Assignment F2 Paper
The first Frankenstein paper asked us to think about how literature can help us understand the ways we imagine, depict, and think about the real. In this paper we will ask how history (of real peoples, events, objects, laws, places, etc.) can give body to and help us understand what is at stake in the literary texts we read. This assignment also has two parts:
In the first part of this assignment, you will be responsible for providing a history that can help us to understand some part of the text we are reading on a deeper level. As with the other assignment, the most important part of this assignment is for you to be focused. For example if you are looking at The Bluest Eye, it is not enough for you to give a broad history of the Civil Rights; or talk about how it used to be racist way back when; or to make a medley of various Black uplift slogans. A good paper will be focused in its scope and specific in the information it relays; it will inevitably be teaching us something. If it is general enough that we could write it almost from memory or guess it or find it with only one Google search, then you have probably not done what you need to do. Instead of the whole Civil Rights, a good paper might focus on something more specific—maybe the history of bleaching creams. Depending on what you find, you may have to specify even more than that like the history of one or two people who died from using bleaching creams before 1970.
The second part of the assignment (though it doesn’t have to be second in the actual paper), you must direct your readers to the specific place in the text in which this history may give resonance to how we read the text.
For example if you write about mid-century mentally-ill youth in New York, then you might (even though Pecola is in Ohio) bring our attention to Pecola in the streets at the end of The Bluest Eye. Of course if you were writing the history on mid-century mentally-ill youths in NYC that may be huge, and your paper might need to be about one specific teen, or one specific law, or a specific social worker who took an interest in mentally-ill youth. Still you would use that history to illuminate something in the novel. Your engagement with the novel must be 1) specific. You should bring us not only to a specific scene and moment, but to specific passages. 2) You should tell us exactly what to focus on and 3) you should explain how the history changes, deepens, challenges, etc. the way we read the part of the novel to which you are calling our attention.
The tricks of this paper are historical relevance and research:
You want to make sure you research something that is historically relevant. You don’t want to be anachronistic, meaning if you are talking police violence in The Outsiders, you shouldn’t be researching Rodney King or Michael Brown. While the connection is interesting and would work for another paper, for this paper research on Rodney King would not be contemporary with the novel.
The second tricky part of this paper is the research. You should leave yourself plenty of time to modify (not totally revamp) your research topic. You may need to narrow a couple of times (most likely you will need to do so at least once). You may need to shift your topic. Maybe you started on New England teen cliques, but end up talking about underground youth gangs in the Midwest. Maybe you started with bleaching creams but because of scope and resources shift to colored contacts or hair straighteners.
I recommend picking a scene or moment in the text that you’re interested in ahead of time and letting, the places, people, setting, and objects of this part of the text guide the parameters of your research. This way you ensure that you won’t go too far away from the text and then struggle when you have to connect your research back. This way you also have various items and themes so you know how you might narrow or shift your research as necessary. You may after you develop your history switch your scene that you want to focus on, but at least this way you have an anchor point.
The most successful papers will be the ones that leave themselves time enough to explore in their research, to get lost, to be creative, and to see what’s out there before honing in one idea.
Formatting: This paper should be double spaced, 1-inch margins and 12 point Times New Roman font with page numbers and your whole name listed in the footer. Again there is no set rule, but I imagine that you would spend roughly 2.5 pages on the history and 1.5 pages showing how that history changes the way we read a specific part of the novel and then consequently the novel as a whole.
F2- Paper Grading Rubrics:
History Presentation
Do you present a clear and focused history? Do you have at least three sources? Do you clearly cite your sources? Do you use reputable sources? Is at least one of your sources a scholarly source? Do you tell/present the history in a way that clearly foregrounds the aspect of the history that you believe will affect the way we read the part of the novel you will ultimately highlight?
Engaging Text
Did you relate your history to a specific part of the novel? Do you posit an explanation of how that history deepens, changes, or challenges our understanding of how to read this part of the text (and consequently the novel as a whole)? In relaying your explanation do you specific textual evidence?
Structure
Are your introduction and conclusion focused and doing more than warming up and cooling down. Do you present your points clearly and in a strong, productive order?
Language
Do you use clear, complete, and active sentences? Do you adhere to rules of capitalization and correct punctuation? Do you spell words correctly?