Overview

For this assignment, students will write and present a brief paper that provides thoughtfully-focused research about some object (person, place, thing, or event) present in the content of their group’s assigned text.  The purpose of the research is both to deepen our general awareness of literature as historically situated and to develop our understanding of the range of significations (i.e. meanings) this particular object may enable in the text as a whole.  

Students will be assigned to a particular panel and a particular text by noon on Monday, September 13th. To view the different panels and/or to check which panel you’ve been assigned, check the Panel Assignment page.

Directions

1. Select one specific historically locatable object (person, place, event, or thing) from your group’s assigned text that you want to examine further. 
   • Example:  If I were examining S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, I might decide to look up the history of drive in theaters (a place, which the novel presents as an important site of class and gender mixing).
2. Research more about the relevant history of this object.  In general, relevant history will give us a sense of how the role of the object within setting (time and place) of the text in which it appears    
   • Example:  Let us continue thinking about researching drive-in theaters in order to learn more about how the drive-in theater functions in The Outsider.   First, I want to get a general history of the drive-in theater in the U.S. to give myself a general frame.  [Note: Wikipedia is a good place for getting started.]  Then I want to hone in on the history most applicable to the novel’s setting.  Meaning, I want to focus on historical information about drive-in theaters in the Midwest, particularly in the Tulsa, OK area where Hinton’s novel takes place.  I also want to focus on the 1950s and 1960s when the story takes place (In this case, the story takes place in the same range that also happens to be when the author came of age and wrote the novel. The story’s setting though will not always be the same as the one the author came of age in or wrote in, nor does the text’s setting always align with its publication and reception dates.)  Note: The novel was published in 1967, so even though I won’t ignore information about drive-in theaters, I have to be careful about not making anachronistic claims about the text.

Pro Tips: Keep in Mind the Following

• There is no straight line to doing historical research in general.  You may have an idea about what you want to learn and you may find that information with just a little bit of work, but you may not.  You may find that you have to either adjust your expectation of what you were hoping to find, and try to think about the relevant import of what you have find. Or, if you’re committed to the questions you have about this object (e.g. you really want to know about how the drive-in theater affects the way we read gender dynamics in the novel), then you might need to be creative and strategic about your research questions and search terms.   
• Ultimately, part of what this research assignment requires you to do is to think critically and creatively, particularly in terms of the following questions:   
  1.   How do we understand what constitutes “relevant” to the text?  
     • (e.g. Is a 1955 event in Wyoming relevant to how we might think about a 1960s drive-in in Tulsa?) 
  2. How exactly should we understand what this object is?
     • (e.g. Is a drive-in theater about cars, cinema, or entertainment technology?  Or is it about land rights issues in Tulsa?)  
• Relatedly, you should keep in mind that your goal is not to write a definitive history about drive-in theaters in the Midwest or even of about the social geography of mid-20^th century youth culture.  Your goal is to find enough threads of relevant information that you can weave together in a story (yep . . . history) that helps us understand how this aspect of the text might shape the way we read the text.   
• Sometimes our historical research might lead us to information that more compellingly contextualizes the author and/or the reception history more so than the specific setting of the world the characters inhabit.  In such cases, you should make sure that your paper/presentation does the additional work of helping us understand how this contextualization of the author and/or the text’s reception might shape how we understand the significance or stakes of some aspect of the text. 

Guidelines

• The beginning of the paper should introduce the object you are examining, which includes telling us where it appears in the text and any relevant information about the object or that part of the text we need to understand. This introduction should be clear and concise. It should not take up more than half of the first page.

• The last three quarters of the paper (i.e. 7/8 to 1 full page) of the paper should be you helping us connect the history back to the text.  You do not have to have a thesis statement per say, but you should be able to point us to some possible ways this information might help us analyze and interpret what’s going on in this part of the stake.  This portion of the paper should include at least two discussion questions for the class to pick up in the discussion portion.

• Between the introduction and the last 3/4^th of the paper, you should be providing a relevant and focused history of the object you researched.   

• FORMATTING: The paper should be 3.5 – 4 pages, 12 point Times New Roman font, with 1 inch margins. Your full name along with page numbers should be listed in the footer.  If you wish to include a title, it must be listed in the header.  The only text in the body of the document should be the text of the paper you present. 

Presentation

• Each student will present their paper in class as part of a panel of 1-4 (depending on the week) other student paper presentations.

• You should write the paper such that you can read the paper to the class during your group’s panel presentation. 

• Every paper presentation should include an audio and/or visual supplement (e.g. a movie clip, a PowerPoint, a photograph, a handout, a song recording, etc.).

Sources & Bibliography

• Within 24 hours of presenting your panel paper, you will need to require both the written version of your paper and a thorough, accurate, and well-formatted MLA style bibliography of all the sources you cited and/or significantly consulted. 

• Your research for this paper must include at least four reputable sources.  (It’s okay if you do not draw equally from all four sources.) 
  • At least one of these sources must be a peer-reviewed scholarly text. 
  • No more than one of these sources can be a general reference source (i.e. Dictionary, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, etc.).  You may consult more than one reference source, but only one reference source may count towards your four required reputable sources.

Grading Rubrics

Each of the four assessment categories listed below will contribute to 25% of your grade for this assignment. Under each assessment category, you will see the four primary assessment questions I will ask when reviewing your work. Generally speaking if we can answer affirmatively to all four questions in regard to your work, then you should score at a B+ or higher in that particular assessment category.

Research

• Is the object you chose to focus on clear, discrete, concrete, and historically locatable object from the novel assigned to your group? 

• Is your research on this object focused to the most historically likely time and place to influence the way the author, the characters, the readers, or any combination of the three experienced the object? 

• Do you use at least four, distinct reliable sources? 

• Do you cite your sources clearly and accurately?

Relaying the History

• Do you clearly and sufficiently introduce the historically locatable object your paper examines?

• Is the scope and depth of the history you present sufficiently focused and relevant?

• Do you organize the history in a clear and relevant manner that helps us connect the history to the text? 

• Do you clearly and compellingly help us connect the history back to the text? 

Presentation

• Do you communicate your paper well orally for an audience?  (e.g. volume, pacing, clarity).

• Do your visual and/or audio materials complement and enrich your paper presentation? 

• Is your presentation within the allotted time limit?

• Do you pose clear and relevant discussion questions?

Grammar & Style

• Do you use clear, complete, and active sentences?

• Do you adhere to all rules for capitalization, punctuation, and underlining?

• Do you use correct spelling?

• Do your pronouns have clear referents? (ex. If you write, “This was the first one?” do the preceding 1-2 sentences provide enough information for me to know exactly what “this” refers to?)