You have just a few weeks to settle on a topic for your Senior Essay and to choose your Faculty Consultant for the project. We will hold a mandatory meeting for seniors on September 11th at 4:15 p.m. in the Meditation Room where you can exchange tips, clarify doubts, meet faculty consultants, and generally get revved up for senior conference.

Consulting with Faculty

Review the list of faculty consultants with a general indication of the fields in which we specialize. You may only work with faculty on this list list, though you are welcome to consult any faculty (here or in the Trico) informally about your project.

In the next few weeks, please talk to at least four of us about your topic for Senior Essay. Do not hesitate to gather ideas from those whose fields seem outside your chosen topic. After you have consulted with all your faculty choices please fill in the online form expressing your area of interest and your first, second, and third choice of faculty consultant. Submit the completed form online no later than September 24th. Remember, you must talk to the faculty members you wish to work with before you complete the form.

We assign a roughly equivalent number of students to each faculty consultant. Those assignments will be made in late September and posted on the office door.  As soon as you have been assigned to a faculty consultant, you must arrange a meeting to discuss your project and begin the work of refining your topic. By Friday, October 5, 2018 you need to turn in a two-line description of your topic that your faculty consultant has approved. 

Choosing your Topic

The department tries to be flexible in the range of topics undertaken. You should begin by thinking through your own interests and desires; then, in consultation with the professors with whom you discuss your interests, you can identify productive lines of inquiry. Please note that your primary text may not be a text in translation. Also, you may do a “creative writing” project only if you already have been admitted to the creative writing concentration. In indicating your topic on the form, be as specific as possible.

Using the Library/Meeting with the Librarian

Each senior will attend a meeting with Semyon Khokhlov, the Humanities librarian. You should contact him to schedule this at skokhlov@haverford.edu; he will be available to meet with you between October 29th and November 16th. To take full advantage of that meeting, you will want to come with well-formed questions about your topic. Note this meeting is required.

We encourage you to read widely at this stage of your thesis preparation so that you develop a sense of the issues and approaches being addressed by the larger critical community about your text, author, or topic.  You might also take a look at essays previous generations of seniors have written.  These can be accessed through the “Research and Resource” page of the library’s website.

Project Proposal and Bibliography

By November 8, you must prepare a brief page or two describing your proposed project together with a short bibliography (5-10 titles) of relevant primary and critical sources, and submit it to your faculty consultant. In developing this short bibliography, work closely with your consultant, who will help to steer you away from sources irrelevant to your project or unlikely to prove useful to you, and toward those sources most likely to help you in shaping and sharpening your own reading and thinking.

Before the end of the semester (December 10th) you must complete a detailed annotated bibliography of relevant critical and theoretical sources for your project, and submit this document to your faculty consultant. Your annotations should take the form of working notes shaping the purpose and direction of your own essay. The annotations should be engaged and productive. We will expect you to keep working on your senior project over the winter break.

The essay should be roughly 25-30 pages in length. Your readers are not absolute about such matters; however, this length is normative, and any essay that is significantly shorter or longer ought to be exceptional (in every sense). Please note these other important deadlines: January 28 for an outline of your entire essay and 4-5 pages of draft, and February 26 for the completed rough draft. The final draft of your senior essay, along with the “library authorization form” is due at 4 p.m., April 11. NO extensions to this final deadline will be given. Any late submissions will be marked down a full grade for each day of tardiness.

In your essay, we expect evidence of some serious engagement with secondary materials, whether critical or theoretical. You will begin to develop a bibliography of appropriate critical readings with your faculty consultant early on. While you needn’t overtly fashion your essay as a response to this material, it is expected that you will be writing with an awareness of your relationship to a critical community that both predates and parallels your own interpretive performance.

Those of you doing a creative writing project will be asked to produce a critical introduction to your work of around 10-12 pages, for which a bibliography will also be required. Students should work with their Faculty Consultant to develop a bibliography for the critical piece which will accompany their creative project. This bibliography might include creative or theoretical work of any kind, as well as authors theorizing or reflecting on the writer's process.

The Writing Center

The faculty and students affiliated with the Writing Center are available to help seniors with every phase of their project. If you are anxious about writing, consider setting up a regular appointment with one of the fellows or faculty affiliates early in the year.

In May, you will take a one-hour oral exam covering both major coursework and your thesis. The first half hour of the exam will concern your essay; the second half hour will concern your course work in the major. To refine the latter part of the exam, we will ask you to produce a list of works for which you will be responsible, divided into three groups of your own devising. This will happen toward the close of second semester, but it might be useful to begin thinking about this now.

The following criteria apply: choose two works from each of seven courses taken for credit in the major (and these courses should be those fulfilling major requirements—that is, you should include work from at least two 300 level courses and two pre-1800 courses) and two literary works and two critical works from each term of Junior Seminar. This amounts to 22 works, at least four of which will be critical texts. Sounds like a lot at first, but you will discover as you begin to look over your course work how many more works you might be able to choose.

What is a ‘work’?

By “works” we mean a novel, play or long poem (e.g. Paradise Lost); or, if you are assembling material of a small scale, we suggest you include at least three short stories or four reasonably complex lyric poems as the equivalent of one “work.” A film course might be represented by two films, each paired with a relevant piece of film theory or criticism.

Preparing your orals examination groupings

Preparing the groupings should be fun. Remember to ask yourself why you have selected the particular works in question (or better yet, why have they chosen you?). What themes run across them? What questions recurred for you in your journey through the major? Thinking along these lines, come up with three rubrics, and place each work on your list in one of them. The way you frame these groupings gives you some control over the exam in advance, and helps us start up the conversation with a bit of momentum.

The list you turn in will contain three groupings (about a paragraph each) with texts divided among them.  It will also include a separate full list of texts categorized by course. Thus you will include seven courses (with two texts each) plus the four semesters of Junior Seminar (with two texts under each one). Remember to include title and author for each work. The list is to be typed and 3 hardcopies submitted to Tricia Griffith (Woodside 100) by Thursday, April 25th.

Orals Examination Format

You will be examined by three Departmental faculty members: your faculty consultant, your second reader, and one other member of the department. These exams are not designed to trick or to intimidate you, but to help you to realize how much you have learned. Often the most exciting exams are really conversations that help you to see the creative power you can generate through the knowledge you already have.

Abstract and Reflective Statement

In addition to your exam list you are required to produce an abstract of your essay (250 words) and a reflective statement (350 words) about your experience working your way through the process to finish your essay.  Your faculty consultant and the writing center will be able to give you pointers on what goes into an abstract.

The reflective statement can be freer in form, and you can choose to focus on any aspect of the essay or the thesis process that is significant for you.  As starting points we offer the following questions:  How or why did you choose your topic?  What did you bring to the essay by way of previous reading, exposure to the topic or author, or knowledge of the period?  Now that you’ve finished the essay, what new questions fall into focus for you about your topic? Beyond the argument and analysis you presented in the essay, what did you learn about conducting research, crafting an argument, and managing an independent project?

Above all, we hope that the reflective statement gives you an opportunity to convey your honest self-assessment and candid thoughts about the process in general. You will submit the abstract and reflective statement to your thesis consultant on Monday, April 15, 2019. A revised version of the abstract and statement will eventually be required of you by the College Publications office during the exam period.

2018-2019

English 399f and 399b