Length: 9-11 pages (2500 - 3000 words)
Due: Wednesday 13 April
Format: hardcopy
Our term paper, due will be standard English course fare: 9-11 pages (2500–3000 words) on a text or issue of your choice. I recommend using MLA citations for outside sources that you use, although I’ll accept APA or another displine-specific format if that’s what you’re most familiar with. I’ll mark the Term Papers on an A–F scale, not on the 1-5 scale I use for the Insight Papers. I’d like hardcopies of these, too, please.
Online Style Guides:
Take a Position; Don't Just Summarize
You can consider the term paper an extended Insight Paper (in fact, an Insight Paper may provide you with the springboard for this longer project). Your term paper should adopt a stance and argue your viewpoint rather than straightforwardly report research or a summarize a text or an issue. You might even consider this assignment to be a "Position Paper." Regardless, you will definitely want to do some outside research in order to contextualize and synthesize your own viewpoints. We don’t learn in a vacuum; we learn by comparing and contrasting our ideas with the ideas of others, and that’s what this paper is designed to do.
How to Find a Topic
One good prewriting strategy might be to catalogue the issues and themes that you find interesting, stimulating, unsettling, disturbing, or exhilarating. In your paper, you can grapple intellectually with the themes that you had an emotional reaction towards. Or you may want to work on a more abstract plane: using some of our more philosophical readings to help explain fiction, popular culture, or current events. There's no one right way to strike upon a good paper topic. Here are a few sample questions that might help you get started (note: you are not obligated to choose a topic from this list!):
What kind of commentary does Powers’s novel, Galatea 2.2, provide upon the humanist traditions? Does that novel signal a shift into posthumanism?
Powers also makes a strong statement on the rivalry between the arts and the sciences. What’s your take on this issue? How does it play out in contemporary culture? In what ways are their methodologies similar or dissimilar?
Is there any kind of relationship between theory (like Baudrillard or Haraway) and technological progress? Or popular culture? Or posthumanism?
Consider the romantic theme from Frankenstein to Neuromancer. What kind of insights can we glean about the place of Romanticism in the 21st-century? What do those two novels say about the "human"?
What’s the role of embodiment in cyberculture? How would you analyze the various dreams of disembodiment that circulate through these texts? What’s gained or lost by such maneuvers?