Saturday, July 16, 2005

Final Paper

The three-thousand-word Final Paper is due in my Department mailbox at midnight Monday August 1st. Because of the generous deadline (I can't help it; excessive niceness is a character flaw of mine) I will be enforcing the three-per-cent-per-day penalty with rigour (even relish.)
The topic of the paper is open to you within the limit that it has to (a) include treatment of at least two assigned course texts, and (b) argue within the context of British masuclinity after 1945. Secondary sources are advisable and should conform to the standard in the English Department Style Guide.
I am available at anytime by e-mail, in my Office Hours as usual, or by appointment to discuss your topic, review your thesis paragraph, or suggest ideas and raise dialectical objections.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This comment does not have to do directly with our final paper, but I missed the opportunity to say this a few weeks back and would like to say it now:
In lecture Prof. Ogden said something like "the expressions 'act like a man', 'be a man' and so on do not have female equivalents".
Those expressions pre-date the 1970s feminist movement and the politically correct; "man" then meant "mankind". Girls and women would/could apply these terms to themselves without feeling any contradiction, or feeling little contradiction--the expressions pertained to human characteristics. I well remember reading for the first time Kipling's "If" in a London dentist's office when I was about twenty, but I don't remember feeling excluded from that poem's sentiment. In fact,to this day I remember its impact and what I believe[d] to be its intent. That said,I hope--feminism and the politically correct notwithstanding--that we can allow men to be men as well as being human beings. On the other hand, I believe that men can benefit from feminism and from the politically correct; it can relieve them of a burden they may not wish to carry.