This essay is to be prepared in advance, then written in class during the second hour of the final exam. You may use the literary and critical texts you are writing about, as well as any notes you can fit onto a 4"x6" card. (The first half of the final exam will be a closed-book exam similar to the midterm.)
Your assignment is to write an essay which engages with a work or theory or criticism in one of the ways desribed below. Note that none of choices allow you to simply summarize and agree with the argument of the work; in one way or another, you must provide an original contribution of your own. Whichever option you choose, be sure to focus your argument narrowly around a single specific claim. You may not use any of the critical articles in F:CSCC that we are reading for this class, although you are welcome to use other articles or books written about Frankenstein.
As always, you must cite your sources (both primary and secondary) properly in MLA parenthetical style. Your Works Cited list may be written out in advance; if it is in proper format in your notes, you don't need to recopy it on the exam.
Please turn in with the exam both your 4"x6" card and a photocopy of the article or of the relevant pages of the critical book with which you are working. You should turn in a copy of your library search records (see below) before the last day of class.
Choose one of the following:
1) Find a published article (or a section of a book) written after 1950 about any work which we have read for class and disagree with, qualify, or extend one of its arguments about the work. (Caution: you need to address the article on its own terms. If the critic is writing a pyschoanalytic argument, for example, you can't just say, "but the text really means this," and offer a formalist argument. Given the small scope of this paper, you would do well to find an article which you find at least partly plausible, but which contains a local argument which is faulty or which could be developed more fully.)
2) Find a published article (or a section of a book) written after 1950 about any work which we have read for class and disagree with, qualify, or extend one of its theoretical assumptions about interpretation. (The warning in (1) applies here as well; make sure that you fully understand what you're attacking.)
3) Find a published article (or a section of a book) written after 1950 which articulates or clearly implies a theoretical methodology, and then apply that methodology to a work which we have read for class but which the critic does not discuss. (Be sure that you yourself clearly articulate what you're doing, presumably with a summary or analysis of the critic's interpretive method. Take care also to focus your argument; apply only one specific aspect of the critic's argument to your paper, not a disconnected series of interpretive moves associated with a critical school. And again, be sure you understand fully--and believe in, at least provisionally--the methodology you're applying.)
This assignment is intended to ensure that you gain some experience in working with the library resources you will need as an English major or minor. It will not be graded on the standard 0-100 scale, but it is worth 4% of the final grade: if you do the assignment fully and in good faith, you get the whole 4%; otherwise, you don't. I might give you less than 4% if you turn in the assignment but it is incomplete in some way.
In the course of searching for a critical source to use in paper 4, be sure to use (at least) the three following search tools:
In addition, please make an appointment to talk to Marcia Thomas, the librarian who serves as the library liaison to the English Department and whose subject specialties include English. You may talk to her about any aspect of your search, but I particularly recommend that you ask her to help you figure out search strategies; students often have trouble at first finding good sources in appropriate quantities, and some expert assistance will get you better results. (I hope also that when you find out how useful it can be to consult a librarian, you establish a habit of doing so that continues when you conduct research in future classes.)
No later than the last day of class, and preferably well before, turn in the following:
If the work you choose to write on is recent or obscure, you may not be able to find all of the above. If that is the case, you may substitute sources about any of the works we have discussed in this class. (Before you take this step, however, talk to Marcia Thomas to see if a change in search strategies gets you better results.)
To save paper, I prefer that you turn in as much of this assignment as you can in electronic form, with your documentary records attached to an email. (You should be able to turn in all of the above electronically except for 1 and 4.) Please do email the citations to yourself, and then attach them to (or paste them into) your paragraph, rather than forwarding the citations directly to me--I will not be able to keep track of what you have turned in otherwise.