The final essay prompt for this class is relatively simple, however it's my hope that within its narrow constraints you'll find a lot of room for individual expression. Throughout the semester we've discussed the greater symbolic significance of the game of baseball for those who play it as well as those who watch it, the meaning it gives to life and the lessons it offers. For your final, I'd like you to trace the ways in which one of the following key ideas/virtues/truths is expressed through the characters populating our various readings:
- Heroism (ideally in the sense of classic Greek tragedy)
- Perseverance / Dedication / Hard Work
- Friendship / Camaraderie
- Faith
- Reinvention / Rebirth
- Patriotism / What it means to be an American
- Mortality (and the acknowledgment or defiance thereof) / Loss
- the ideal of the Great American Melting Pot
- Deception / Dishonesty / Cheating
Of course, this paper should not be a simple exercise in listing characters who exemplify these ideals. First, you need to make a clear case for how your examples (of which there should be at least three) demonstrate your chosen topic, providing plentiful evidence from the texts themselves (this means quotations and summaries/paraphrases of plot points, all of which should be cited). Moreover, you'll need to analyze your examples, discussing them in relation to one another. Can you find nuances between characters, or outright contradictions? Finally, you should address the question of how baseball is uniquely suited to reveal these truths (about the human condition, the nature of our existence, the nation in which we live, etc.).
Your final essays should be a minimum of two thousand (2,000) words (not counting your works cited list), and written in MLA style (including a proper header, parenthetical in-text citations and a works cited list at the end), double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman, no tricked-out margins, etc. You'll e-mail your papers to me (in .doc or .docx format; .rtf in a pinch) no later than 5:00 PM on Thursday, April 25th. Because e-mail is an imperfect delivery medium and the UC system is prone to collapse, take note that I'll reply to each paper received, letting students know that it's arrived safely, so if you don't receive that e-mail, get in touch with me, and should you have any questions or concerns prior to the deadline, don't hesitate to drop me a line. I'm also sure that we'll have an open discussion of the final essay on Facebook.
Also, please don't forget that tardy papers will be docked a full letter grade for every day they're late and that papers that are less than the stated limit of two thousand words (again, not counting your works cited list) will automatically receive an F. Finally, I will not permit block quotes for this essay — whittle down your quotations to the essential information and make use of summary and paraphrase when necessary.
While two thousand words (roughly six full pages) seems like an endlessly long paper, I can assure you that it's not really a lot of space to discuss these topics in great depth, therefore I wholeheartedly encourage you to dispense with any and all filler, including bloated rhetoric and lengthy five-paragraph-style introductions that ultimately say very little while taking up a lot of word count. Don't hover over the surface of the issues — dive right in and get to the heart of your argument (i.e. evidence, analysis . . . the good stuff) from the start. I also recommend that unless you have compelling reasons to do otherwise, organize your essay around the the facets of the topic you've chosen to discuss, rather than proceeding chronologically or dealing with each author individually, and also that you write through the source texts themselves, as demonstrated in the "Making Effective Arguments" post I put up at the start of the term. You do not need to do outside research for this assignment, and you should avoid lengthy explications of the authors' biographical details or summaries of the plots of texts outside of what relates directly to the points that you are making. Presume that the person reading your paper has read all of the texts you reference (because he has!). Finally, make sure that you are following the conventions of MLA formatting (which can be found in numerous places on the internet).
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