English 2342 / Piercy Horrors! Or The Research Paper

"Thanks to the lessons of Felix, and the sanguinary laws of man, I have learned how to work mischief." --Frankenstein's Creature

"[T]he classic genre marker of the Gothic...is doubleness, for it is the dualities typically created by the Gothic that invest it with its uncanny ability to hold its darkly shadowed mirror up to its own age." --Lisa Hopkins, Screening the Gothic.

Directions: Choose to discuss one of the listed Gothic, Ghost, Horror works below. You can also choose one of the works mentioned by Lovecraft in his “Supernatural in Horror Literature” essay.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Mark Danielewski, House of LeavesHenry James, The Turn of The ScrewEmily Bronte, Wuthering HeightsJohn Fowles, The French Lieutenant's WomanFranz Kafka, The TrialFranz Kafka, The CastleNathaniel Hawthorne, The House of The Seven GablesSheridan Le Fanu, Uncle SilasHorace Walpole, Castle of OtrantoAnn Radcliffe, The ItalianJane Austen, Northanger AbbeyH. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of MadnessRichard Matheson, I Am Legend

Alternatively: You can negotiate a title, but I am interested in you working on relatively classic gothic and horror novels for our Survey course.

Number of sources: Minimum of six. Follow MLA guidelines for formatting your paper and citing sources.

Length: Minimum of six typed pages (1500 words) of writing, the works cited page being a seventh page.

You do not need a title page but you need a specific academic title for your paper. Do not highlight or boldface or italicize your own title without need. Please use 10 or 12 point type and use a font style that does not call attention to itself. Standard fonts are Times New Roman and Arial. Other clear, easily readable, professional looking fonts are acceptable. Fonts like Goudy Stout or Wingdings are not acceptable. Please staple your paper yourself. I will not accept unstapled papers.

Please do not encase your paper in a soft binder or folder or three-ring binder or in gift wrapping paper.

Due Dates: See syllabus. There will be a Turnitin dropbox in our online D2L course. Papers—the 5% draft and the final draft—must be delivered in class on the due dates and must be uploaded to our dropbox by the next day. Late papers take a 10% penalty.

Writing and Research Guidelines: Consult and correctly document secondary sources (using MLA format) where they enlarge, defend, or give contrast to your analysis or close reading of the novel. Do not dump large, unintegrated quotes into your paper.

On THE ONE HAND, I am most interested in your own thinking, your own meditations on the features or problems the work you examines raises—your own fresh analysis, what you see—so do not rely so much on critics’ thoughts that I cannot see what you think. And please do not write pages of biography or pages of plot summary. I can get that on the Internet. On THE OTHER HAND, this is a research paper and you do need to be in conversation with scholars and critics who have had serious things to say about the work on which you are writing. That means you need to find out what other people have had to say about Frankenstein or House of Leaves or Castle of Otranto or whatever you are investigating. That way you can frame your discussion, not in a vacuum, but within the world of intelligent commentary surrounding the work, its themes, and problematics. What topics in the work do people find most engaging or most difficult or strange?

Discovering what scholars and critics have to say about a particular work often begins with a visit with a librarian, a search of our library catalogue, and importantly, a diligent search of our library’s electronic databases: http://www.lonestar.edu/library/article-databases. EBSCO Academic Search Complete, the MLA database, JSTOR, and Project MUSE database are all good bets for humanities research. Google searches can help. Scholar.google.com may be of assistance. However, the college pays a lot of money for you to be able to access the premium databases. Those online databases accessible through our college library links will likely offer you the best, most efficient use of your research time.

For help on your research paper you can talk with me. You can work with other students in our class who are writing. You can also see the writing tutors at the Extended Learning Center on the second floor of our library. Start early for the best chance at writing a great paper!

Purdue University’s OWL site (Google: OWL) or these pages at Gallaudet University’s site offer good information on writing research papers:

http://aaweb.gallaudet.edu/CLAST/Tutorial_and_Instructional_Programs/English_Works/Writing/Research_Papers_Citations_and_Reference.html.

See also this useful MLA paper template at http://vpiercy.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/mla_formating.pdf.

There is a nice site for gothic literary terms and themes that you might find helpful at http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~dougt/goth.html.