📚 Summer 2023 Course: Topics in Science Fiction

Response Paper: The first major assignment, a short response paper, asks you to briefly (2-4 pages) analyze and expand on, or respond to, themes or issues from one of the texts we have read so far ("Story of Your Life," Arrival, or "I Have No Mouth"). You should not incorporate secondary readings. This first paper asks you to do most of the work yourself here; tell me what you see going on and think through it. It is meant to be low stakes—it is quite literally your response to the text.

Further Detail: Since this paper is so short, and no secondary sources are needed, the idea here is for you to 1) choose a novel or story that seems important to you so far and to 2) analyze the major themes of the text. This is 2-4 pages of you thinking through the text: there are many ways to do this. I recommend using your discussion post as a starting point for your response; take what interested you in your post/your thoughts on the questions, and think about ways you could take your thoughts further. Some examples would be:

1. Choose a theme you find important in one of the stories and respond to it, reflect on its importance, talk about key scenes where you see it come up, think about how that theme might help us understand the world better.

2. Choose a specific section if the story is longer to focus in on and respond to.

3. Choose one specific character in one of the stories and talk about what their arc is, what they learn, etc.

4. You could even talk about a specific word that comes up a lot in one of the stories, and think about why.

These are just four ideas--there are so many possibilities for you that it's hard to give you a specific guideline for the paper. This should not be scary, though, this should be freeing--the paper is truthfully not for me, it is for you. It is a low-stakes chance for you to start writing and thinking about the text without the burden of a "big final argument paper"-style assignment hanging over your head. 

Close Reading Paper: The second major assignment, a short close reading paper, asks you to briefly (2-4 pages) close read a passage from one of the texts you’ve read so far. You should not incorporate secondary readings. This second paper asks you to do most of the work yourself here; tell me what you see going on and think through it. The difference here is that you will be close reading a smaller portion of the text, rather than simply responding to it in entirety. 

For further guidance, think of it like this: first, find a story or film that you had a strong reaction to (one way or the other--positive or negative!) and then look within that text to find a particular scene that either resonates with you, seems as though there is something deeper going on there, or both and analyze it.

A "scene" means a lot of different things depending on the text; sometimes it's a paragraph, sometimes it's two, sometimes it's an entire page and sometimes it's densely packed, other times it's a lot of dialogue. It's up to you what constitutes the scene, but there has to be enough there for you to dig deeper into and it shouldn't be so long that you aren't able to spend enough time with each line, each idea. This is a hard thing to balance, but I am confident you can do it.

And by "analyze" and "close read," I mean that this is no longer a "response"; now you really need to do a lot more work with a smaller portion of the text. You're not just telling me what you think the text is doing, you're telling me what it's doing, how it's doing it, and why it's doing it, all while breaking down the language piece by piece, line by line. And since you're telling me all of this, you will need to be making a clear argument about the text.

Final Paper: The third and final major assignment for the course is the final paper, a 6-8 paged paper in which you will include at least three critical sources (one may be from class readings) and discuss elements of more than one of the stories and how they help us understand something about the world as a whole. You can (and should!) use either your response paper or close reading paper (but not both combined) as a basis for this paper. This way, you will have a great start for the final project. You could also choose a new topic entirely, if you wish.