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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: Wolfhowls on April 12, 2008, 04:40:05 PM
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Ok here's the deal I'm doing a research paper on Gothic Fition on Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" story and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans "The Yellow Wallpaper". The kicker the paper is due on Tuesday, yes the up coming Tuesday, and I am having a hell of a time finding online resources. So I reach out to you oh great and wonderful fans of the Butcher Board. Help me find some online resources. The only one I can't use is the dreaded Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a no-go and my professor will crush me if I even think of using that web site.
So....here what I'm suppose to do. Select 2-3 stories/poems/eassys(by the same authors or different authors) to examine in relation to the topic. Support my thesis concerning this topic with your own ideas/explanations,examples from stories, and literary criticism.
Help!!
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Poe had other stories that feel more Gothic than The Tell-Tale Heart, like The Pit and the Pendulum. I don't think I've read anything by Gilmans. Why are you doing your research online, instead of in a library, where you can get the full text of critical revews?
The Internet is handy for lots of stuff, but not so much for literary criticism.
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Poe had other stories that feel more Gothic than The Tell-Tale Heart, like The Pit and the Pendulum. I don't think I've read anything by Gilmans. Why are you doing your research online, instead of in a library, where you can get the full text of critical revews?
The Internet is handy for lots of stuff, but not so much for literary criticism.
I have to have at lease four online soruces.
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I have to have at lease four online soruces.
Then I'd probably start with the Internet Public Library, http://www.ipl.org.ar/cgi-bin/ref/litcrit/litcrit.out.pl?au=poe-10
And if it was me, I'd be working on it now, instead of hanging around here. :D
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Ok here's the deal I'm doing a research paper on Gothic Fition on Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" story and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans "The Yellow Wallpaper". The kicker the paper is due on Tuessay, yes the up coming Tuesday, and I am having a hell of a time finding online resources. So I reach out to you oh great and wonderful fans of the Butcher Board. Help me find some online resources. The only one I can't use is the dreaded Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a no-go and my professor will crush me if I even think of using that web site.
So....here what I'm suppose to do. Select 2-3 stories/poems/eassys(by the same authors or different authors) to examine in relation to the topic. Support my thesis concerning this topic with your own ideas/explanations,examples from stories, and literary criticism.
Help!!
While you may not be able to use Wikipedia as a resource, it might still be helpful. My job is the same way, I can't use it to verify information, but if I'm having trouble finding something, I'll go to Wikipedia, and then I'll scroll down to whatever external links the article has and see if any of them are viable for information. Just scrolling quickly through the Wiki entry on gothic fiction, it gives lots of references and links, and lots of other examples of gothic fiction, like Dracula, which might be enough for a jumping off point for what you need.
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WONDERFUL!! You two have saved me from sheer madness.
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WONDERFUL!! You two have saved me from sheer madness.
Well, descent into madness is certainly a Gothic Theme, as illustrated by both The Tell-tale Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper.
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Well, descent into madness is certainly a Gothic Theme, as illustrated by both The Tell-tale Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper.
Yeah thats was the reason I picked them both for my research paper. I tried to tell my professor that but all I got was an odd look for her.
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Here's a brief historical overview you may find helpful:
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/gothic/history.html
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Yeah thats was the reason I picked them both for my research paper. I tried to tell my professor that but all I got was an odd look for her.
To be fair, they aren't usually juxtaposed in scholarly literature. Maybe that's why she thought they were a weird choice. The Yellow Wallpaper is certainly gothic enough, but it's much more famous as feminist literature. Maybe you could try comparing it to some of the Poe stories where unpleasant things happen to women (there are certainly enough of them!).
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To be fair, they aren't usually juxtaposed in scholarly literature. Maybe that's why she thought they were a weird choice. The Yellow Wallpaper is certainly gothic enough, but it's much more famous as feminist literature. Maybe you could try comparing it to some of the Poe stories where unpleasant things happen to women (there are certainly enough of them!).
The common factor to these two stories is that they are both first person narratives by someone going insane due to fantastical thoughts playing on their immaginations.
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The common factor to these two stories is that they are both first person narratives by someone going insane due to fantastical thoughts playing on their immaginations.
SEE you understand. I said something along the lines of that and my professor gave me that LOOK.
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The common factor to these two stories is that they are both first person narratives by someone going insane due to fantastical thoughts playing on their immaginations.
Hey, I'm not saying it's an invalid comparison. I just suggested a reason the professor might have reacted strangely. The Yellow Wallpaper is often analyzed as a condemnation of men's/society's control of women rather than as a story about madness per se, so the professor was probably surprised by the topic. There are a number of Poe stories about societal pressures destroying women, so they seemed like a natural comparison to me. (Oh! Sorry. The way the original post was written, I thought the OP was looking for additional stories by these two authors to add to the two he is already using. Oops.)
One could probably get some good material out of the externalized violence of The Tell-Tale Heart vs. the internalized violence of The Yellow Wallpaper as gendered behaviors. I guarantee that writing a paper about The Yellow Wallpaper without including at least some mention of gender is asking for a bad grade. I've never met a lit prof who wasn't obsessed with its feminist implications.
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Hey, I'm not saying it's an invalid comparison. I just suggested a reason the professor might have reacted strangely. The Yellow Wallpaper is often analyzed as a condemnation of men's/society's control of women rather than as a story about madness per se, so the professor was probably surprised by the topic. There are a number of Poe stories about societal pressures destroying women, so they seemed like a natural comparison to me. (Oh! Sorry. The way the original post was written, I thought the OP was looking for additional stories by these two authors to add to the two he is already using. Oops.)
One could probably get some good material out of the externalized violence of The Tell-Tale Heart vs. the internalized violence of The Yellow Wallpaper as gendered behaviors. I guarantee that writing a paper about The Yellow Wallpaper without including at least some mention of gender is asking for a bad grade. I've never met a lit prof who wasn't obsessed with its feminist implications.
It sounds a bit more original to explore the madness, rather than the gender roles. If his thesis is well stated and well supported, and the paper is properly formatted and spelled correctly, that should be enough for a good grade, in my book. I wouldn't have much respect for any professor of literature with a gender bias of any sort, or who marked down original ideas because they didn't parrot the party line. If I was writing on the theme, the only mention of gender I might make would be to point out that one protagonist is male and the other female, demonstrating that madness and "hysteria" are not exclusively female traits in the genre.
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It sounds a bit more original to explore the madness, rather than the gender roles.
I don't think you can do one without doing the other. I'm sure you could do it for lots of other stories, but The Yellow Wallpaper is about a depressed woman who's driven mad by her doctor husband when she's locked in her room as part of a misguided medical procedure. If I were a professor reading a paper on this story that didn't mention gender (at least to the extent of mentioning why the author doesn't think it's significant), I might worry that my student had missed the gendered aspects entirely.
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I don't think you can do one without doing the other. I'm sure you could do it for lots of other stories, but The Yellow Wallpaper is about a depressed woman who's driven mad by her doctor husband when she's locked in her room as part of a misguided medical procedure. If I were a professor reading a paper on this story that didn't mention gender (at least to the extent of mentioning why the author doesn't think it's significant), I might worry that my student had missed the gendered aspects entirely.
There are lots of different ways to structure a paper like that. I'm pretty sure I could write an acceptable one without mentioning gender at all, but I could also write one bringing in the 19th Century fad of performing hysterectomies on women to "cure" hysteria, or the fact that madness, either congenital as in The Fall of the House of Usher, or brought on by the ever popular "brain fever", popped up in so many Gothic stories. I could also do one in convoluted run-on sentences like that. :) I once wrote an entire paper leaving out the vowel "i", just to see if it was possible. (e.g. "Once was done a whole essay, sans the vowel of 'oneness', just for laughs.")
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When it came to The Yellow Wallpaper, I stayed away from the gender role. I based it more on the fact that she was somewhat forced into solitude. And in that note I finished the paper but by all means keep talking about Gothic Fiction.
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Got my paper back today. Yeah I got dinged for no reason. She knocked 40 points off my paper for small gammar mistakes which was suppose to be only 20% of the grade on the paper. Content was 60% and I had tons of that. Eh Well you win some and you lose some.
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Got my paper back today. Yeah I got dinged for no reason. She knocked 40 points off my paper for small gammar mistakes which was suppose to be only 20% of the grade on the paper. Content was 60% and I had tons of that. Eh Well you win some and you lose some.
Aww man, that really sucks. Did she say exactly what she was taking off for? At least you're probably nearly done with this class, right?
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Aww man, that really sucks. Did she say exactly what she was taking off for? At least you're probably nearly done with this class, right?
Yeah she made a whole bunch points, but they were all small points. Not worth 40 points. Yeah I have two whole days left of the class.
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Sounds like you could use a proofreader to check the grammar before you turn in your final papers. They ding a lot more for grammar and spelling in college level and graduate courses, because you are supposed to KNOW that stuff by then, and sloppy work is just unacceptable to many professors, no matter how original your thinking.
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Sounds like you could use a proofreader to check the grammar before you turn in your final papers. They ding a lot more for grammar and spelling in college level and graduate courses, because you are supposed to KNOW that stuff by then, and sloppy work is just unacceptable to many professors, no matter how original your thinking.
Yeah ~sigh~ I know. I understood a few of them but some of them I was like HUH? Oh well, the class is almost over.
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Yeah ~sigh~ I know. I understood a few of them but some of them I was like HUH? Oh well, the class is almost over.
If you're going to have to do a lot more writing in the future, for school or work, it might be worth it to take a refresher course in English composition. Papers that are spelled correctly, properly punctuated, and have the verbs agreeing with the nouns tend to get higher grades just because teachers are so grateful they don't have to spend so much time marking them up. I've also seen letters and emails from business executives that look like they flunked English comp, and probably had to have their secretaries write all their papers to get their "Executive MBA" degrees.
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If you're going to have to do a lot more writing in the future, for school or work, it might be worth it to take a refresher course in English composition. Papers that are spelled correctly, properly punctuated, and have the verbs agreeing with the nouns tend to get higher grades just because teachers are so grateful they don't have to spend so much time marking them up. I've also seen letters and emails from business executives that look like they flunked English comp, and probably had to have their secretaries write all their papers to get their "Executive MBA" degrees.
Well I have to retake English Comp One because I got a D in it and the University I want to go to won't take D's from a Community College. So I will welcome the refresher.
Edit for mistake
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Yeah ~sigh~ I know. I understood a few of them but some of them I was like HUH? Oh well, the class is almost over.
I'm sure we'd be happy to help if you want to post an example or two of the comments that are confusing you. I agree that teachers tend to be lenient if your paper seems good to them overall and extremely harsh if they get a headache trying to get through it. No matter how good the ideas, no matter whether this is "fair" or not, a paper that is hard to read is a paper that's going to get a crappy grade.
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I'm sure we'd be happy to help if you want to post an example or two of the comments that are confusing you. I agree that teachers tend to be lenient if your paper seems good to them overall and extremely harsh if they get a headache trying to get through it. No matter how good the ideas, no matter whether this is "fair" or not, a paper that is hard to read is a paper that's going to get a crappy grade.
More than just grades in class, people tend to judge you in Life on how well you express yourself. Say, for example, you've got a Bachelor's Degree and a Master's Degree from a prominent Ivy League university, and you've been successful in advancing your business career, and even been elected to high public office, yet if you can't express your thoughts clearly, use bad grammar, and mispronounce words like "nuclear" in public, people will sneer at you behind your back and whisper to each other that you're some kind of idiot. Trust me, it can happen. ;)
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yet if you can't express your thoughts clearly, use bad grammar, and mispronounce words like "nuclear" in public, people will sneer at you behind your back and whisper to each other that you're some kind of idiot. Trust me, it can happen. ;)
LOL snarky snark... not you Wolfie, but at the implied unmentioned person.
The Univ of IA law school has an ENTIRE support staff department to read the Briefs and Memos of the students in the college. Unfortunately, they must assume that most law firms and public defenders offices have a grammar expert on retainer for correcting papers.
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I'm not going to let this class get me too down. Ever since English Comp Two I've ever made anything less then a B on a paper. This was the first time ever, so now that I have cooled my heels I'm going take this as a learning lesson and humble myself a bit.