Traitor – Living a lie
BIBLIOGRAPHY DUE Friday April 26: I want you to have between two and four secondary historical sources (books or essays by historians about the gunpowder plot, Catholic Priests in England, the history of the study of the female body, or witchcraft) and between two and four secondary literary criticisms (books or essays by literary critics about Macbeth, the play). The sources should be very specifically related to your topic.
ROUGH DRAFT DUE Friday, May 3—Must be turned in on time to receive final credit for the paper.
Paper Conferences Friday April 20-Tuesday April 24
FINAL DRAFT DUE
8:30 Section–Friday May 10 @ 12 noon in my office B14 Bauman
11:30 Section—Monday May 13 @ 12 noon
—No e-mailed papers. No extensions. This one is due when it is due! (You may turn it in early, if you wish.)
Papers without Chicago Style documentation will receive an F.
Papers containing plagiarism will receive an F.
In this final paper I want you to analyze how a specific discourse circulates through society and makes its way into a Shakespeare play. In other words, do a close reading of a Shakespeare play looking at what Shakespeare does with the discourse you analyzed in paper #3.
In paper #3 you analyzed a specific discourse from the Jacobean period that constructed a social object, i.e. the witch, Friendship, the female body, the traitor, the new world inhabitant.
In paper #4 I want you to choose a Shakespeare play and look at how Shakespeare participates in the construction of that social object that you analyzed in paper #3. For example, if you wrote paper #3 on witchcraft, you should write this next paper on Macbeth and the discourse of witchcraft. If you wrote paper #3 on the construction of Friendship, you should write this next paper on 12th night and the construction of friendship. Where in the play does conflict over the construction of the social object occur? Are any of the characters in Macbeth skeptical about the existence of witchcraft?
You will need a clear introduction with a thesis or main claim at the end of the first or second paragraph. In a paper like this it may take more than one sentence to fully state your claim. Your claim cannot be: this paper will discuss the conflict between skepticism and belief in witches in Macbeth. That is a broad, general topic, not a claim. For an example of a good thesis, look at how Ron Takaki frames his thesis in a series of questions on pg. 142 of your Tempest book:For the first time in the English theater, an Indian character was being presented. What did Shakespeare and his audience know about the native peoples of America, and what choices were they making in the ways they characterized Caliban? Although they saw him as “savage,” did they racialize savagery? Was the play a prologue for America?
Other examples:
You may include bits and pieces of your previous paper, but they must be shortened, compressed, revised, to fit the new purpose and context. Also, you will want to devote more space in this paper to your analysis of Macbeth than to your analysis of the historical documents.
Your paper must include at least five body paragraphs analyzing the Shakespeare play. In those body paragraphs you need to include quotations from the Shakespeare play and include at least one extended close reading or explication of an important passage or an important cluster of imagery. I want to see that you know how to read the language, the poetry and imagery, that you know how to talk about similes, metaphors, the connotations of important words. If the last paper privileged history, this paper should privilege literature, albeit as an historical text.
Quotations from the play must be properly introduced and properly punctuated and documented. See the attached handout.
This final paper should include secondary research, both historical and literary. You must have a minimum of two literary sources and two historical sources (4 total). Sources must be legitimate scholarly print sources. They cannot be websites. I would suggest that you get books as well as articles. Your research should be integrated smoothly into the body of your paper and carefully introduced and framed. It is more important to have a few good sources that relate very specifically to your topic than to have many sources that relate only tangentially to your topic.
Keep in mind that you are on the same level as the other writers of secondary literary and historical sources. Your job is not just to echo them or quote them in big chunks at the end of the paper, but to come up with your own analysis that builds upon what they have done or that challenges what they have done. You are entering into conversation with them about the play you are discussing.
I encourage you to come see me and/or get help in the academic skills center at any stage of the process or writing this paper.
The final paper should be 7 pages long. This is a minimum, but not a maximum page requirement.
Attachments:
Discourse Analysis.docx (93K)
…………………………Answer preview…………………………….
Traitor – Living a lie
Traitor! Who would want to be associated with such a name? English literature introduction of the themes of traitor and particularly to William Shakespeare literature of Macbeth would make one wonder if they were studying the American society that has been characterized by the theme in its history………………………….
APA
2134 words
