4106: Research Paper—guidelines and due dates

As you develop your topic for your research paper, keep in mind some of the broad ideas and questions about the novel as a genre that have structured this class: narration and ideology, representation and reality, gender and the novel, subversion and containment, representations of reading and textuality within novels….Below I have listed a selection of excerpts from critics and theorists we’ve considered this semester; if you consult your notes, you’ll find more. Reviewing these critical assertions might help you generate relevant questions and ideas. Think, too, about what you genuinely find most interesting—most intriguing, most perplexing—about the text or text you’ve chosen to work with, and perhaps that will help to shape an approach that’s meaningful to you.

Keep in mind that your paper will be 8-10 pages long, and should incorporate at least 3 outside sources (criticism, history, or theory—primary texts don’t count).

Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” from The Common Reader (1925)

*Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?

Margaret Anne Doody (The True Story of the Novel)

*Novel characters, even those who are truly well-to-do, exist in perpetual dissatisfaction with their financial and social condition (476).

Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction

*Competing class interests are therefore represented as a struggle between the sexes that can be completely resolved in terms of the sexual contract” (49).

D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, Or the Secret of Style

 *Of that godlike authority which we think of as the default mode of narration in the traditional novel, Jane Austen may well be the only English. example. Whether our standard is Fielding in the 18^th century or Thackeray in the 19th the omniscient narrator’s divinity proves constantly betrayed by his human verisimilitude, the all-too-familiar “character” with which he can’t help tending to coincide….By contrast, Austen’s divinity is free of all accents that might identify it with a socially accredited broker of power/knowledge in the world under narration….she always writes like a real god, without anthropomorphism. Nowhere else in 19^th century narration have the claims of the “person,” its ideology, been more completely denied.

Brantlinger, Patrick. “What is ‘Sensational’ About the ‘Sensation Novel’?” Nineteenth Century Fiction 37.1 (1982): 1-28.

*At the same time that the narrator of a sensation novel seems to acquire authority by withholding the solution to a mystery, he or she also loses authority of at least innocence, becoming a figure no longer to be trusted (Brantlinger 15).

*The early, naïve development of omniscient narration in fiction breaks down partly from the intrusion of mystery into it, but partly also from the recognition of the conventional—and logically preposterous—nature of omniscience (17).

Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police.

*We enjoy our privacy in the act of watching privacy being violated, in the act of watching that is already a violation of privacy….It is built into the structure of the Novel that every reader must realize the definitive fantasy of the liberal subject, who imagines himself free from surveillance that he nonetheless sees operating everywhere around him (162).

George Eliot’s Adam Bede

 *…I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed; the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you, as precisely as I can, what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness box narrating my experience on oath” (177).

Important Due Dates

November 13. Short prospectus due. In-class writing workshop. This should be a one-page description of your ideas for your research paper, and should present some of the major ideas or theoretical questions you plan at this point to explore in your paper. Identify the novel (or novels) you plan to work with. If you already know your paper is going to be based on specific passages or images from the text that you see as central, you might want to mention or discuss those here.

You may structure your one-page proposal in any way that seems useful to you. Naturally, the more you say—and the better developed your ideas are—the more fully I’ll be able to respond.

November 19. Mountain of notes: a page or so of inspired freewriting on each of 5 passages (or more, if you’re ambitious. 2 of these passages should be from a critical or theoretical work (including, but not limited to, ones we’ve discussed in class) and the other should be from the novel(s) your working with. Unpack your passage phrase by phrase, word by word; generate questions, ideas, observations on the significance of this passage to the text as a whole, its interpretive possibilities, associations it suggests to you Later you can use these notes as mines of ideas from which you’ll select the best, the most relevant and suggestive, and begin to structure them into a thesis driven argument.

Nov. 26. 5 page rough draft due. In-class writing workshop. It’s okay if this is still pretty rough—but, as always, the more work you have done, the better feedback you are likely to get and the more productive the workshop will be.

Nov. 28, 29. Optional Conferences. Come with specific questions and concerns to make our meeting as useful to you as possible.

Dec. 7. Research paper due in my office by 5:00. 8 polished pages (minimum) with an MLA-style works cited page.