text(s) to complete this assignment. You can use the Additional Readings page on this site to help you get started.

You also may want to check out a library research guide that Literatures in English subject librarian Fred Muratori created for a class I taught last year: https://guides.library.cornell.edu/english3630lt/home. The “Find Books” and “Find Articles” tabs include instructions and links for using the Cornell library resources to find scholarly sources.

Some databases of scholarly sources that I find particularly useful for conducting research in secondary sources in literary studies:

Preparing to Write Your Final Research Paper

Completing this assignment will involve completing a number of small preliminary assignments, including:

These assignments will give you the opportunity to receive feedback on your final project ideas from me and from other members of the class.