Your final paper is an opportunity to bring together the skills and ideas that you’ve been developing over the course of the semester. This project should be something that excites and interests you: it should be an occasion to follow up on the most engaging aspects of the course material and to connect those elements to your own enthusiasms. You have three options available to you. Pick the one that will allow you to best explore your interests.

Assignment description

Over the course of the semester, we’ve worked on a number of skills necessary to writing an analytic paper. In this final paper, you will bring all of those skills together to make an argument about one or two of the texts we’ve read this semester. This is your opportunity to extend your argument beyond a single scene and make claims about your broader understanding of the text. You have several options for the form your paper might take, and the audience you will address. No matter which option you choose, your paper should still have a clearly defined, focused scope, and should draw evidence from specific places in the text.

Important dates and grading

Paper options

A) Traditional analytic paper

Description
Make an argument about one or more of the texts from the class, aimed at an academic audience (in this case, your classmates and professor). Your paper should combine close readings, summary, and synthesis in order to show your reader something interesting that emerges when you consider two or three texts in relation to each other, or consider a single text in relation to an expanded context.

Some approaches you might consider in this paper include:

• Analyze one text in terms of another. Pick two texts that you think speak to similar issues. How does one help explain, clarify, or complicate the other? What’s gained by reading these two texts together?
• Explain a text in terms of its historical context. Think about the importance of understanding a particular text within its historical moment. What does looking closely at the historical context add to your understanding of the text?
• Conduct an expanded formal reading of a text or texts. Here, you might apply an argument you developed in one of your close readings to a larger piece of the text, or to two texts that exhibit similar formal qualities.
• Identify an important pattern in the text. What is the pattern and how does it work? How does it help you better understand the text?

Your paper should

• Have a clear, focused thesis that identifies an argument that can be addressed in the scope of the paper. Your thesis should be contestable; that is, it should present an argument that your reader might reasonably disagree with and therefore needs proving. It should not be a summary either of the text or your secondary sources.
• Support your thesis with details drawn from your texts, and follow each piece of evidence with analysis that shows how your evidence proves your claim.
• Address no more than three texts from the course. This paper is not a place to talk about everything we’ve read over the course of the semester. Your thesis should identify the text or texts that your paper will analyze.
• Be 1750-2500 words long, and formatted according to MLA guidelines.

B) Cultural criticism for a non-academic audience

Make an argument about one or more of the texts from the class, aimed at a specific audience or community of readers (readers of a specific blog, magazine, newspaper, etc.). Your paper should combine close readings, summary, and synthesis in order to show your reader something interesting about the text or texts. It should also make an argument for why your argument is relevant to this particular community of readers.

The same approaches from option A apply to option B, though your explanation for why your argument is significant will differ according to your audience. You should also write a short reflective essay on why you chose the specific publication venue for your essay, what expectations and interests your audience is likely to have, and how you addressed those expectations and interests in your essay.

Your paper should

• Have a clear, focused thesis that identifies an argument that can be addressed in the scope of the paper. Your thesis should be contestable; that is, it should present an argument that your reader might reasonably disagree with and therefore needs proving. It should not be a summary either of the text or your secondary sources.
• Connect your thesis to your audience’s interests.
• Support your thesis with details drawn from the texts, and follow each piece of evidence with analysis that shows how your evidence proves your claim.
• Address no more than three texts from the course. This paper is not a place to talk about everything we’ve read over the course of the semester. Your thesis should identify the text or texts that your paper will analyze.
• In a separate section, analyze your paper. Tell your reader why you chose your particular audience, and how you framed your argument with that audience in mind.
• Be 1750-2500 words long in total, and formatted according to MLA guidelines. Your main argument should be 1500-2000 words long, and your reflective essay should be 250-500 words long.

C) Creative essay for a non-academic audience

Write a short, creative blog post that makes connections between the two Gilded Ages using the conventions of online writing (the listicle, the mash-up, “Texts from,” etc.). The idea here is to connect the novels we’ve read in class to contemporary experience using popular forms of writing. What does the Buzzfeed version of this class look like? How might you get Internet audiences to see the connections we’ve been making in class? How can you use writing styles other than straightforward analysis to make a point about historic and cultural analysis?

The format of this option is up to you, but the creative part should be relatively short (approx. 500 words), and should be accompanied by an in-depth analysis of the choices you made in your post. You should locate some examples of online writing that accomplishes something similar to what you’d like to do. You should also think about how these posts work—what makes them funny? How were they able to make their point in indirect or satirical ways?

Your paper should

• Include a 500 word creative post that shows your reader something of interest about one or more of the texts from the class. Like option B, this paper should make an argument for the relevance of the texts to the audience, but unlike option B, it will probably make that argument indirectly.
• Include a 1500-2000 word analysis of your post. Here, you will tell your reader what point you were trying to make about the text or texts you chose. You should then connect the individual details of your blog post back to the source texts. This section is, in essence, a close reading of your own work—you show your readers what choices you made, why you made them, and how they are grounded in evidence from the text or texts. As in option B, you should also discuss your audience. Who is your audience? What are their interests? How do you take that into account in your post?
• As with options A and B, your analysis should have a clear, focused thesis; in this case, your thesis will articulate the analytic point that’s implicit in your creative post, and explain why that point is significant.
• Be formatted according to MLA guidelines.