Final Essay (Due December 9th)

For your final essay, you'll choose from one of the three prompts below. While we've read a wide variety of works over the course of the semester, I think that these topics are open-ended enough to allow for meaningful connections to be made between disparate writers. Consider . . .

1. How national identity is exemplified by the poet(s) we've read representing a given country — i.e. its ideologies, the character of its people, its natural environment, its unique problems, etc. Aside from the poet(s) from a given country, your argument might benefit from including the perspectives of poets visiting or writing about that country. Poets with a hybrid nationality will prove to be interesting wildcards for this prompt.
2. How cosmopolitanism and/or the intermingling of cultures, particularly in our hyper-connected contemporary moment, shapes the discourse of our poets.  If choosing this topic, you'd do well to  take into account the malleability of language and/or those poets who've chosen to employ languages other than English in their work.  Likewise, the ways in which our poets depict living in or visiting other countries will also be useful.
3. How the poets we've read have addressed current events, particularly those that transcend national boundaries.  If you choose this prompt, you'll want the event(s) you choose to have thematic unity, but there are more general topics you might choose — civil rights of various sorts (women's rights, racial equality, etc.), economic inequality, war/violence, environmentalism — that will allow you to group together different authors who don't perfectly overlap.

You'll want to make sure that your essays demonstrate a sufficient degree of complexity and so towards that end I'm requiring that you find at least three facets to the topic you've chosen.  Each of these will need to be backed up with plentiful evidence from the texts themselves (this means quotations and summaries/paraphrases of narrative points, all of which should be cited).  Moreover, you'll need to analyze your examples, discussing them in relation to one another.  What nuances and contradictions can you find, creating a more complex understanding of your given topic?

Your final essays should be a minimum of two thousand (2,000) words (not counting your works cited list), and written in MLA style (including a proper header, parenthetical in-text citations and a works cited list at the end), double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman, no tricked-out margins, etc. You'll e-mail your papers to me (in .doc or .docx format; .rtf in a pinch) no later than 5:00 PM on Tuesday, December 9th. Because e-mail is an imperfect delivery medium and the UC system is prone to collapse, take note that I'll reply to each paper received, letting students know that it's arrived safely, so if you don't receive that e-mail, get in touch with me, and should you have any questions or concerns prior to the deadline, don't hesitate to drop me a line.  I'm also sure that we'll have an open discussion of the final essay on Facebook.

Also, please don't forget that tardy papers will be docked a full letter grade for every day they're late and that papers that are less than the stated limit of two thousand words (again, not counting your works cited list) will automatically receive an F. Finally, I will not permit block quotes for this essay — whittle down your quotations to the essential information and make use of summary and paraphrase when necessary.

While two thousand words (roughly six full pages) seems like an endlessly long paper, I can assure you that it's not really a lot of space to discuss these topics in great depth, therefore I wholeheartedly encourage you to dispense with any and all filler, including bloated rhetoric and lengthy five-paragraph-style introductions that ultimately say very little while taking up a lot of word count. Don't hover over the surface of the issues — dive right in and get to the heart of your argument (i.e. evidence, analysis . . .  the good stuff) from the start. I also recommend that unless you have compelling reasons to do otherwise, organize your essay around the the facets of the topic you've chosen to discuss, rather than proceeding chronologically or dealing with each author individually, and also that you write through the source texts themselves, as demonstrated in the "Making Effective Arguments" post I put up at the start of the term. You do not need to do outside research for this assignment, and you should avoid lengthy explications of the authors' biographical details or summaries of the plots of texts outside of what relates directly to the points that you are making. Presume that the person reading your paper has read all of the texts you reference (because he has!). Finally, make sure that you are following the conventions of MLA formatting (which can be found in numerous places on the internet).