Annotated Research

    You may write your final essay on any one of the following narratives: Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan, or Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. For this assignment, you will make a list of three potential research topics for your final essay. Each potential research topic must be followed by a short paragraph describing why you are interested in the topic, how that topic connects to your analysis, and potential key-words you might use to search for secondary sources on that research topic. Carefully consider the interpretive context foregrounded by your research topic: are you interested in how the narrative creates meaning through audience attitudes and knowledge about a particular concept or theme (for example, the link between caste/race and cultural ideas of “purity”) or how the narrative works with certain formal resources to influences audiences in particular ways, or both? Try to narrow down your research topics as much as possible. For example, instead of examining slavery as a whole in Twelve Years a Slave, you might consider examining how Northup represents the effects of slavery on familial relationships between slaves, for instance.