University Writing Program

Assignment Description

The research essay builds on the first essay because you will use multiple lenses and close reading to make an argument. For this essay, choose an examination of love from the list below or find one on your own (but you must clear it with me first); this will be your primary text.

Next, identify research questions about the reasons that love is expressed in a particular way or ways. Recalling Charles Lindholm’s question “What social factors promote and which extinguish the possibility of love?” (2006, 16), make an argument about the ways that interactions between lovers in your chosen primary text reflect the social and structural conditions of their historic moment.

For example, if you are writing about the Marri Baluch, the nomadic people living in the deserts of Iran who suffer harsh marriages yet fantastically idealize their lovers, you might ask how and why their love is so different in wedlock and affairs. Why are their marriages never for love? Why is it shameful to show affection for one’s spouse? What social factors promote and which extinguish the possibility of love among the Marri Baluch? Research into the answers to these questions might lead to an argument about the social, structural, and historical conditions regarding love and affection among these people. In other words, your research essay might be a close reading of Pehrson (1966), whom Lindholm cited, that uses multiple outside sources to support the argument.

I strongly encourage you to choose a text addressing an issue about which you have not yet formed an opinion. This essay should truly explore an area with which you are not familiar rather than use research to rubberstamp an opinion you have already formed. Most importantly, you will be doing a close reading of your text that uses outside research to bolster your argument.

Possible options for your primary text are listed below. You are also welcome to find your own text if you clear it with me first. You can get any book or film from the library (use ILL if Brandeis doesn’t have it), but please order the text now so you have time to read/watch/listen. Let me know right away if you are having difficulty getting your text.

Books and articles (non-fiction, scholarly):

(Please note: If Brandeis Library does not own a book, they can order it for you through Interlibrary Loan.)

• One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, by Rebecca Mead. A writer for The New Yorker magazine explores Americans’ obsession with lavish weddings.
• The Social Organization of the Marri Baluch, by R. Pehrson. Chicago: Aldine Press 1966.
• Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999, by Yunxiang Yan. 2003.
• Yan, Yunxiang. 2002. “Courtship, Love and Premarital Sex in a North China Village.” The China Journal 48:29-53.
• Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes, by Mary Weismantel. Best to focus on Chapter 2, “City of Women,” about affectionate relationships among market women. 2001
• When Marriages Go Astray: Choices Made, Choices Challenged, by Lina Fruzzetti. 2013. Ethnographic case studies from West Bengal.
• Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS, by Sanyu A. Mojola. 2014
• Article that Prof will post on Latte: “Courting marriage: juridification of intimate relationships in North India,” by Rama Srinivasan, 2018. The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 50:2, 213-234, DOI: 10.1080/07329113.2018.1501243. 2018.
• Love in Africa edited by Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas, eds. Interesting chapters about Africans in different countries. 2009. Our Smith chapter is from this book.
• Ireen Mudeka, “Gendered Exclusion and Contestation: Malawian Women’s Migration and Work in Colonial Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930s to 1963,” African Economic History 44 (2016): 18-43. (Please focus most on love and marriage portions.)
• Marriage without Borders: Transnational Spouses in Neoliberal Senegal, by Dinah Hannaford. 2017. How does love stay alive when couples live so far apart?
• Susan Frohlick, “Intimate Tourism Markets: Money, Gender, and the Complexity of Erotic Exchange in a Costa Rican Caribbean Town,”Anthropological Quarterly, George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research, Volume 86, Number 1, Winter 2013, pp. 133-162.
• Islamizing Intimacies: Youth, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Indonesia by Nancy Smith-Hefner. 2019. As the author writes, “One of the great transformations presently sweeping the Muslim world involves not just political and economic change but the reshaping of young Muslims’ styles of romance, courtship, and marriage.”
• Cousin Marriages: Between Tradition, Genetic Risk, and Cultural Change, edited by Alison Shaw and Aviad Raz. (See, for example, Adam Kuper analyzing Charles Darwin’s cousin marriage, or authors Liversage and Rytter on forced marriage in Denmark.) 2015.
• Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya, by Lynn Thomas. It is an ebook at Brandeis Library. 2003.

Films:

• Love Crimes of Kabul (2011): Documentary about three young Afghan women jailed for “morals crimes” such as premarital sex and running away from home.
• Brokeback Mountain (2005): American romantic drama about two cowboys, based on a short story by Annie Proulx. Winner of three Academy Awards including Best Director (Ang Lee).
• Loving (2016): Dramatization of the true story of an interracial couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, plaintiffs in the landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia that invalidated state laws prohibiting interracial marriage.
• Farewell My Concubine (1993): Famous Chinese melodrama starring Gong Li, about the effect of political turmoil on the love and lives of three people.
• Edie and Thea: A Very Long Engagement (2009): Engaging documentary about the long-term relationship between two lesbians who first met in New York City in 1963 and for decades were barred from marriage in the USA.
• Raise the Red Lantern (1991): Based on the novel Wives and Concubines, this is the drama of an educated young woman who, due to family misfortune, becomes the concubine of a wealthy man during China’s Warlord Era (1916–1928). At first she is treated like royalty, but things change.

Newspaper articles:

• Any “Modern Love” essays in The New York Times – exploring the joys and tribulations of love. https://www.nytimes.com/column/modern-love
• “A young Indian couple married for love. Then the bride’s father hired assassins.” The Washington Post, August 19, 2019. https://preview.tinyurl.com/yyndt82p
• “’Love is love’: Coke Ad Riles Hungary Conservatives, Part of Larger Gay Rights Battle.” The New York Times, August 9, 2019. https://preview.tinyurl.com/y2yw9ued

Novels:

• Stay with Me, by Ayobami Adebayo
• On Love, by Alain de Botton
• White Teeth, by Okot p’Bitek

Memoirs:

• Just Kids by Patti Smith. Winner of many book awards, this memoir details singer Smith’s relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe when both were just starting out as penniless artists in gritty New York City in the 1970s.
• Trans Love: An Anthology of Transgender and Non-Binary Voices, edited by Freiya Benson.

Love letters:

• The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, by Peter Abelard and Heloise (2004). Centuries before Shakespeare wrote “Romeo and Juliet,” there was the real-life forbidden romance of French nun Heloise d'Argenteuil (1100-1164) and priest Peter Abelard (1079-1142). Their graves lie side by side in Paris.

Paintings:

• “The Birthday” (Marc Chagall, 1915)
• “The Lovers” (Rene Magritte, 1928)
• “Lovers under an Umbrella in the Snow” (Suzuki Harunobu, late 1700s)
• “American Gothic” (Grant Wood, 1930)

U.S. Supreme Court cases about the right to marry (try to examine the arguments about love):

• Loving v. Virgina 1967
• Obergefell v. Hodges 2015

You are welcome to use any of the texts listed above for your research topic, but please feel free to keep looking. You will spend a lot of time on this essay, so find something that truly interests you!

For your research you must use a minimum of four sources (your primary text does not count as a research source). Your research should come from reputable, peer- reviewed publications. This will be the longest and most time-consuming paper of the semester and will thus require significant preparation and thought. You will be developing your own interpretive framework based on the scholarly work of others. This resembles lens analysis—you’ll be using others’ ideas to produce an informed reading of your argument—but with an important difference: here, you’ll be creating a new lens of your own making, one that borrows elements from, reacts against, and synthesizes multiple lenses into an original critical stance. Be sure to locate sources that both agree and disagree with your claims so that you can anticipate counterarguments in your paper. Your paper should follow MLA formatting guidelines.

Essay length: 10-12 pages

The first draft of the essay must be submitted electronically to your peers and me no later than 11:55 PM on Monday, December 2. Essays must use 1-inch margins and 12-point Times New Roman font. Please do not enlarge your font—I can tell. Essays must have a title, be double-spaced, and have page numbers. Pre-drafts will be submitted in hard copy in class and must be typed and stapled.

Goals of the Essay

In addition to continuing work on the goals of essays 1, this assignment asks you to:

1. Integrate primary and secondary source material.

You should not simply report the findings of your research, as you would in a literature review or book report, but incorporate them into your argument as evidence or motive. Remember, a quotation never speaks for itself—you must spell out its implications and relevance for your reader.

2. Close with a conclusion that draws out the implications of your argument and shows where the process of the paper has taken us.

Your essay should walk us through a developing process of thought, rather than offer an already-decided idea. Thus, your conclusion should show us where we end up after following the steps of your thought process—a different place than where you begin in your introduction. Remember: your motive brings you from the outside world into the writing space of your essay; it can help you find your way back out, too.

3. Transition logically and smoothly from paragraph to paragraph and idea to idea.

A transitional topic sentence does the double duty of 1) encapsulating the main idea of its paragraph, and 2) smoothly transitioning from the last idea of the previous paragraph. A topic sentence will ensure that each paragraph proves a specific claim and that your paper has an overall logical flow. Remember that transition occurs not only on the rhetorical level but also on the content level. Use signposting and reflection to help move your reader from one idea to the next and to show the developing thought process your essay records.

4. Title your paper.

Titles should be eye-catching—they’re the first opportunity you have to hook your reader—and informative, hinting at the overall focus and aim of your paper.

Good research is driven by analytical questions. However, in order to know what questions to ask, it is necessary to learn what research already exists on your topic. What are the gaps in the literature? What conflicts exist? Why do these questions matter? How will you manage to insert yourself into the larger conversation on your topic?

Therefore, in preparation for the draft of the multi-source research paper, please prepare a research proposal. As noted on the syllabus, the research proposal is not graded for quality, but on completion. If you fully execute all requested components of the proposal, you will receive full credit (10% of the final grade).

Your proposal should include the following sections, preferably in this order:

1. Introduction to the project (~1 paragraph)

Provide an introduction to your chosen topic. Attempt to frame for the reader what you’re planning to explore and why this topic is interesting. There likely will not be a thesis yet, since your research will not be complete (but there could be a preliminary thesis).

2. Preliminary literature review (~1-2 pages)

Based on your preliminary foray into the literature, synthesize for the reader what you have learned about your topic. What does the initial literature seem to show? What questions are unanswered? What conflicts or contradictions exist in the literature? Don’t be afraid of complications – messiness is an opportunity to intervene. NOTE: you should be citing the literature at the sentence-level in this section.

3. Library research method (~1 page)

How will you research this topic? What types of searches will you want to do? What information will you seek out? What keywords might you use? Are you interested in exploring sources outside of the social sciences? Don’t rush past this section – really consider your plan for your research.

4. Significance / motive (~1-2 paragraphs)

What do you hope to accomplish with your research? What is the larger motivation for exploring this topic? Why does the research matter? Think about why a reader might want to know about this topic.

5. Weekly timeline (~1/2 page)

In order to facilitate your research over the remainder of the semester, please come up with a week-by-week plan for how you will approach your research. What do you plan to do each week? Be as specific as possible, and refer to the deadlines below as you plan:

• November 18-22: Conferences this week
• November 29: Outline due
• December 2: Draft due
• December 11: Revision due with cover letter and portfolio

6. Annotated bibliography (minimum of 4-5 sources)

Each source/entry should be followed by an annotation in paragraph form that gives the following information:

• Type of source (book, article, electronic etc.…)
• The specific subject the author is writing about
• What the author seeks to discover, prove or challenge
• The broad debates the author seeks to discover, prove, or challenge.
• How the source will contribute to your research

Remember to follow MLA citation format carefully; I will be paying special attention to how you cite in this essay. Remember, too, that annotations both summarize and evaluate the importance of a source. A sample entry is given below:

Mutongi, Kenda. “’Dear Dolly’s Advice: Representations of Youth, Courtship, and Sexualities in Africa, 1960-1980.” Love in Africa, edited by Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, Chicago UP, 2009, pp. 83-108.

In addition to providing a list of the sources you have included thus far (in MLA format), please include a sentence or two explaining how each source informs your research topic. For example:

Mutongi, Kenda. “’Dear Dolly’s Advice: Representations of Youth, Courtship, and Sexualities in Africa, 1960-1980.” Love in Africa, edited by Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, Chicago UP, 2009, pp. 83-108.

As Africans gained independence in the two decades following the end of colonial rule, young people focused on their love and sex lives and sought advice from a popular magazine. This chapter explores what made the “Dear Dolly” column so popular and further explores its representations of male, female, heterosexual, and homosexual love. Despite the variety of incoming letters, the editors’ responses became didactic and predictable. “For all its supposed openmindedness, then, ‘Dear Dolly’ more often than not defended a familiar double standard” (106). Although the author does not specifically address love among the people I am studying, I will use her discussion as a lens through which to understand the role of representation at the time of transition I am focusing on.

PRE-DRAFT 2.1 IS DUE AT 11:55 PM ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13.

Student quote: “I feel that this proposal was able to really ground my thoughts pertaining to what I want to do with this essay. Before writing it, I did not have a very good idea of the direction that I wanted to go in, but the proposal really allowed me to think about it in depth and generate ideas for the paper.”

Write the introduction to your research essay, which should include the following:

• A hook to open the essay (anecdote, quotation, description of your story of sugar)
• A summary of your examination of sugar if you did not open the essay with this
• The research question(s) your essay will explore/the problem or gap that you’ve identified (your motive)
• The working thesis of the essay

PRE-DRAFT 2.2 IS DUE AT 11:55 PM ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18.

As you did for the lens essay, you will write a comprehensive outline to ensure that your paper has a logical structure and evidence that is relevant to your argument. Again, each paragraph should have a separate claim that supports the thesis, as well as evidence and analysis. The argument should develop as the paper unfolds. In other words, paragraphs should not be interchangeable. The outline should follow the format below:

I. Introduction

1. Motive
2. Thesis

 II. Paragraph #1 (Background information)

1. Topic Sentence
2. Contextualization: For research paragraphs, name the author of the source, their credentials, and the name of the source. For close reading paragraphs, tell the reader what is happening.
3. Evidence: include the quotation and the page number
4. Analysis: restate the quotation in your own words for research paragraphs or give a brief summary of how you plan to analyze the quotation.
5. Relevance: a brief statement of how the evidence relates to your thesis

1. Topic Sentence
2. Contextualization: For research paragraphs, name the author of the source, his or her credentials and the name of the source. For close reading paragraphs, tell the reader what is happening in the case study.
3. Evidence: include the quotation and the page number
4. Analysis: restate the quotation in your own words for research paragraphs or give a brief summary of how you plan to analyze the quotation.
5. Relevance: a brief statement of how the evidence relates to your thesis

Etc… for ALL of the body paragraphs. You should have a minimum of ten body paragraphs.

(final Roman numeral). Conclusion

1. What are the larger implications of your argument? How do these sources comment on a broader theme than just your specific claims?

POST YOUR OUTLINE TO LATTE BY 11:55 PM ON FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22.

Please write a draft cover letter, addressed to your readers (i.e., “Dear Reader”), in which you answer the following questions and present any other concerns that you have. This letter should be typed and should be about three-quarters to a full page long, single-spaced. Attach it to the front of your essay.

1. What do you see as your thesis or main idea? What is your motive?
2. Where does the process of thought in the essay start off, and where does it end? How are these two positions related to and different from each other? What is the “process” of your essay?
3. How well do you feel you have used sources in this paper? Which sources work best? Which feel like they need more work?
4. What are the biggest problems you’re having at this point in the writing process? What have you accomplished most successfully?
5. What’s the number one concern about your essay—thesis, structure, use of evidence, persuasiveness, style and so on—that you’d like your readers to focus their comments on for you?
6. When you revise, what the one biggest thing you intend to focus on? How?

DRAFT OF ESSAY #2 PLUS COVER LETTER IS DUE IN A WORD DOCUMENT ON LATTE BY 11:55 PM ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 2.

EMAIL ESSAY AND COVER LETTER TO YOUR PEERS AS A GOOGLE DOC.

Your goal during peer review is to offer the writer constructive comments that will help them revise, literally to “see again,” from a fresh perspective. This is an opportunity to help your partner become a better writer by pushing for true revision, rather than cosmetic tweaking. As you carefully read each essay you have been given, please do the following:

• Draw a line under awkwardly expressed sentences and phrases whose meanings are unclear.
• Write marginal notes to the writer on anything that puzzles you, explaining why.
• Label the topic of each paragraph; if you cannot determine the topic, put a question mark.

After you have marked it up, read the essay one more time and then write a letter in which you address the following questions:

1. Thesis and motive

What is the essay’s thesis or controlling idea? How compelling is the thesis? How arguable is it? What motivating idea from the list distributed in class do you feel the essay adopts, if any? What is the essay’s motive? Restate these in your own words. Don’t assume the writer knows what his or her own essay is about!

2. Conclusion

Where does the essay end up, in comparison to where it starts? Does the conclusion indicate a development in thought during the course of the paper? Does it pursue implications, identify limitations, and come full circle? Or is it redundant? Does it suddenly raise a new point or make grand, overstated claims? How could the author improve his or her conclusion?

3. Quotation and Citation

How has the writer incorporated material from his or her sources into the flow of the paper? How many sources are used? Are they used substantially, or simply inserted for the sake of the assignment? How well are quotations explained and analyzed? Are there any Chicago citation mistakes?

4. Transitions

How has the writer incorporated material from his or her sources into the flow of the paper? How many sources are used? Are they used substantially or simply inserted for the sake of the assignment? How well are quotations explained and analyzed? Are there any Chicago citation mistakes?

5. Writer Questions

The writer has asked you one or more questions in their cover letter. What answers do you have to offer? Be prepared not only to review your feedback with the author in class, but also to point out specific examples and discuss concrete revision possibilities.

BY 11:55 PM ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, PLEASE DO THE FOLLOWING:

• POST YOUR PEER LETTERS TO LATTE.
• EMAIL THE MARKED-UP ESSAYS AND LETTERS TO EACH PEER.

BRING YOUR LAPTOPS TO CLASS ON WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4.

Each time you hand in a revision, you’ll hand in a cover letter (one page, single-spaced) along with it. For Essay 2, please answer the following questions and discuss any other concerns you have.

1. What is your thesis? How has it changed from draft to revision?
2. What changes have you made? Why?
3. What are you most pleased about in this revision?
4. What would you work on, if you had the chance to keep revising?
5. What was the most challenging in your drafting and revision process? How did you approach those challenges?
6. Choose two “Elements of the Academic Essay” (Gordon Harvey)—one that you think works well, and one that feels less successful—and describe, in each case, why.

Be sure to re-read the information on grading criteria to make sure your paper fulfills the requirements.

REVISION OF ESSAY #2 PLUS COVER LETTER IS DUE BY 11:55 PM ON WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11 AS PART OF YOUR PORTFOLIO.