Instead of meeting as a class next week, we’ll have individual conferences to discuss your research papers. After you’ve received your exploratory draft back with comments, please draft the following and send it to me by Wednesday, Oct. 27 @ 10 a.m.
In your next draft (6-8 pages), I’d like to see the following:
- Close work with and analytical reading of 2-3 passages from the primary texts that you’re working with. This kind of work will be different for everyone, but I hope to see you wrestle with the deployment of aesthetics, thematic interests, political and/or material representations, etc. In what ways do the passages that you choose help you to articulate important ideas about the text that you’re working on? What kinds of terms, tones, associations, etc. do they reference and implicate in order to do this? [With your analyses, I'm hoping to see ways that you're argument is developing and becoming more sophisticated.] At the end of these readings, please give me another attempt at stating your argument or research question, in light of your new work. What is it that you find yourself pursuing? Why is important? What does it reveal about that is new or surprising?
- A working bibliography of 8-10 sources. I don’t expect you to have read all of these!! I just want a brief survey of the kinds of sources that you think will be useful, and a birds’-eye view of the field from your perspective.
- With reference to the bibliography, please include a short paragraph that begins to situate your work within a larger context of ideas/themes/approaches/debates in Asian American literary/cultural criticism. Feel free to use the expertise projects that people have produced here. What does your readings and anticipated argument add to what we’ve seen thus far? Do you find yourself falling into line with a particular theorist/critic? do you find yourself taking issue with his/her assumptions or conclusions?
Like your exploratory draft, I don’t expect to see polished, beautiful writing here, nor do I expect to see the paper developing from introduction to conclusion. Instead, I’m asking you to do some hard thinking and reading to ground your research and writing close attention to the primary text itself, and then to the ways in which your creative and analytic readings can enter into ongoing debates and conversations in the field of Asian American theory.
0 Responses to “Draft Assignment”