Literary Research Essay Assignment

Purpose(Please don’t copy, Check turnitin.)

Your last written assignment for this class is a 6 to 8-page, 1,250 to 2,000-word research essay on a literary topic, current issue, or enduring question of your choice. You will use documented source material to support your essay’s thesis.

You must use 1 or more of the literary pieces listed on our syllabus as a source.

A research essay presents and develops a thesis supporting multiple sources of opinion. You stake out a subject narrow enough to be researched and you steep yourself in it. Then you formulate a thesis — your own attitude or opinion on the subject — and present it in an analytical and/or argumentative form, along with facts, opinions, and information that prove it true. You should use appeals and other methods to support your thesis, but you should also analyze each source you plan to use to support your thesis.

The Parts of a Research Essay

There are two parts to a Research Essay:

The text (6 to 8 pages and 1,250 to 1,750 words)
The works cited page (one or more pages)

Research Essay Format

Much of the writing in your research essay comes from the work of other writers, and you must give proper credit by citing (mentioning) these sources in your paper. The art of citing is called documentation, which is required for any information falling into the following three categories:

Any judgment, opinion, speculation or theory that is not original (unless it is universally known and accepted).
Any fact or statistic open to dispute.
Any information provided by a specific observer, even by an expert in his or her field (for example, opinions of psychologists on child abuse).

Sources

You must use quote and cite passages from 4 to 6 scholarly sources (one or more from each of the following categories) and list them on your works cited page. You may use our campus library’s Website to find and access these sources:

one book (such as our Literature textbook or Animal Farm);
one periodical (magazine, journal or newspaper) article;
one website;
one “multimedia” source: a film, video, DVD, photo, musical piece, etc.).

Quotations and Citations

You will use quotations to include information from your sources in your essay. For example, if you were quoting a Newsweek magazine article on the Virgin Mary by Kenneth L. Woodward, you could write:

Kenneth L. Woodward, in his article on the Virgin Mary, writes that “the 20th century has belonged to Mary” (Woodward 49).

Or…..

According to Kenneth L. Woodward, the 20th century has “belonged to Mary” (49).

Or…..

Kenneth L. Woodward writes: “The 20th century has belonged to Mary” (49).

Works Cited Page

You will use the MLA (Modern Languages Association) style for parenthetical documentation to list your sources on your Works Cited page, which is the last page of your essay.

These sources should be listed on your works cited page in alphabetical order, by the author’s last name. Your source listings for books should look like this: Author’s last name, author’s first name, title of book, name of publisher, and year of publication.

For example, if we were listing author Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Bean Trees:

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Bean Trees. HarperCollins, 1988.

(The publisher and year of publication can usually be found at the beginning of a book, before the title page.)

Your source listings for articles should look like this: Author’s last name, author’s first name, title of article, name of magazine or newspaper, date of article, article’s page numbers.

For example, if we were listing Kenneth L. Woodward’s Newsweek article, “Hail, Mary”:

Woodward, Kenneth L. “Hail, Mary.” Newsweek. August 25, 1997: pp. 49-55.

Topics

Writing research essays is not as complicated as it sounds. Think carefully about the subject you write about, and see me if you have any questions. Here is a list of possible research essay topics for you to choose from. You may also write about a topic you already wrote about in this class.

You must quote from one or more sources (short story, novel, poem, or play) that are mentioned in our Syllabus.

Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Magical Realism.
Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, and the African-American experience in literature.
George Orwell, Ursula K. LeGuin, and the literature of utopia and dystopia.
Tim O’Brien, Wilfred Owen, and the literature of war.
Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Susan Glaspell, and feminist literature.
William Shakespeare, John Donne, and the literature of romantic love.
Edgar Allan Poe and Lost Love. What is it like to lose a loved one?
Romantic Love versus Family Love.
Ancient versus Modern Drama.
Sophocles and the Literature of Arrogant Leaders.
Susan Glaspell and the literature of murder: Why do people kill?
William Butler Yeats, the literature of Apocalypse, and COVID-19.

Tasks

Please perform the following steps in order to successfully complete the assignment.

Use prewriting techniques to generate ideas (based on the guidelines in this prompt),
Write a first draft of your essay which includes 5 to 10 paragraphs, a working title, a working thesis statement, a beginning, middle, and end.
Title and save your final draft to a desktop or laptop computer,
Click Submit Assignment on the top right to upload your assignment,
Click Choose File to upload your file submission,
Click Submit Assignment to submit.

Submission Format

Please submit your assignment by uploading a Microsoft Word Document or a PDF file.