Write a focused, analytic paper making an argument about a specific problem, device, or pattern in Shelley’s Frankenstein. Your paper should be 2000–2500 words in length, and it should be formatted according to the guidelines described under “Format” below. Your paper must also engage meaningfully with the scholarly source from the syllabus—Poovey’s “‘Hy Hideous Progeny’”.
– The requirement of responding to a scholar’s argument means that you must think of your own work as part of a scholarly conversation. As in any conversation, merely repeating what the other person said adds nothing; instead, look for a way in which your own argument extends, refines, or critiques an idea from another scholar. This can be as small as an interpretive point about one passage of text or as large as a big idea about narrative, fiction, literature. Your address to the scholarly source can come at any point in your essay; think about the best place for it in terms of the logic of your own argument.
This secondary-source requirement is significant, but it is not the most important part of the assignment. Your paper should above all make a convincing argument about your primary text. Nonetheless, an important aspect of your motive can come from using another source to demonstrate that there is some- thing that needs to be figured out (because people argue over it) and your analysis helps to do so.
– A paper needs a motive and argument (thesis)
– A paper needs a motive or source of interest: a question or problem it seeks to resolve. If your paper argues for some- thing that every reader of the text would immediately agree with, your argument lacks motive. In a paper on a single text that does not cite other scholars, good motives typically come by pointing out unexpected or counterintuitive patterns in the text, or problems the text raises but does not solve.
– An effective thesis organizes everything that you have to say about the text, showing how many parts of the text contribute to an overall pattern of significance. But though a thesis statement is essential, the paper does not have an argument unless each part of the paper is clearly related to this main claim. Your sequence of paragraphs should clearly signal the line of thinking you want your reader to follow.
