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Intellectual Heritage I 851 — Sections 24 and 26 Spring 2018 — Joe Giuffre

Proposal (“Outline”) of the Final Paper: The final and absolute deadline for this proposal is Friday, Mar. 23 at 11:59pm. But you can begin the process of proposing, drafting, and writing the final paper for this course any time after Jan. 26. So if you want to get the major paper in the course out of the way early, you can begin it as soon as a good idea occurs to you or as soon as a book you really like and want to write about comes along. The only rule is that once you begin the process, you have about four weeks to finish: the first version (the “smooth draft”) is due two weeks after you get feedback from me on your proposal (the “outline”) and the final version is due two weeks after you get feedback from me on the first version. You must e-mail all these things to me in the form of an MSWord document attached to an e- mail. PLEASE, no pdfs, no Google Docs, no zipped files, etc. The proposal itself can be very brief and will probably fit easily on one page. But the paper that you are proposing should ultimately be about four or five pages long, between say 1000 and 1500 words. So make sure you pick a topic that you can cover in that amount of space and that is substantial enough to make a paper of that length. Instructions for the Proposal: I want: 1) a thesis statement that tells me what you intend to prove, 2) a short statement that tells me how you came up with the topic and why you want to write about it, and 3) about three to five bullet points telling me how you intend to prove your thesis. This is NOT a research paper. Try to imagine a topic that allows you to directly analyze the book(s) you choose and that you can prove by quoting from that book or books. Avoid topics that require the use of outside sources to prove your point. For example, don’t write about the intersection of a writer on the syllabus and our contemporary society. You may write on ANY aspect of the syllabus for the course. The only restrictions are that the thesis, your argument, be concise and on a high level of discourse. In other words, don’t choose a trivial aspect of one of the books to discuss. There are two different ways to keep your argument concise. 1) You may work on one aspect of one book. So, you would analyze a single theme in one book, such as “justice” in Plato. Or you could analyze a single character in one book, such as Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh. 2) You may compare how two different books deal with a single theme, such as “honor” in The Apology and The Iliad or the idea of personhood in Shelley and The Popol Vuh. Possible topics other than those listed above include: “The journey” in Gilgamesh; self and other in the Noh plays; Socrates and his community, Achilles and his, or both. And there are, of course, many other possibilities.