Below you will find my old paper attached. Here are the coments from my proffesor. revise the paper using the comments and extend the paper to 15 pages total.
There are some interesting considerations about the reception and potential for Russian literary critics’ work to be useful in analyzing The Blue Notebook, but there are likewise elements of the essay which could be improved to make it more effective.
The essay doesn’t offer a thesis, and it isn’t clear what research question is being explored by this paper. The goal of the research paper is to pursue a research question and to offer an answer to that question in the form of a thesis. This paper seems more like a report on The Blue Notebook that touches on many of its elements, rather than singling out one and contributing original research to our understanding of the source text. I would encourage you to think about an open question related to The Blue Notebook that interests you, and forming a thesis around answering that question.
The language used throughout the essay is very vague and abstract. You often make claims, such as “the text is filled with bizarre and fantastical events, absurd characters, and unexpected twists,” without citing examples from the text to substantiate the claim. Occasionally doing this is fine, but just about every example of your discussion of the text never actually touches on the letter of the text at all.
The inclusion of Shklovsky and Bakhtin is puzzling. This paragraph doesn’t seem to have much bearing on the rest of the text. Why do you consider this to be important, if these ideas never reoccur in the essay, what is it contributing to your analysis of Kharms’ collection?
The essay is lacking some very important MLA elements. It is absolutely essential for research papers to have a title, and the Works Cited page isn’t properly formatted.
