Final Paper due Due 5/2/14, 11:59 P.M; send in Word file attachment to gmajer@stevenson.edu.

Spring 2014 English 281 Final Essay

Due 5/2/14, 11:59 P.M; send in Word file attachment to gmajer@stevenson.edu.

Drafts read up to 4/30/14.

1500 words minimum; 2000 words maximum.

Times New Roman 12 font, double spaced.

All quotes and citations use MLA or APA format.

Two Options; choose one.

Option 1

As with the midterm, use a 3-part structure to develop analysis of the zombie-figure and zombie-narrative from course readings and viewings (and additional cases if you would like to incorporate these).  The best structure is to move through the essay case by case, covering the 3 parts for one case, then moving on to the next, and so on through your cases.   Note that you are allowed to uses cases/texts/films from outside the course readings/films as long as they are clearly on topic.

Advice: Use 1 or 2 cases (or maybe 3) and go into more depth for each, being generous with quotations and examples from the text or film.   Also, be equally generous with explanations, placed before and after quotations and examples and making absolutely clear what they mean and how they support your point.

Your intro paragraph should not be a long account of what you will be doing.  Just announce that you are going to explore your given texts/films in light of the 3 parts and that will be enough.

Simply:

For each example/case, use the 3 parts as follows:

1. Horror-engineering, employing Carroll's 9 horror-effects as relevant (if you like, you also can include refs to Freud, Kristeva, Lacan, or Zizek and other theory we have discussed).

2.  Social attitudes--ideas, fears, stereotypes, phobias, fantasies of various kinds registering social attitudes.  Be sure to have a sense of the historical-cultural context of your example (research online can help you, say, with things like 1930s America).  You can use any of the critical articles we have read to help you with these; you also may do further research and incorporate other sources (but they must be peer-reviewed articles from standard scholarly sources and may not be blogs, popular treatments, etc.  Searching MLA or Academic Search Complete, note and check off the box for "Peer Reviewed.")

toward nation/empire

toward race or ethnicity

toward social class

toward family and community

toward feminine, masculine, and gay/queer gender roles/identities

toward capitalism, labor, and economics

toward modern"biopower" and the human/"posthuman"

and toward other specific aspects of the text/film historical-social context (2000s 9/11 terrorism, war, bioterror, economic crisis, globalization, Millennial-generation anxieties.)

3.  Possible social critique, commentary, satire--highlighting of social inequities, failures, hypocrisies, double-standards, rigid roles, "normative" categorizations.  Also sometimes alternative or utopian potentials beyond dominant social-political structures and systems.  Again, you can use any of the critical articles we have read to help you with these; you also may do further research and incorporate other sources (but they must be peer-reviewed articles from standard scholarly sources and may not be blogs, popular treatments, etc.  Searching MLA or Academic Search Complete, note and check off the box for "Peer Reviewed.")

Option 2

Use one of the following thesis statements or develop your own in consultation with me (the latter must be approved ahead of time).  You can use any of the critical articles we have read to help you with these; you also may do further research and incorporate other sources (but they must be peer-reviewed articles from standard scholarly sources and may not be blogs, popular treatments, etc.  Searching MLA or Academic Search Complete, note and check off the box for "Peer Reviewed.")

Develop your essay with 1 or 2 (or maybe 3) cases explored in depth, providing a generous amount of quotations and examples.  Be generous as well in explaining each quotation and example, making absolutely clear how it supports your point.  Such explanations come before the quotation/example to set it up and come after it to make sure the point is clear to the reader.  

Also, remember the classic strategy of tagging your main point in each paragraph using a topic sentence at the beginning of the paragraph.  And remember the similar strategy of using subtopic statements within the paragraph to keep the main point of your paragraph clearly in view as you move through quotations and examples.  Reiterate, repeat--these are the tried-and-true strategies of exposition and argument.

Note that an account of horror-engineering a la Carroll is not required with this model but is not excluded--your call.  

Theses--choose only one:

1. The zombie narrative plays out anxieties and ambivalences about 21^st century biopower—an unsettling sense that governments, corporations, medicine and bioscience claim to act in favor of life but at the same time are a danger to it.  (Birch-Bayley, among other articles.) 

2. The zombie narrative registers ambivalent social attitudes toward war and the traumas of war in post-9/11 America.  (The Birch-Bayley article works here.)

3. The zombie narrative projects a carnivalesque satire of American late-capitalist consumer society.  (Shaviro's article, among others, makes this point.)

4. The zombie narrative pursues a meditation on issues of race in contemporary American society, projecting in dramatic form a range of attitudes from racist phobias to progressive inclusiveness and valuing of diversity. (McAllister'a article works here.)

5. The zombie narrative betrays deep ambivalences about the normative family in American society, sometimes privileging the nuclear family as last refuge in an apocalyptic world, sometimes representing the family as a space of patriarchal confinement and pathological power relationships.  (Shaviro's article, among others.)

6. The zombie narrative breaks out space in ambiguous, unsettling ways, highlighting social phobias involving "us and them," that is, the assorted "others" of post-2000 Western societies (non-European, immigrant, poor), while at the same time making social boundaries appear permeable and open to change. (The Jeff May article works here.)   

7. The zombie apocalypse often elaborates a survivor's narrativeanalogous to the classic American "frontier myth" where the “frontier wilderness...forces migrants to give up their Old World ways and offers them the chance to become a new kind of people, individuals responsible for their own fate and fortune and free to define who they are” (Katerberg 1), even as the survivor narrative shows a continuing struggle with the problems of the pre-apocalypse world left behind. (This is a good thesis for World War Z.)


8. Dramatizing social bonds and roles in extreme, perilous scenarios, zombie survivor-narratives often test in particular the roles and powers of women in the post-apocalypse world, encompassing a range of attitudes from those that are clearly feminist to those that resist or dismiss feminist perspectives on power and equality. (TWD, others)


9. Post-2000 zombie narratives often suggest an ambivalence about the "global," with the positives of worldwide connectivity offset by the negatives of global plagues and even the global media that broadcast the news appearing to augment the terror of the global. (Birch-Bayley, others; World War Z.)


10. Post-2000 zombie narratives often register social anxieties about military power and its role in a post 9-11 world, suggesting a range of positive, negative, and ambivalent attitudes about the military.