Discussion of set reading from Obasan + presentation of how to prepare and write an abstract for a research essay
19 Novembro 2018, 08:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
Discussion of set reading from Obasan
Guidelines for preparing, writing and getting feedback on your abstracts
Submission date for abstract: 5TH December - 200 – 250 words
Your abstract will - 200 – 250 words and contain your thesis idea and theoretical framework (10%). – also your main bibliographic references ( 3-5).
The thesis idea/statement is the heart of your research paper and should be the first thing you concentrate on. It not only indicates what you are going to do, but how you are going to do this. It is the unifying agent of an essay, summarizing the main point of the paper "in a nutshell," and indicating how the paper will develop.
When you define your thesis idea as a first step in the writing process, remember that you may need to tweak this when you have finished because your main idea has changed, but it is a good place to start your writing from even if you have to move away a little from the initial claim because of new evidence found through your research.
I will not accept essay from students who have not presented their abstract. However, if you wish to submit your abstracts earlier you can do so and I will discuss them with you
12th Dec– I will return abstract and discuss abstracts with students from Andrea Vercammen to João Pedro Ribeiro
17th Dec – return and discuss abstracts to students from José Barata to Tiago Silva.
Sample title and abstract
Ben Taylor: A Canadian Hero
In One Week (2008) Michael McGowen casts his protagonist, Ben Taylor, as an everyman something that is quite unusual for a contemporary road movie. Perhaps Elspeth Cameron’s proposals in Canadian Culture: An Introduction (1997) can offer some explanation for this unusual positioning. Cameron suggests that Canadians do not particularly like heroes, preferring the ordinary to the extraordinary; a condition she attributes to the country’s colonial past, which has given the country and its people a feeling of peripherality because “’ Head Office’ is somewhere else” (19).
Traces of Margaret Atwood’s victims, as presented in Survival (1972), can also be seen in Ben Taylor’s progression through the movie. Developing these arguments, in this essay, I will suggest that both One Week and Ben Taylor are creations that fit in the Canadian literary tradition and can be understood more easily when examined from this perspective. (143 words)