Summary

You will write a paper approximately 10 pages in length on cyberpunk literature that might be appropriate for a conference presentation.

Due Date

8/5

Technical Instructions

Submit your final paper in the Assignments area of Web CT.

Rhetorical Guidelines

On the Cyberpunk Bibliography page I have provided links to 19 articles on electronic reserve, most of which are examples of scholarly analysis of cyberpunk. We will read some of these during the course, but they provide good examples, in a way, of the kind of intellectual work I am looking for you to do. Of course, they are also 6000-8000 words in length and have not been composed in a couple weeks after the first time reading of a novel and cursory introduction to the genre. So in many important ways I do not expect you to compose texts like these.

As students in a graduate literature course, I am assuming that you all have experience writing about literature. As advanced college students, I could also assume that you have general experience with writing academic discourse. But then again, we all know what happens when we assume, eh? As such, I think it would probably be a good idea for us to have a conversation about these matters.

First, some basics

• Audience: Who do you imagine will read this text? That is, imagine yourself presenting your paper at an academic conference or publishing it in an academic journal. Who will read your article? What might their interest be? What do you want to say to your audience about this topic? How do you gain your audience's respect? That is, how do you establish yourself as an authority? How do you expect they will respond to your argument?
• Purpose: This is the "so what" question. Setting aside the need to write this for a grade business, what other purpose do you have for writing this? If you don't have a reason to write it, how could I have a reason to read it? If you're not interested in what you write, how could I be? What action would you like to result from someone reading your text? What would you like your audience to think?
• Genre: What does literary scholarship look like? While most articles are longer than what you are writing, most academic conference papers are about the length of this assignment. And believe it or not, in literary scholarship, academics still read their presentations for the most part (how boring! but that's a subject for another time). There are a couple of obvious features. Literary scholarship generally includes references to other published scholars, direct quotes from the literary text(s) being studied, and close readings of those quoted passages. Generally there is some kind of claim or argument or thesis being made about the literary text in question.

Identifying your subject and thesis

• Ask a question: all worthwhile research begins with a question. There's something you want to know, so you go and research it! In literary studies this means careful examination of literary texts and reviews of existing scholarship. So what is your question and what makes it important? Why do you care about the answer? What difference does the answer make to you? What difference should it make to me?
• Do some research: just start by doing some preliminary research. You can start with material on electronic reserve. Unfortunately the Cortland library is not a great resource for literary studies. However, there is a fair amount of material in our full-text databases. There is also a great deal of information available online if you know where to look. You should give yourself a day to just scan the research and get a general sense of what others have said about your question before really getting down to business.
• Articulate a method: questions often point to methods of literary analysis. Methods emerge from theories: Marxism, feminism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, psychoanalysis, queer studies, ethnic studies, new historicism, postmodernism/poststructuralism, etc. As with any discipline, in literary studies, one asks a question and then seeks to answer it through the paradigms of disciplinary methods. You should be able to state why you are employing a particular method to answer your question.
• The elevator talk: you run into an expert on your research subject at a conference. You're together in an elevator for a minute. Can you pitch your research project? What would you say you are doing? You might keep revising this talk. The idea is to be able to keep the kernel of your project visible to yourself as you are working.

A process

• Write, write, write: don't start with the introduction and don't start with your thesis! Just write and write some more. Pick out some passages from the text you are studying and write about them. What do they say? What makes them interesting? What do you want to say about them? Write about the research you've done. Summarize the articles you've read. Pick out some key passages and write about them. Map out the relationship between the articles you've researched. Where do they agree? Where do they disagree? What questions have they left unanswered? Write about interesting passages in these articles as well.
• Putting writing to the question: How do the things you are writing relate to the question driving your research? Be willing to revise/refine your question. When you start to see an answer to your question, you are beginning to move in the direction of your thesis and purpose.
• Time to think about audience again: a strong thesis is one that you can convince your audience to agree with, but if your thesis is something that your audience already agrees with, then it's a weak thesis. To strengthen a weak thesis often you need to make it more specific. You should imagine that your audience are other graduate students and faculty interested in literary studies but who are not specialists in cyberpunk. That is you should imagine an audience with whom you share a great deal but who know less than you do about your specific subject.
• Research and originality: you will need to move beyond the arguments laid out in your research. It's not enough to say, "My question is X. Dr. A says this about X.  Prof B says this about X. I agree with Prof B." You've got to add something. Often we add but shifting the focus or the context of the question, particularly in relation to audience. For example, you could say "Dr X and Prof B say these things about this important question. But what does all this mean for those of us teaching HS English?" In that way you bring the conversation into a realm where you have more authority, as well as into a place where you have something to contribute.
• Think organization: now you need to start thinking about genre as well. How should you put this all together? What parts do you need? Well, you need some review of the literature and you need some close reading of the text. You can do one and then the other. Alternately, if you have a couple themes, you can organize the text by theme and address lit review and close reading in each section. You need to stay within the expectations of the genre, but you also need to think rhetorically about your purpose. How will you best reach your audience? What is most convincing?
• Write and REVISE: don't expect to get it right the first time! Draw from what you've already written. Put it all together. Take some time away, then come back and read it. Don't be afraid to move things around. Don't fall in love with your language. Just because something is clever doesn't mean that it should be in your paper. Get some feedback from someone you trust. And revise again.