Research Paper and Presentation

ENG 201-3, Casey Smith

Writing about Modern Literature

29 October 2018

Research Project: Presentation & Paper

This semester we’ve been exploring the impossibly large sea of modern and contemporary literature. You’ve discovered some new writers, and maybe revisited some that you already knew about before taking this class. One thing is for certain: We haven’t read any author in depth. We’ve only read single stories or plays or limited groups of poems. This assignment asks you to do exactly this: Explore the depths.  

Choose one writer to focus your work on. It can be a writer that we’ve encountered on the syllabus, and it can be a writer that we haven’t. The general criteria is simple: your chosen writer must have written something that was first published in the 20^th or 21^st century. You might scour the table of contents of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume F, or you might find your author somewhere/anywhere else. Even though I have complete and total respect for authors of young adult and children’s literature, for this assignment you’ll need to choose an author with a predominately adult readership. Therefore, JK Rowling and John Green would not make the cut, but Stephen King would.

After choosing your writer, start to immerse yourself in a vertical reading of their work. You might not have time to read multiple novels, but you do have time to read some of their other stories, essays they’ve written, interviews they’ve given, etc.  This is called primary research. Your final paper should discuss and cite no fewer than three such works. In addition, you’ll need to discuss and cite no fewer than five scholarly secondary sources. A scholarly secondary source is critical work that addresses the ideas in the primary work. Your final paper, the document itself, is an example of a secondary source. This part is important: It can’t be merely a survey of your chosen writer’s career; it must have at its center an arguable thesis.

This research project has two components: the paper (20 pts) and the presentation (5 pts).

Your final paper will be 6-8 double-spaced pages printed in a standard serifed font (Garamond and Times New Roman are the usual suspects) with 1-inch margins. You don’t need a separate title page, but you do need a separate “Works Cited” page. We’re using MLA 8^th edition for the format.

The final paper is due no later than December 14, at 6:00 pm. Email this to csmith@dcad.edu or hand me a physical copy. A draft of this paper (4-8 pages) is due on Monday, December 3.  Your non-binding proposal (a single emailed paragraph) is due on Wednesday, October 31, at the conclusion of class. I’ll be available for consultation

Your presentation will be a brief summation of your findings/argument delivered to the class with a PowerPoint deck on either December 3 or 5. Presentations need to be between 5-7 minutes to ensure that we can hear from all 21 classmates.

Questions: csmith@dcad.edu or see me in my office.