Research Paper
Your research paper will be about any piece we have read this semester, or any combination of
pieces.
LENGTH: The body of your essay is to be at least 1,500 words (about 5 double-spaced
pages)
TOPIC: Your essay will be about any piece (or combination of pieces) we have read
this semester:
■ “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe
■ “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
■ “The Rocking Horse Winner” by DH Lawrence
■ “In the Land of the Free” by Sui Sin Far
■ “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” by Yiyun Li
■ A Scandal in Bohemia” by Arthur Conan Doyle
■ “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka
■ The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay
■ “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” by Robert Browning
■ “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” by Emily Dickinson
■ “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll
■ “Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith
■ “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens
■ “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” by William Blake
■ Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
ASSIGNMENT: You have some options.
■ Option 1: Compare/contrast two works — pick a couple of pieces and show how
they are alike and how they are different.
■ Option 2: Compare/contrast two genres — pick to genres (poetry, short story,
drama, novel) and discuss how they are alike and different. In this option, you will
use the specific pieces we read to illustrate your points.
■ Option 3: Historical grounding — Pick any one piece and discuss the author,
his/her life, the time period, controversies surrounding his/her work (particularly
the piece in discussion), and how those factors influenced the work itself.
■ Option 4: You have a cool idea and want to pursue it. E-mail me to see if it’ll
work.
RESEARCH: To help you develop and support your interpretation, you need to use
material from at least five credible sources . This is in addition to the works you’re analyzing (in
other words, if you’re working with three poems, you still have to have five separate, scholarly
sources discussing the poems and/or topics around them). All sources must be cited and
documented according to MLA 8 standards. This means you must have both a separate works
cited page (make sure it’s not hanging on to the bottom of a previous page; this is very easy to
do in Word and there’s no reason for that kind of sloppy formatting) and in-text citations.
PURPOSE: This is a critical essay and not a general, informative paper. You must be able
to apply your findings to the topic and draw a conclusion that will offer your readers a unique
insight to the play. A good analysis concentrates on details: you should quote portions of the
play and your secondary sources to show how the texts support your thesis, but do not drop in
long passages, and do not summarize the whole thing. You also need to offer comments and
analysis that show how the portion you’re interpreting contributes to the work as a whole. As a
general rule, “say more about less”: limit your focus to a small enough topic so that you can
cover it in detail in this assignment.
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