topic and bibliography

By the middle of the semster, you should have a topic for your research paper, and a bibliography. The topic should consist of approximately one page (1-2 paragraphs) that explains what your particular interest is that you plan to explore further: race, class, sex, gender, sexuality, technology, bodybuilding, Italianness, transnational cinema, "trash" cinema, the apocalypse, comic books, television, etc. It's just one page, but it should show that you've thought and read about the issue a little bit, and explain what your particular angle might be, what you'd like to explore. Ideally, you should also have a simple outline. Divide the project into 3 or 4 parts, by themes, by historical eras, by countries—whatever seems like it might simplify the project.

You also need to include a bibliography of 10-15 works that you plan to see and read. Some should be primary works—the television episodes, comic book issues, photographs, and films that you plan to look at for the project. Others should be secondary works: articles or books about your topic that you will consult. These may be very general and theoretical (a book about the history of comic books, an article about bodybuilding) or specifically about one of your primary works (an article about a specific film you plan on watching). At least 3 entries in your bibliography should be primary works, and at least 3 should be secondary, but some projects are really about watching a lot of primary sources, and others are about doing reading. The balance is up to you.

2-3 pages in all.

research paper

A research paper explains in the first 1-2 pages what the project is ("in this paper, I examine the differences in the representation of gender and sexuality between Italian, American and Argentinian peplums in the 1980s"), give the conclusion in simplified form ("by and large, while all three cinemas offered hyperbolic portrayals of masculinity, American films were significantly less misogynist than Italian and Argentinian films, which featured more gratuitous nudity and violence against women"), and explain why this might matter ("I conclude that US cinema is more mainstream not because of more enlightened attitudes about women, but because Italian and Argentinian cinemas could only turn a profit by appealing to narrow, niche markets, such as cult or exploitation films."

In the body section, the research paper presents the student's research: "I watched 2-3 films from each national cinema. Representative films from Argentina included Barbarian Queen and Deathstalker; films from Italy included…" The paper should divide the material into several categories (themes, national cinemas, historical eras…) and dedicate 2-5 pages to each category, depending on the number. This section should be 7-9 pages in length.

In the conclusion, the research paper should summarize very briefly the findings, and discuss the meaning, the consequence of these results, more fully. It is probably a good idea in this section to be more speculative: "if, in fact, misogyny is not a function of national culture, but simply an economic pressure, what might this mean for film studies? Or ideological criticism? Or our study of film as a national phenomenon?"

In total, 10-12 pages.

Grades

20% attendance and participation

20% topic/bibliography paper

60% final paper

Graduate students: presentation

In 15-20 minutes, with or without PowerPoint or its equivalent, present one of the assigned readings (the supplemental texts by Esposito, Edelman, Locks, Williams, or La Capra). You may wish to write out your presentation in advance (a typical conference presentation is approximately 8 pages, double spaced, which will usually give you about 15 minutes; 10 pages will give you about 20 minutes), and read that in a communicative and pedagogically effective way. While your audience is chiefly undergraduates, it will normally be graduate students and faculty, so write in a way that is comprehensible but intellectually sophisticated. (And really, why wouldn't you just do that all the time?) Your task is threefold: (1) explain the reading(s) and the arguments made in some detail; (2) explain how they are significant for our understanding of the peplum; (3) position yourself with respect to the readings—what are the advantages and shortcomings of an understanding of the peplum based on, say, Esposito and biopolitics? Or Edelman and queer theory? Is Lock's explanation of bodybuilding valuable or problematic?

A word on PowerPoint, since it is a pet peeve of mine. PowerPoint exists in order to provide a visual counterpoint to your spoken presentation. Meditate on that mantra until you understand it. PowerPoint is not there to repeat your presentation, or worse still, to put up large blocks of text that people are supposed to read while you talk about something else. You might as well ask your audience to practice basketball while you talk. Some quick quidelines (these apply equally to Keynote, Prezi, etc.):

• Use only one template for the entire presentation.

• Use a maximum of two fonts (one for headers, one for text).

• A maximum of 3 font sizes may be used.

• Use simple, legible fonts—something assertive for headers, and a plain serif for text.

• Most of your slides should consist of images, and just images.

• Never put a block of text on the screen unless it is a passage to be analyzed.

• If that passage is too long, break it into multiple slides.

• Otherwise, if text doesn't fit, don't make it smaller—make it shorter.

• Every animation and visual "trick" you use will distract your audience from what you are saying.

• Approximately one slide per paragraph (more is okay—don't leave a single slide on screen for too long).

Graduate students: seminar paper

Seminar papers should be 15-25 pages in length, and should demonstrate good writing, and a serious engagement with the primary material and the scholarship on it. When you write a seminar paper, you are practicing to write an article—they rarely get to the stage where they are actually ready to be submitted to a journal, but you are striving to move them in that direction. That means you should have an important issue in the scholarship that you think you have an interesting or worthwhile take on, and you should have read a selection of the scholarship on the specific text or texts you will be writing on. You should be able to write something like this:

In two major works of cinema studies in the early 1990s (Altman, Neale), genre emerged as an area of contention.  For Altman, genre is a potentially creative arena not only for the film industry, but also for fans and critics, who often recognize genres beyond "official" ones. This is the "soft" version of genre, let us say, exemplified today by Netflix, which organizes films around categories so unusual as to have only one member ("cerebral military movies based on real life" or "critically acclaimed emotional drug movies," both real Netflix categories). For Neale, however, genre is only a category created by conscious industry practices, a "hard" version of genre. Film noir is a central example for both. For Altman, it is an excellent example of how critics could return to films from previous decades and discover a "hidden" genre; for Neale, an example of de-historicizing critical work that fundamentally ignored industry practices and audience expectations (although Neale recognizes that, ironically, film noir became a conscious industry practice after critics "discovered" it). In this paper, I will examine the question of "peplum" as a genre. Does it qualify as a genre in Neale's more restrictive sense? Curiously, it does—Neale himself uses the peplum as an example of a subset of the "epic." And yet it remains a term almost unknown to many film scholars and fans, and almost all spectators—in other words, it passes the hard test, but not the soft test.

You want your seminar paper to strive for that kind of positioning—make it sound like you know a part of the field; read a number (let's say 10) of articles and a couple of books; spend a little time on Google; get an impression of the kind of work that people are doing. In the case of the peplum, where the field of schoalrship is very small, you will almost necessarily turn to larger theoretical questions. This is good.