Unit 2: A Multi-Source Paper

Objectives

A frequent essay assignment at Harvard asks students to compare two texts (or events, ideas, objects, etc.) – they might be two works of art, two approaches to a public policy problem, two scientific experiments, two economic theories, or a theory and a new set of data, but the underlying goals are the same. This unit is designed to familiarize you with some different kinds of multi-source essays and to help you develop skills of comparative analysis, which doesn’t simply observe similarities and differences between two texts. Rather, it establishes the significance of those similarities and differences and discusses why they matter.

Readings

• The instructor will select three specific readings for this unit:
  • A Shakespearean Text
  • A Modern Adaptation
  • A Social Scientific Theory
• Aphorisms from Unit 1 and the Aphorisms on Comparative Literature, The Elements of Academic Argument, Reference Works, Method, and Organization for Comparative Papers

Assignment

Write a seven-page comparative paper involving a Shakespearean play and one additional text, either an adaptation or a social scientific theory.

Instructions

Your work in our class will prepare you to write a successful paper. From Unit 1, you’ll draw upon the insight you’ve gained into Shakespeare’s work and the strategies for close reading that we’ve discussed (explications, timelines, conceptual maps, etc.), as well as your ability to pose a question or problem in an essay and respond with an argument supported by evidence and analysis. In Unit 2, you’ll begin branching out from text to context that can be gleaned from academic reference works. You’ll also learn about some different ways of bringing two texts into dialog with each other, whether it’s a “comparative essay” that discusses some common aspect of two texts, or a “lens essay” that uses a theoretical text to unpack a specific example, or a “test-a-theory essay” that uses the example to evaluate the theory.

For instance, a Unit 2 essay could compare Shakespeare’s Elizabethan play, Romeo and Juliet, with the RSC’s Twitter adaptation of it, Such Tweet Sorrow, which brought the play into a radically different time, place, and medium. Or, the essay could use Robert Sternberg’s “triangular theory of love” to explain the famous love story in Shakespeare’s play. Or, alternately, it could use Shakespeare’s play to test the quality of Sternberg’s theory and, potentially, develop it or offer a new theory to replace it based on the way love works in Romeo and Juliet.

To orient you to these various possible avenues, and to help you find your topic and argument, your Unit 2 response papers will include:

•  Response Paper 2.1: Text and Context: By looking at reference works, you will practice asking questions and making points that require contextual information beyond “common knowledge.”
•  Response Paper 2.2: Comparative Analysis: By creating a list of parallel passages between two texts, and discussing those passages, you will practice making specific comparisons.
•  Response Paper 2.3: A Detailed Outline: In between the draft and revision stages, you will create a detailed outline for your paper.

Your essay for Unit 2, a seven-page comparative analysis, should exhibit all of the elements of academic argumentation that were discussed in Unit 1. In addition, when you write a comparative paper you should:

• Deal carefully with your stakes: The introduction of a comparative analysis should make clear that the comparison reveals something we wouldn’t have understood by looking at only one of the texts. Your introduction should identify a problem or question that arises out of looking at these two texts together and, in the process, alert your readers to what’s at stake in the comparison (thoughts to be further developed in the conclusion of the essay).
• Be mindful of the structure of your paper: Comparative essays pose a structural challenge: how will you weave your analyses of these two texts together? Will you discuss one text in full, and then the other? Or will you jump back and forth between texts? Will you give them equal weight, or will you spend more time with one of the texts? Is your argument “about” both texts together, or is it really only “about” one of the texts? Will you use one text as a lens through which to look at the other text, or will you be doing the same kind of analysis on both texts?

As in a close reading, the ideas you offer in a comparative analysis should be your own. No outside sources are required, nor should you consult any scholarship on your primary texts. You may, however, find it necessary to consult some reference works for context that goes beyond “common knowledge.”

Requirements

Your paper should:

• Be seven pages long;
• Be written in MLA style (see Citing Sources in The Harvard Guide to Using Sources and Wilson’s Sample MLA Style Paper);
• Include a cover letter.

Sample Papers

• Lydia Goldberg, “Elizabeth as America: The Victor in McKellen’s Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III”
  A Shakespearean Student’s Comparative Essay
• Grace Carney, "'Black and deep desires': Tragedy and Criminology in Macbeth"
  A Shakespearean Student's Lens Essay
• Maia Silber, “An Answer to Langer and Lopate: Two-Layered Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus”
  Exposé Humanities Lens Essay
• Joule Voelz, “Interpreting the Failure of the Poor People’s Campaign”
  Exposé Humanities Historicist Essay
• Serena Eggers, “The BBC’s Pride and Prejudice: Falling in Love through Nature”
  Exposé Humanities Comparative Essay
• Olivier Simon, “An Unsuspected Ideal: Reassessing the Treatment of Representational Art in Jose Ortega y Gasset’s The Dehumanization of Art”
  Exposé Humanities Test-a-Theory Essay
• Francesca Annicchiarico, “Chinese Civic Identity Twenty Years After Tiananmen Square”
  Exposé Social Sciences Lens Essay
• Edward Horgan, “Exceeding the Threshold: Why Women Prefer Bad Boys”
  Exposé Social Sciences Meta-Analysis Essay
• Kevin Hazlett, “A Freedom by Any Other Name: Serbia’s Article 43 and the Resurgence of Hate”
  Exposé Social Sciences Historicist Essay
• Lisa Wang, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Troubled Attitude toward Nonviolent Resistance”
  Exposé Social Sciences Comparative Essay
• Marc Bornstein, “On Uncertainty and Possibility: Consequences of an Unproven Science”
  Exposé Sciences Comparative Essay
• Ruth Choa, “Through the Looking Glass: A Psychological Perspective of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study”
  Exposé Sciences Lens Essay

Objectives

This assignment is designed to give you experience working with academic reference works. Reference works – encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, companions, study guides, and so forth – are a nice alternative when you need contextual information for a paper but are faced with, on the one hand, the unreliability of Wikipedia and, on the other, the overwhelming sea of scholarship in academic books and articles. Reference works provide readers with knowledge that is both authoritative (because it was written by a specialist and peer-reviewed) and accessible (because it was written as an introduction to a topic).

Readings

• A Shakespearean Text (Selected by the Instructor)
• Aphorisms on Reference Works

Assignment

Write three paragraphs, each being either an analytical question or an analytical point, and each drawing upon and referring to information “outside” the text and only available through a reference work.

Instructions

Multi-source papers usually address context in a serious way, the idea being, usually, that context changes or enhances the meaning of the primary text(s) under consideration. Maybe something in a text makes better sense when seen in light of the author’s historical circumstances. Maybe the history of a term or idea needs to be reviewed in order to discuss how it surfaces in a text. Maybe some similarity or difference in two texts has implications for some similarity or difference in contexts.

For this assignment, use the resources available to you through academic reference works to consider some aspects of your Shakespearean text as they pertain to any number of relevant contexts. One reference work that will surely be useful is The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. You may also find The Oxford Companion to British History and The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms helpful. But, because there are so many different aspects of your text that could jump out to you, and you could choose to think about them in any number of ways, you may have to do some more general searching in Oxford Reference, which includes reference works for more than 100 different disciplines.

Based on your analysis of Shakespeare’s text and of the relevant contexts discovered through reference works, write three paragraphs that offer evidence and analysis either to ask a question or to make a point. That is, each paragraph should either (1) pose a question about Shakespeare’s text that can only be asked and answered by referring to some context, or (2) make a point about Shakespeare’s text that has implications for some relevant context.

In your writing, remember to present these different kinds of evidence – textual and contextual – appropriately: you will have to decide whether the textual evidence needs to be quoted, paraphrased, or summarized, while contextual evidence should almost always be summarized or paraphrased, not quoted. Whether textual or contextual, the source of the evidence must be clear through a proper in-text citation.

Requirements

The document you submit should:

• Include three numbered paragraphs;
• Be written in MLA style, including a Works Cited page and proper in-text citations, though the document can be single-spaced.

Sample Papers

• Sample Response Paper 2.1
• Sample Response Paper 2.1

Objectives

This assignment is meant to help you develop skilsl of comparative analysis, which involves recognizing similarities and differences between two texts, sure, but also recognizing patterns in similarities or differences and articulating the importance and implications of similarities and differences.

Readings

• The instructor will select three specific readings for this unit:
• A Shakespearean Text 
• A Modern Adaptation
• A Social Scientific Theory

Assignment

Compare three passages from your Shakespearean text with relevant passages in the comparative text of your choosing.

Instructions

After reading all three texts, select which comparative text you’d like to work with, either the adaptation or the theory. The next thing to do is to compile a list of as many parallel passages between your Shakespearean text and your comparative text as possible. These can be passages which represent the same moment or invoke the same idea, or passages in which one text helps us understand the other. From your list, select three parallels to address in detail in your response paper. Select the passages you choose to discuss from any you find interesting, intriguing, or curiosity-provoking, especially if you start to notice patterns in the relationships between parallel passages. In the document you submit, for each pair of parallel passages, you should 

1. Provide evidence from the two texts (through quotation, paraphrase, summary, etc.). This step can be written in the form of tables, outlines, prose: whatever you find the easiest and most productive as you move on to the second step.
2. Analyze the relationship between the two passages in a few sentences for each parallel. 

Feel free to use reference works to contextualize your readings, if needed. If you do so, remember to deal with that evidence appropriately: the source of the evidence must be clear with an in-text citation; it should probably be summarized or paraphrased, not quoted; and the full bibliographic reference should appear in your Works Cited.

Requirements

The document you submit should:

• Include three numbered analyses;
• Be written in MLA style, including a Works Cited page and proper in-text citations, though the document can be single-spaced.

Sample Papers

• Sample Response Paper 2.2
• Sample Response Paper 2.2

Objectives

This assignment is meant to help you develop skills of organization and revision. Revision is not about fixing the misplaced commas and misspelled words in a paper. It's about re-envisioning the evidence, analyses, argument, and framing material for a paper (i.e., the whole paper). A detailed outline adds to a basic outline the specific claims you're making in full sentences or even paragraphs.

Readings

• Your Unit 2 Draft
• Aphorisms on Outlines

Assignment

Based on class discussion and your further thinking on your idea, create a detailed outline for your revision of Essay 2.

Instructions

A detailed outline is something you should only try to piece together only after you’ve already written a draft or a significant part of a paper. Much of the drafting process is about coming to your argument. The detailed outline is about trying to effectively present your argument. If your argument is not yet fully formed, then trying to figure out how to present it may only result in frustration.

A detailed outline is difficult to describe abstractly; your best bet is to take a look at some samples, which will be provided.

To start a detailed outline, create a new basic outline, not a revision of your previous outline, but a new outline based on what the completely new paper you would write today would look like. Then, using complete sentences, and tagging your information with the appropriate category of academic information, build out from your basic outline to a detailed outline for your paper. In order to do so, start by articulating the academic information you’ll need to address in your introduction. Then proceed into the body of the paper.

In a detailed outline, for introductory and concluding material, tag your information and then write out your sentences. For body paragraphs, I’ll usually tag them with “Assert,” and then use a bulleted list to work through evidence (all the various kinds: textual, historical, and citational) and analysis. I don’t specify what kind of evidence I’m presenting, nor do I even tag different sentences as “Evidence” or “Analysis,” because these categories often blend together, but you may find it helpful to do so.

Requirements

The document you submit should:

• Be written in MLA style, including a Works Cited page and proper in-text citations when needed, though the document will be in outline form and can be single-spaced. 

Sample Papers

• Sample Response Paper 2.3
• Sample Response Paper 2.3