Final Essay
Choice A: 1400 words minimum of formal writing
Choice A: This is basically the same as your Analysis Essay, but you’ll need to choose a different primary source that is from horror books, movies, or tv shows.
A Reminder of the requirements
This assignment asks you to select and analyze a “ text ” from the popular media as your primary source and to analyze said primary source using a theory about the horror genre as a lens for understanding it.
The purpose of analysis (regardless of disciplinary point of view) is to explain relationships between parts and wholes—to break down the object into its constituent parts, find meaning in those parts, and then determine the meaning of the whole object. Your analysis must include a careful tracing of the meaning of those parts and how they relate to the meaning of the whole; remember the meaning of the whole is where you will at a minimum need to include and connect Foucault’s work to your primary source.
To describe it in a different manner: analyzing a work of art, musical composition, literary work, historical document, philosophical argument, or film is to explain how it “works”—how particular part(s) contribute to some whole in order to enhance understanding of the meaning of the text or artifact. Which part(s) you choose to examine depends largely on the question that you are trying to answer.
You will want to choose a small aspect of your primary source—one that you can really analyze and make a point about in 4-6 pages. Really. A small aspect like a single scene from a tv show or movie, a single verse from a song, a 30-second portion of a youtube video, and the like.
Your response to this assignment can also be a formal, conceptual, or thematic analysis that uses the tools, theories, and/or concepts privileged by a particular discipline. For more specific ideas about how to proceed, please refer to the links to your specific discipline or to the general tips provided in on Gauchospace.
Please use MLA or CMS guidelines to document your source(s). You will need to have at least 2 scholarly secondary sources as support for your ideas and 1 of them may be from our class readings for option A.
