Spring 2009
Stephen C. Behrendt
Graduate Student Research Papers and Projects
For graduate students in English 802, the most practical and professionally useful sort of course project is an extended, research-based piece of interpretive and critical writing involving subject matter(s) of your choice and some of the ideas, methods, approaches, and theories we will be examining during the course of the semester in our readings and class discussions. I’d like the project to serve your own personal and professional goals as much as possible, and to that end I’d like you to have maximum freedom of choice.
Your project should demonstrate your ability to integrate, at a graduate student level, primary and secondary materials, including critical and theoretical ones as appropriate, and to produce the sort of extended scholarly essay that typically serves as the basis for publication: an “article,” in essence. In other words, you should generate and develop an original idea or perspective and then situate it within the broader contexts of scholarly discourse in the field(s) in which your primary material lies. Increasingly, the research projects that graduate students are producing in courses like this one – including at institutions other than UNL – are interdisciplinary in nature. They combine in various ways and in productive fashion the perspectives furnished by areas like literary studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy and aesthetics, economics, and the human sciences (like sociology, psychology, and anthropology). They are increasingly informed by theory and by theoretical models ranging from feminist theory and gender studies to any number of poststructuralist and linguistic theories. The sort of theoretical framework or lens you adopt for your project will of course depend upon your own interests and experiences, although I encourage you to try new things, to venture into new territory, to take the intellectual risks that are the whole purpose of scholarship.
The topic for your project is entirely up to each of you, and I hope you will let me know your choice as soon as you settle upon it. I recommend that you begin by thinking about what course materials you find most inherently interesting AND by thinking hard about where your own greatest interests lie as a writer, a scholar, and as an actual or a potential teacher, whether those interests center in the literature itself or in the cultural contexts in which that literature existed during the Modernist period or in any subsequent period (including our own). Permit yourself the luxury of creating a project that serves you by focusing on materials about which you simply wish to develop a more intimate and sophisticated working knowledge.
As far as the writing, I shall of course expect a level of sophistication appropriate to graduate-level work, including clear, concise, lively and readable writing; correct documentation; and a facility with handling source material, including appropriate and judicious quotation or primary and secondary source material: rigorous and engaging academic writing, in other words, free of the sort of jargon that pollutes a lot of supposedly “scholarly” writing these days.
Length? Probably about 20 pages or 5000 words, which is the typical length of an academic article (since you should regard all your course papers as “apprentice pieces” in which you learn more about how to write the sort of effective articles you should aspire to publish or to present at academic conferences).
Our last class meeting is scheduled for Thursday, 30 April, but our final day of class will in fact be Tuesday, 28 April because I need to be in Philadelphia for a professional conference by the evening of the 30th. Therefore, I shall need to have your project paper no later than Thursday, 23 April, so that I will have sufficient time for grading. I will be delighted if you can give me the text earlier than that, but I really must have it no later than Thursday, 23 April (the Thursday before Dead Week).