ENG 401:001
Professor Fernheimer
Spring 2016: Final Essay
Proposal and Annotated Bibliography Due: March 24
Full draft first submission Due: April 19
Comments on first submission returned: April 26
Final Essays Due: May 3 9:30 am
One of the most valuable skills you will develop in college is the ability to critically evaluate different sources of information and synthesize what you find so that you can make an informed opinion or decision about a particular matter. Research skills are also highly valued in the workplace, and yet, oddly enough, students get strikingly few opportunities to explore an idea in depth. In this course, you will have a chance to investigate and argue about a research question that is of interest to you.
Identifying a Paper Topic
Topics for the final paper will be selected and proposed by you and should come from and/or be related to the readings and issues we’ve explored in class. The requirements are few, but topics must meet the following criteria:
1) They must be interesting enough to keep you engaged throughout the semester, as you will begin working on them early on and keep working on them until the semester is over.
2) They must make be rich enough to all you to develop an argument that is supported with substantial evidence from both primary and secondary sources. Final papers should include quotations from no fewer than two primary texts and five secondary texts. This means you will need to do substantive research, and yes, it means that you will have to physically go to the library.
3) They must allow you to investigate an issue that is arguable. This might be tougher than you think. The topic must be controversial enough that there are several different approaches to it, and several different ways to interpret, answer, or argue it (otherwise, you’re not dealing with an arguable topic).
Final papers will need to do the following:
1) Make and support a scholarly argument with evidence from multiple quotes from primary and secondary sources.
2) Offer a compelling answer to the so-what question that situates your own work within the scholarly conversation that already is happening.
3) Include a substantive Works Cited in MLA format that demonstrates you have done appropriate and adequate research. Ideally you will no cite less than two primary texts and five-seven secondary texts in your final essay.
Finding a topic and narrowing it down to a specific research question can be a daunting task. To help you in that task, I want you to think about the following questions:
What are the various types of comix we’ve encountered? How do they shape and transform the way we think about the narrators of the texts, gender, Israel, Palestine, the “conflict,” the Israeli military (IDF), Jewish identity, Palestinian identity, truth, history, historiography? What are the historical roots of these concepts and where and how do they intersect, if at all?
Since this course is designed to introduce you to representations and the histories of Israel/Palestine, you might choose a topic that helps to answer one of the following questions:
What are historical comix?
How do generic conventions influence the way we interpret these texts?
What is the relationship between words, symbolic language, visual representation, and action?
How is a particular aspect of the conflict defined, studied, and taught? Why are these historiographic methods important to recognize and understand?
How do these relatively idiosyncratic memoirs/autobiographies/novellas/comix influence the way we think about the characters within the texts and the larger collectivities of which they are part?
What might the reception of a particular text tell us about the representations within it?
Visual/Comix Options
Since this is course about graphic narrative, it seems only fair to allow you the option to write a graphic narrative final project. Such projects may be individual or collaborative, though if you go the collaborative route, you will each need to submit a short reflective piece about the collaboration itself, and they may take one of several formats.
1) “Fan” response–take a point of view not represented in the text, and respond to the text–i.e. take on the persona of the IDF soldiers who appear but have no voice in Sacco’s Footnotes to Gaza and write a response to the representation or write a response to Yizhar’s text from the perspective of the Palestinians whom we see only through the soldiers’ eyes.
2) Write your “memoir” of the course, a la Glidden, Libicki, or Sacco. Rather than a travel narrative, yours may be a reading or literacy narrative of your experience learning about graphic narratives, Israel/Palestine.
3) Take a page from Libicki’s book in “Toward a Hot Jew” and write a scholarly piece in comix.
4) Want to do something else? Come talk to me, but be prepared to make the case!
Comiclife is the software program you might want to play around with if you’re not comfortable drawing.