Research Analysis

Explore how a specific and relevant context (artistic elements of form, social, cultural, historical, political, psychological, religious, milieus, situations, circumstances, etc.) informs the writer’s work to help the reader better understand, and better experience, or at least imagine, and appreciate the underlying meanings and connections between the writer and the literature. Take care that you don’t produce a report or mere regurgitation of facts found in research. You may find chapter 45 particularly useful for the short descriptions of critical literary approaches that could help to shape your argument: historical, psychological, mythological, sociological, gender, cultural, or deconstructionist. Understand the chapter gives general descriptions of the literary theories and as any theory goes, the theory you may think initially works, may not turn out to work best after you begin researching. Be flexible and consider the approaches as frameworks to help direct your thoughts about the writer and his/her work, as you start researching. Perhaps you may want to utilize a perspective to guide your preliminary research to see if scholars discuss your author and work within a perspective; if you find one approach does not work, simply switch to another angle if you notice sources emphasize your author and work within another context. Knowing these contexts and theories exist also helps you understand references to the language scholars often use in their criticism so you gain a fluency with their discourse. Your Research Project is worth 25% of your Final Grade and averages the following PROCESS WORK: Topic Proposal and Bibliography(25 points) Documented Essay Final Draft(100 points) But how do you go about doing it all?… Learning How to Teach Yourself From the outset, keep in mind one important point: Writing a research paper is in part about learning how to teach yourself. Long after you leave college, you will continue learning about the world and its vast complexities. There is no better way to hone the skills of life-long learning than by writing individual research papers. The process forces you to ask good questions, find the sources to answer them, present your answers to an audience, and defend your answers against detractors. Those are skills that you will use in any profession you might eventually pursue. Steps to Writing the Research Paper To write first-rate research papers, follow the following simple rules—well, simple to repeat, but too often ignored. 1. Identify a Topic by doing Preliminary Research, thinking hard, & asking for help. At the beginning of a course, you will probably not know enough about the major scholarly topics that are of most importance in the field, the topics that are most well-covered in the secondary literature or the topics that have already had the life beaten out of them by successive generations of writers. You should begin by doing some general reading in the field. If nothing else, begin with the preliminary sources such as biographical sources and introductory materials about the author and his/her work (overviews, summaries, biographies, etc.). Such preliminary sources provide a wonderful but sadly neglected resource. Read a few books or articles on topics we are studying if you don’t know who any of them are to better understand who they are so that you can develop and find an interest in someone. Follow up the suggested reading on the course syllabus or the footnotes or bibliographies of the texts you are reading for the course. After that, speak with me (your professor) about some of your general ideas if you get stuck, and the possible research directions you are thinking about pursuing. And you should do all this as early in the course as possible. 2. Create a Clear Research Question. A research question, at least in literature, begins with the word “why” or “how.” Think of it as a puzzle: Why did a writer’s literature or literary work turn out as it did and not some other way? Why does a literary pattern (symbolism, metaphor, tone, form, etc.) exist in the writer’s literature (i.e. why does the writer use a specific style)? How is the writer’s work affected by