ENGL/GWS 418 Fall 2024 Research Paper Instructions Due: Narrative Bibliography: Feb 27

ENGL/GWS 418

Fall 2024

Research Paper Instructions

Due:

Narrative Bibliography: Feb 27 or April 2

Research Paper: April 2 or April 23

Proposal: at least 1 week before narrative bib

Worth: 35% of final course grade

Research proposal: 1%

Narrative Bib: 10%

Research paper: 24%, ~3000-4000 words

Details: All submissions should be submitted to the “Research paper” assignment folders as .doc or .docx files (no .pdfs please). Other submission details are in the syllabus.

Assignment goals:

To provide students the opportunity to develop extended analytic responses to our course texts.

To enable students to continue developing their skills in employing methods of academic research to support analytic work

To use the planning process to give students experience in identifying the guiding topics, concepts, and ideas that most interest them or are most useful for achieving their academic goals.

Part 1: research proposal (1%)

Whenever you want to start working on the research proposal, but no more than 1 week before your narrative bibliography is due, you’ll submit a research proposal. Your proposal should outline a project that you feel you can accomplish in 12-15 pages, that reflects your interests as they intersect with the course texts so far, and that is disciplinarily appropriate for work in English and/or GWS (always bearing in mind that this is primarily a paper about literature). This is intentionally very broad! One of the skills that we are working on is developing intellectual interests and projects independently at a fairly advanced scale.

In your proposal, you’ll briefly explain what you plan to do and hope to accomplish. You don’t need to choose an author/authors that we will have covered in class by the time the proposal is due: you’re encouraged to look (and read) ahead to the writers at the end of the semester as well. You may not write about the author you are covering in your podcast; you may make reference to the work you do in the “responding to theory” essay.

Your proposal should include the following:

A statement of the topic that your paper(s) will cover

the course text(s)/author(s) you’ll use to explore your topics

A research question (a formulation of the question that your research paper will attempt to answer) for the research paper.

A research plan

The research plan should be a paragraph (or so) outlining information you don’t yet have that you’ll need to answer your research question: what do you need to know before you can answer your question? This should grow out of your research question and ultimately provide the intellectual scaffolding that allows you to answer the question in creative and innovative ways. It will identify three to four categories of research or evidence that will support the project, and that can be met by using peer-reviewed, academic sources. Basically, the research plan should identify the things you know you don’t know, and create a roadmap for learning them. Of course, you’ll encounter things along the way that you didn’t know you didn’t know; strong final projects find space for those elements as well (and, as a result, the research plan is a living document that might change radically as you work).

What do “research categories” look like? They should cover the different areas that you’ll need to consider in order to answer your research question. For a paper on Olive Senior that’s looking at “Gardening in the Tropics” and “Old Gods in the New World” as companion pieces, for example, your categories might be “critical work on Senior’s poetry,” “ecopoetics in the Caribbean,” “context for Caribbean spiritual practices,” and “ theories of lyric poetry,” all of which might help you answer a question like “How do these two sections of Gardening in the Tropics allow Goodison to ground her representations of both the natural world and the divine within a broader poetics of place?”

More basically, the research plan should identify the things you know you don’t know, and create a roadmap for learning them. Of course, you’ll encounter things along the way that you didn’t know you didn’t know; strong final projects find space for those elements as well (and, as a result, the research plan is a living document that might change radically as you work). My office hours are a great place to talk through these questions if you’re feeling uncertain about what you want to work on or how to pull a research question and plan together!

This part will be graded pass/fail (100%/0%). If you submit a proposal that receives a 0, you’ll also have comments from me about how to revise and resubmit the proposal. You cannot submit part 2 before receiving a pass grade on the proposal, so plan accordingly.

Part 2: Narrative Bibliography (10%)

Your narrative bibliography will contain an entry for each of your research sources and a brief narrative of how they will be used in your project. It should contain not fewer than 12-15 peer-reviewed, secondary sources. Don’t include primary or tertiary sources, or book reviews. If you are using multiple chapters from a collection of scholarly essays by different authors, you should count each chapter separately.

Organize your sources into subgroupings in whatever way makes most sense to you (this might be by your original research categories, but it might not), and include an MLA- or CMS-style citation for each source. For each subgrouping, outline the discussion surrounding the topic and how each source participates in this group. What are the major claims being advanced or points of contention or disagreement? Do you have a set of sources that build on one another chronologically? Authors or theorists who dominate the conversation with some minor voices?

You should give yourself however much space you need to explain each subgrouping. Some subgroups might be quick to recap, some may take a number of pages, especially if they are especially methodologically or philosophically complex. Once you’ve given an overview of all of your subgroups, provide a short account of which you will engage with critically in your paper, and how you see yourself relative to the issues raised in each of the groups: Are you mostly in agreement? Critical? Are you going to try to put two groups that don’t usually talk to one another into conversation with one another? (This is a common thing for strong humanities/social sciences research work to do.) Basically, this requires you to think about what sort of intervention into the field as a whole your paper will make.

There is no required word count for this portion of the assignment, and revisions are allowed with the same guidelines as paper revisions. You may take sections of the writing you do here and include them in the final project, so long as you do so in a way that makes sense.

A note about research: the academic journals Small Axe and the Journal of West Indian Literature are excellent sources for information and scholarly articles for most of our authors, and for our course generally. They are accessible through the Journal Search function in the library’s databases.

Part 3: Research paper (24%)

For this part, you’ll write the thing: the assignment henceforth is to do what you said you would do. You’ll be graded on how well you meet the benchmarks you’ve set for yourself. You are not required to use all of the sources from your narrative bibliography in the paper, but the research should substantially inform the work you present.

One area in which students often struggle in a paper of this length is organization. It is fine (encouraged!) to break the paper down into smaller pieces/sections in the way that many of your sources will likely be broken down, and to use signposting to guide your reader through your argument. (Use the format of the pieces that you read for research as a model here: which pieces do you find clearest in their approach? How do they tend to organize the information they present?) It is also common for introductions and conclusions to be more than a single paragraph in papers of this length.

In preparation for the papers, we’ll do a number of activities in class that focus on structure and organization of research papers, as well as some in-class work with the library databases.

Grading Rubrics:

Narrative Bibliography

Appears to include a full set of resources, no holes in the research picture, secondary
sources are appropriately recent and scholarly /10

Properly formatted citation for sources /15

Organization of resources into groups makes sense /10

Explanation of how texts within each group relate to one another is clear and

makes appropriate use of quotation and paraphrase of sources /30

Explanation of writer’s position relative to sources is clear and plausible /15

Critical bibliography gives a clear sense of where the project is headed

and how writer will be using sources within the paper /20

Total /100

Analytic Projects

The paper makes an analytic argument with clear stakes that respond to the
question you set out to answer /20

It’s a research paper: uses secondary, peer-reviewed academic research effectively
to support its claims about individual texts and the contexts with which the
paper is concerned /20

Uses primary texts with sufficient thoroughness to make clear how the author

is engaging the questions that you are interested in, and offers strong close

reading of those texts where necessary /20

Organization: the paper’s structure is clear and it marshals its claims and

evidence to support them in a logical manner /15

Creativity/originality: the paper shows evidence of original thought on the

topic chosen, does not simply aggregate sources /15

Grammar and syntax /5

Correct MLA or CMS citation practice including properly formatted works cited /5

Total /100