using peer reviewed journals H u m a n i t i e s

The basic details for the Second Essay are, more or less, the same as those for the first one: your paper must be seven pages minimum ( roughly 2000 words minimum) with a standard professional font, margins, and justification. You must properly cite all work according to either the MLA Style Guide or the Chicago Manual of Style. In terms of topics, you should write on one of the topics, readings, or objects from the second half of the semester. As with the first paper, you can bring in additional texts or concepts, but the central focus of your essay must be the concepts from the course.

Your paper should be an in-depth investigation of a theme, technique, concept, or theory as it is applied to or put in conversation with a media text. You should have a well-developed and insightful thesis that engages with the texts that we have read and the issues that they address. It should demonstrate your understanding of the central theories and issues. You should also offer a close reading of a media text: this should be a detailed analysis of the formal elements; it should not be an overarching or general synopsis of a television show or an explanation of a genre. Ideally, these three components should work together in order to support and mutually reinforce one another. You are able to bring in additional visual and theoretical materials, but it would be a good idea to include these as part of a proposal. Essays should not be summaries or overviews of our materials.

You are not required to do any research for the essay (i.e., it is not a research paper) but it is a good idea to look further into topics and texts if it gives you a stronger sense of the visual objects and their discourses. Make certain to use the library and its online resources if you do engage in research for the paper: you should be using peer reviewed journals and books put out through university presses or reputable private publishing houses. You are free to use images and clips (audio or video) within your paper, but use these are productively as possible. Given that many of the media types that we are working with do have have the same narrative flow as film and television, analysing them closely might be difficult at the beginning, but you can definitely do some interesting things with navigation, interactivity, and visual elements.

film: Hale County, This Morning, This Evening

one of the readings: https://filmquarterly.org/2019/02/27/manifesto-ele…