Final Project Guidelines (Due Thursday, Dec. 12th)

Scope and Components

The concept behind your final project is relatively simple: you'll choose one idea/technique/author that we've covered during the semester and undertake a more in-depth critical investigation, which will have both a written and audio component.  In terms of the scope this might take several forms:

• You might choose to do deeper reading/listening within the assigned texts for a given topic (i.e. including the assigned work that we did cover as well as those texts we didn't).
• You might choose to do deeper reading/listening outside of the assigned texts for a given topic (i.e. read more widely within a certain assigned author's work and/or find other authors to include in your analysis).
• You might choose to make ideological/aesthetic/technique-based connections between authors/topics — ideally ones not explicitly made during our class discussions — working within or outside of the assigned readings.

The key point here that you don't want to lose is that you'll be making an argument, taking a stand, tracing aesthetic threads and/or lineages (i.e. the development of ideas), and not just compiling a greatest hits list, or rehashing points that we've made as a class, or that I've made through the organization of the class. Likewise, in terms of outside readings, I can make suggestions but also welcome you to do your own research on the topic(s) of your choosing.

As for the audio component of the final, it might also take several forms:

• It will very likely be something following the podcast model, establishing a dialogue, of sorts, between your recorded voice-over and samples of recordings by poets themselves (taken from archives like PennSound, the Elliston Project, UbuWeb, etc.) or of you reading their work (if recordings don't exist). In essence, this would be more like a distilled version of your paper that's augmented by actual recordings of the poets.
• It could be an audio artifact that critically demonstrates some key point from your essay, which is then set up by the essay itself, however it's important to be mindful of the fact that this shouldn't be a creative endeavor like the midterm sound collages. If you want to pursue this route, we should discuss your plans before I greenlight your project.
• It could be a largely textual endeavor in which micro-edits of recorded audio are embedded throughout, serving the same function as, and accompanying, quotations. A fine example of this possibility can be found here, in Bob Perelman's "A Williams Soundscript," an analysis of William Carlos Williams' "The Sea-Elephant." Again, we'll need to discuss your plans in advance to make sure you're on the right track.

As for podcast models, there are a great many to follow as inspiration, including PoemTalk, Al Filreis' PennSound Podcasts, Charles Bernstein's Close Listening, This American Life, Garrison Keillor's the Writers Almanac, and several from the Poetry Foundation: Poetry Off the Shelf, Essential American Poets, and Kenny Goldsmith's Avant-Garde All the Time, among others. Ideally, you'll want to aim for something more finely interwoven and dialogic than the DJ model — i.e. you talk for a little bit and then play an entire recording.


Facts and Figures (i.e. deadlines, page count, formatting, etc.)

I want you to do your best work without feeling constrained, but at the same time I don't want to set minimum length requirements that are impossible for the average student to reach. Therefore, I'm setting minimums that I expect many of you will greatly exceed, and I welcome you to do so.  Your written essay should be at least six (6) full pages long (and by six pages, I mean that the text of your essay itself makes it to the very bottom of the the page, or better yet onto a seventh), and written in MLA style (including a proper header, parenthetical in-text citations and a works cited list, which doesn't count towards your page count, at the end), double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman, no tricked-out margins, etc. Your audio component should me a minimum of three minutes, though I could very easily see students producing pieces five, ten, even fifteen minutes long.

While six pages seems like an endlessly long paper, I can assure you that it's not really a lot of space to discuss these topics in great depth, therefore I wholeheartedly encourage you to dispense with any and all filler, including bloated rhetoric and lengthy five-paragraph-style introductions that ultimately say very little while taking up a lot of word count. Don't hover over the surface of the issues — dive right in and get to the heart of your argument from the start. I also recommend that unless you have compelling reasons to do otherwise, organize your essay around the topics (characters/techniques/etc.) you've chosen to discuss, rather than proceeding chronologically or dealing with each author individually, and also that you write through the source texts themselves, as demonstrated in the "Making Effective Arguments" post I put up at the start of the term. Finally, make sure that you are following the conventions of MLA formatting (which can be found in numerous places on the internet; a link with guidelines can be found on the right-hand sidebar as well).

You'll e-mail your papers to me (at hennessey [dot] michael [@t] gmail [dot] com) no later than 7:00 PM on Thursday, December 12th. Please include a link to your audio piece on Soundcloud in that e-mail and feel free to share it with our class group. Because e-mail is an imperfect delivery medium and the UC system is prone to collapse, take note that I'll reply to each paper received, letting students know that it's arrived safely, so if you don't receive that e-mail, get in touch with me, and should you have any questions or concerns prior to the deadline, don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Also, please don't forget that tardy projects will be docked a full letter grade for every day they're late and that papers that are less than the stated limit of six full pages will automatically receive an F.

Class Feedback

Finally, because I consider this course an organic and malleable construct, I'd greatly appreciate it if you took the time to answer these questions in a separate document. Please don't feel the need to flatter me or the course materials either — I respect your honest opinions about the class and what did or didn't appeal to you.

• What 10 authors/class topics were most useful/interesting to you?
• What 5 authors/class topics were least useful/interesting?
• Are there any authors/topics you wish we had covered that we didn't?
• Are there any activities (i.e. audio work) that you'd have liked to do? (Or, should the class involve more audio work?)
• Are there any authors you're eager to investigate further after the term is over?