Dr. Yoder
English 7360.01     4 Literary Icons     Fall 2007
Paper Assignments

Oral Reports:

All students will do one "formal" oral report, chosen from the options on the syllabus Schedule Page. These reports should be 10-15 minutes. (Please stay within the time limits.) You should provide copies of the bibliography for your oral report, which should also be posted to the course email listserve. Your report notes or text may serve as your journal for the week of your report. Since we are in a "smart" classroom, please feel free to exploit the audio / visual possibilities in your report.

Students will also be required to report periodically on the progress of their projects.

Formal Papers:

Aside from the informal journals, students will write 4 essays: 2 very short (1-2pp.) reviews of a critical essay; 1 short (5-7pp.) essay on Frankenstein; and a final paper / project (15-20pp.) a topic of your choice.

Critical Reviews (due anytime before Thanksgiving):

Each of these papers should be 1-2pp. It should be a review of a more substantial critical essay on any topic related to the course (for examples of acceptable essays, see Further Reading. One may be on an alternate text such as John Polidori's The Vampyre. You should submit a hard copy to me for grading, and post your review to the course listserve as your journal for that week.

Short essay (due Sept. 17):

These essays should be 5-7pp. and must be about some topic related to Frankenstein. You may write about the some aspect of Mary Shelleyıs novel (plot structure, religion, alchemy, gender, etc.), or you may consider some related topic (itıs adaptation in the play Presumption, for example). This essay should be submitted in hard copy for grading.

Final Paper / Project (due Friday, Dec. 7, by noon):

For the longer paper, I hope you will extend your range. I expect this paper to be thesis driven, but also informed by research. Pending my approval, it may be (but need not be) multimedia in format, perhaps even a webpage of some sort. You may focus on more traditional aspects of literary scholarship such as literary history (influences on the work or of the work on other writers) or some formal elements or social element in the work. Or you may consider something more interdisciplinary in the interaction between the literary work and art or cinema. Or you might consider the relationship between a given work and popular culture, including theories of celebrity derived from studies of Lord Byron.

Some examples of possible approaches:

Theories of Language in Frankenstein and Tarzan
Images of London, Empire or the "Other" in Sherlock Holmes and Dracula
Theories / Images of Race
The Paranoid Vision in and Sherlock Holmes
Any of the characters / texts and Pop Culture or movies
The role of women in any of the texts
Queer Theory and / Homosocial bonding in any of the texts
The Byronic in any of the texts
Narrative Structure

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