Unit #3 Essay Assignment—Draft due FOR FULL COMMENTS on
Friday, December 4 at
11:59pm; draft due FOR OVERVIEW COMMENTS on Sunday, December 6 at 11:59pm.
In the course so far, we’ve been considering how social rules impact our
decisions and
freedoms. While we tend to think of strict social rules as antiquated, social
expectations
still control us today. In this final essay, we’ll be looking at contemporary
films and
television series that are set in the past, asking what they might teach us
about present
intellectual problems.
The final essay assignment is an 8 page research paper. In
it, you must use a television
series or film to intervene on an
academic debate (broadly conceived). Here’s the process
you should use to write your paper:
1) First, choose your primary source. Your choices are:
Films
Selma [issues: race, federal versus state legislation, religion, law and
society]
2) Identify an analytical question/problem to drive your
research. Your analytical question
can come from within your source text or from an academic debate on a specific
issue your
film deals with. The location of your analytical question
will help determine the kind of
paper you will write. While all papers must make use of
close analysis, some may put the
majority of their focus on analyzing the film; others may choose to carefully
deconstruct
the complexity of their academic debate.
3) Once you have identified your analytical
question/problem, you’ll begin the research
process in earnest. For this paper,you will also need to incorporate at least
five outside
sources. You are free and encouraged to use more than five sources, but be sure
that your
integration of outside material does not eclipse the presentation of your own
ideas. As a
general rule, you should aim to integrate your sources as evenly as possible;
you don’t want
to exhaust all your outside evidence on your first pages or hold off on
presenting them until
the end. This will likely require you to find different kinds of sources
(supporting,
dissenting, contextual, etc.) to support the full progression of your argument.
The Thesis
What will your thesis look like for this paper? For this assignment, you’ll
need to show how
the film/television show you’re writing on provides useful insight into an
intellectual,
academic debate. It will, in fact, have to help you pick a side of that debate
to endorse, or
lead you toward an alternative that the debate has yet to consider. It may help
to think
about your film/television series in the context of the following questions:
How does the
film/series help you understand your debate differently? Does it provide a
solution to
problems raised? Shed light on unconsidered aspects of debate? Change
perceptions of the
debate’s implications? Show that one side of the debate may ultimately hold
more merit?
As you connect your analysis of your primary source (the film/series) to your
academic
debate in your thesis, consider that there are a few ways you might do this:
1) You might read the primary source as offering a useful solution to the
debate.
2) You might read the primary source as revealing an important facet of the
debate
that has been overlooked so far.
3) You might read the primary source as reinforcing or contributing to a
problematic
view within the debate that needs correction.
There are likely more ways to use your primary source, but what you
don’t want to do is end up saying that both the source material and the
contemporary debate are “complicated.” You should be making an argument about
how the primary source and the
debate interact, rather than providing observations about their similarities or
differences.
It may help you to think of your primary source as a “lens” you are using to
read the debate,
and in doing so build off the argumentative skills you developed in Paper 2.
Your thesis
should show clearly how the primary source has allowed you to take a specific
stance on
your academic debate, just as Berlin/Skinner helped you formulate a claim about
your film.
As you might imagine, then, the way you tie your primary source to your
academic debate
will be an important component of your paper’s stakes: it’s your opportunity to
show your
reader why it was important to look at your source material at all. Just as you
had to justify
the comparison you made between Berlin/Skinner and your film
in Unit 2, in this research
paper you’ll want to be clear about how your chosen primary source (your
film/series) has
helped you see something new in the debate you are engaging with.
Getting Started
There are two ways to get started on this paper. I’ve listed next to the films
and television
shows some of the general intellectual categories they impinge on (there are
certainly
more than I’ve noted here, though). If one of them seems like an issue you’re
particularly
interested in or brings to mind an academic/intellectual debate you’d like to
explore, you
might use that as a starting point in picking a film. Conversely, you may have
no particular
issue that you’re passionate about pursuing, and in this case it makes sense to
pick a film or
series that seems most interesting to you and let the material guide you toward
an
academic debate.
From there, you have a good deal of freedom as to how you proceed. Some of you
may have
chosen your particular film/series because it allows you to wade into the
intellectual
complexity of how academics are approaching issues of the present moment.
Others may
be more interested in performing the kind of close analysis of texts that we’ve
been doing
in class so far, and will consequently want to engage with scholarly debates
that have a
more literary or philosophical focus. Both approaches are equally valid, but
they will
involve different kinds of research and writing. Whatever approach you choose,
you mustperform close analysis in your paper, of the film/series and the debate
it intervenes on.
A note on choosing your academic1 debate: while it’s important to pick a topic
that you’re
interested in (and hopefully passionate about) for this paper, it’s equally
important that
you choose a debate on which you do not already hold a fixed opinion. If you
already
believe that the other side of a particular debate has no worth, the likelihood
that you will
write a strong paper on the subject is small (in such cases, authors often
misrepresent or
disregard opposing views or have chosen debates that don’t have equally strong
voices on
both sides). This doesn’t mean you have to ditch a topic that you have strong
opinions
about, but that you may need to get more nuanced in your approach. This often
involves
finding a matter of disagreement within the side of the debate you already lean
toward. For
1 Why does this assignment keep specifying that you need to intervene on an
“academic”
debate? What does the word “academic” signify here? It probably won’t surprise
you to
hear that on issues where there is a good deal of academic consensus, there is
little
scholarly literature to engage with, even if that issue is still treated as a
debate in the public
sphere. A good example of this is the debate surrounding vaccination and its
correlation
with rises in autism that occasionally crops up in the news. Though this is an
issue that
commands attention the popular media, it’s not something that academics are
debating
because the evidence is seen to point in one direction (as we’ve talked about,
what counts
as evidence in academia might be different than in other places). Even if you do
choose an
issue that is debated in both the public sphere and in academia, it’s important
to know that
the parameters of the debate may be different in academic sources than in the
public
sphere.
instance, perhaps you’re interested in debates about the future
and dangers of A.I., but
think the side asserting that A.I. is harmless is naïve. This particular debate
would make a
poor focus for your paper, because you already believe one side lacks merit.
However,
there are numerous debates within the side you already agree with that you
could tackle
instead. You could, say, consider the possible solutions to this problem that
have been
posed and ultimately assert a stance on them. By doing so, you would avoid
engaging with a
debate that you didn’t see
as a debate, and would instead let the evidence you found in your
research determine your argument.
As always, keep in mind that your paper should be:
1) Driven by a strong analytical question or problem.
2) Supported by an argumentative claim.
3) Made of up close analysis (attention to language, structure, imagery, etc.).
4) Replete with citations and concluded with a works cited page (please use MLA
style).
A note on the draft: For Unit 3, the draft always comes on a tight timetable.
For most
people, it will not make sense to churn out 10 pages of draft material, since
you are still
getting a feel for your thesis, evidence, or argument. Therefore, you should
feel empowered
to turn in something much shorter—6 pages have started to look like a workable
ideal—at
the draft deadline. Your goal in the draft should be to set out your present
thesis, the two
sides of your debate, and some sense of how your primary source helps you
intervene on it.
Of course, the more realized your draft is the more we’ll have to work with in
the following
weeks, but you should not just write pages in order to fill them; this tends to
be
counterproductive and may make you feel tied to ideas that aren’t sophisticated
or
developed enough

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