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 Thursday, September 16, 2021 at 4:15 P.M. in the Meditation Room, where you can exchange tips, clarify doubts, meet faculty consultants, and begin the multiple tasks of Senior Conference.

Consulting with Faculty

On this website, you will find a list of Faculty Consultants with a general indication of the fields in which we specialize. Of course, you are welcome informally to consult any faculty member about your project.

In the next few weeks, please talk to at least three of us about your topic for the 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 October 1, 2021. Remember, you must talk to the faculty members with whom you wish to work before you complete the form.

We assign a roughly equivalent number of students to each faculty member. Those assignments will be made in late September and posted on the English Department 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 22, 2021, you need to turn in a one-paragraph description of your topic that your Faculty Consultant has approved. Use the submission form on the website.

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; afterwards, 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. The choice of a central text that you choose is generally limited to genres that you have formally studied. (For example, if you have not taken a film class, we would ask that you not write about a film since you will not have the background in that area.)

In indicating your topic and paragraph on the form, be as specific as possible. If you have a very definite idea already, include that (e.g. “Who (or What) Speaks?: Discerning the Subject in Three Stories from La Frontera (Anaya, Anzaldua, Cisneros).” Or you can say something less formal: “I’m interested in looking very closely at images of windows in at least one of Virginia Woolf’s novels, maybe Mrs. Dalloway, and I’d also like to talk about her essays.” If you only have a vague notion, you may indicate a general area of interest (“I want to work on technology in contemporary American poetry” or “I’d like to write on themes of loss in fiction about refugee journeys”), but you should use this opportunity to focus your thinking as sharply as you can.

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 (skhokhlov [at] haverford.edu); he will be available to meet with you between October 19 and November 11. To take full advantage of that meeting, you will want to come with well-formed questions about your topic. Note this meeting is required.

As you will discuss in 399f, 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. We also encourage you to take a look at essays previous generations of seniors have written and sign up for extended borrowing privileges using the "Senior Thesis Resources page".

Project Proposal and Bibliography

By November 11, you must prepare a brief page or two describing your proposed project, together with a short bibliography (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.

By December 8, you will 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. You may point out how certain sources will help you to locate and to advance your own argument, and you may also define positions that are unlike your own, which your work will effectively challenge. You might find it helpful to divide the bibliography into two parts-- "likely to be used"/"unlikely to be used," or "important to my argument"/"unimportant to my argument." What's critical here is to make this stage a genuinely helpful one rather than stalling before you get to the real work. The annotations should be engaged and productive. We will expect you to keep working on your senior project over the winter break.

Your final essay should be 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 27 for an outline of your entire essay and 4-5 pages of draft, and March 1 for the completed rough draft. The final draft of your senior essay, along with the “library authorization form” is due at 4 p.m., Thursday, April 7, 2022. 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. You are entering into a conversation with critical readers who have gone before you.

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. The English department has on file a packet of materials related to this requirement (contemporary writers on writing, etc.). Contact Trish Griffith in Woodside Cottage for the material.

Both your faculty consultant and a second departmental faculty member will read your thesis. These assignments will be made in April (see “Oral comprehensive Exam”). They will agree on a grade for the essay. Your final grade for senior conference is based on the essay grade and the grade for the oral examination.

The Writing Center

The faculty and students affiliated with the Writing Center are available to help seniors with every phase of their project. You might 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 task will happen toward the close of the 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 post-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 coursework 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. Montage of a Dream Deferred or ‘Angels in America’); 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

This task should be (reasonably) 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 some 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 two 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 copies turned into Trish Griffith by Monday, April 18, 2022.

Orals Examination Format

Three departmental faculty members will examine you: your faculty consultant, your second reader, and one other member of the department (colloquially referred to a ‘third reader’). 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. A second letter will lay out more specific information about exam preparation in the Spring Semester.

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 11, 2022. A revised version of the abstract and statement will eventually be required of you by the College Publications office during the exam period.

2021-2022

English 399f and 399b