Writing Your Term Paper

First Steps: Choosing a Topic.

The first step in writing any paper is to find a topic. You may be very interested in your presentation topic and can imagine expanding your previous research into a paper, or you decide you want to do something else entirely and have your own suggestion from the course’s reading list, or even a text of your own reading.

In any case, you should start looking for a topic early on (not a week before the official deadline) that makes you curious enough to spend a certain amount of time working on it intensively. If you were bored while working through the course material on Coleridge, there is little point in writing a term paper on Gothic motifs in ‘Christabel’. The likelihood that you will not finish this paper or write something trivial in order to fill as many pages as possible is greater than with a topic that really interests you.

Many students enjoy writing comparative papers. Topics such as ‘The Vampire Motif in Literature in Dracula and Twilight’ are very popular. Be cautious, however, when writing comparative papers: Although it can be very exciting and motivating to highlight differences, you should not limit yourself to simply listing these differences. Papers based on the motto ‘Edward sparkles in the sun and Dracula does not, Edward mostly drinks animal blood and Dracula drinks human blood’ offer little substance for a promising analysis. The question is, why does the vampire motif develop in a certain direction? Why is it worthwhile for aspiring researchers (and you should consider yourself as such when writing an academic paper) to compare these two texts in particular and not, say, Vampire Diaries and ‘Good Lady Ducayne’?

Make sure that your paper reflects the current state of research on the topic. Otherwise, it would be impossible to deliver a comprehensive study on the development of the international research landscape on the vampire motif in 10-12 pages of text. Your topic should not be too broad, but not too narrow either, so that you have enough scope to create your own priorities.

Pure overviews without an actual research task (‘Characteristics of vampire literature in the 19th century’) are not suitable, as you would only be summarising secondary literature and not addressing a problem in the true sense of the word. You should also avoid overly broad research contexts (‘Identity in modern literature’), which you will never be able to cover even partially in 10-12 pages. Tip: Look up terms such as identity, foreignness, feminism, etc. in a cultural theory handbook and then consider which aspects your topic could focus on.

Formulate your topic in the nominal style:
NOT: Why is Sir Walter Scott’s poetry patriotic?
BUT: Patriotic aspects in Sir Walter Scott’s poetry

Please do not start your term paper if your topic has not been discussed with your lecturer beforehand. Otherwise, you may invest working time in a topic that is too broad, too narrow or unsuitable, which you will ultimately not be able to work on. Your supervisors have the necessary experience in academic work to assess this, but you usually do not yet.

You are allowed to set your own priorities in your term paper. However, you are not allowed to change the topic on your own initiative (even if it is only a translation); you must always discuss any changes with your supervisor. Submitting work on topics that have not been discussed with your supervisor in advance may result in the work being rejected.

Clarify Your Topic.

Once you have formulated your topic, begin to explore its boundaries in detail and ask yourself what solutions and strategies the topic requires. Otto Kruse refers to this step as ‘topic clarification’ and suggests the following approach:

“What is the subject of my term paper? The ‘subject’ can be, for example, a material object, a theory, a text or a problem.
How do I approach the subject? Should I present, problematise, explore or analyse a fact?
What material (scientific texts or sources) should form the basis of my work?” (Otto Kruse, Keine Angst vor dem leeren Blatt. Ohne Schreibblockaden durchs Studium. Campus Concret Band 16. 10th edition. Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2004, 87).

First, clarify the most important terms contained in your topic. You need reliable definitions from academic sources for all terms that are central to your topic. These may be genre terms such as Gothic or parody, but also terms that do not immediately appear to require definition, e.g. ‘monster’. Think of the film Alien and the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street – the term is not as obvious as it seems at first glance, it encompasses many heterogeneous phenomena and requires further explanation.
If you find several definitions that seem to contradict each other, compare the definitions with each other and explain why the one you want to work with is more promising to your topic than the others. You can briefly mention the problem of terms in the introduction and discuss it in more detail in your theory section.

In addition to an introduction and a conclusion, your paper will ultimately also have a theoretical section and a text analysis section.
When writing the theoretical section, make sure you always draw on several sources. During your research, you will often come across an extensive overview by a well-known English scholar that seems to contain everything you need to establish the theoretical and literary-historical context of your paper. Nonetheless, do not limit yourself to this one source. Read several sources on the topic to broaden your perspective.

Formulating a Thesis

You have probably already written one or two essays at school and formulated theses such as the following: ‘The introduction of standardised school uniforms has a positive effect on the social structure within a school’. A thesis is therefore a statement that you make on a topic and which you must then prove with arguments. Your thesis gives rise to specific research questions, such as whether the introduction of standardised school uniforms has an impact on certain forms of marginalisation with regard to social background or gender, what role it plays in interaction with other factors such as migration and integration, and whether and how it affects the sense of security and cohesion within a class community. You then select your methods, i.e. the theoretical basis and perspective from which you will examine the topic. You support your thesis with arguments and substantiate it with secondary literature: “One reason for this is that social differences are no longer reflected in clothing when it is the same for all pupils. A recent study shows that in classes with uniform school clothing, a better social climate, higher attention, a greater sense of security and a generally lower importance of clothing were observed than in the comparison classes (Dickhäuser 7).”

In literary and cultural studies, you must also first formulate a thesis that guides your entire work. Based on this thesis, you select your methods: Do you view your topic from a feminist, ecocritical, psychoanalytical, or reception-aesthetic perspective? Clearly state both in your introduction.

What theses and methods should NOT look like

Consider the following examples:

Example 1 Thesis: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey presents a compelling study in the development of Gothic modalities within the genre of romance. Central to this analysis is the concept of Gothic modality, referring to the specific forms and functions of Gothic elements employed to create particular effects. This approach is informed by a critical understanding of the Gothic as a literary device that can be employed across diverse narrative frameworks to create a narrative that engages with the enduring tension between superstition and reason.

Replace Jane Austen and Northanger Abbey with any work that contains elements of horror (Gothic), such as Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, A.C. Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, etc. You will notice that this text is universally applicable because it has virtually no content.

Example 2 Methodology: In the first chapter, an overview of Regency society will be given in order to better understand the role of women in this period. In the second chapter, the main character Catherine Morland will be analysed in more detail. The following chapter will compare the different settings in the novel with regard to their Gothic character. The entire analysis and comparison will be summarised.

This is not a list of methods or theoretical approaches, but merely a description of the structure of the work, i.e. meta-text. That’s what the table of contents is for!

The following example illustrates what theses and methods should look like:

Example 3 Thesis and methods: This paper will analyse how Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey employs the Gothic as a mode of writing to satirise the popularity of Gothic fiction with a largely female audience and, at the same time, uses the subversive potential of the Gothic to challenge perceptions of gender in the Regency era. To this end, a feminist reading will frame Austen’s heroine Catherine as a critical comment on how female curiosity is culturally categorised in a patriarchal society, drawing both on Donna Heiland’s concept of “toxic nostalgia of home and hearth” in the Gothic novel and on Barbara Benedict’s socio-cultural contextualisation of curiosity.

The text contains a clear, non-trivial thesis:
Austen uses Gothic as a twofold satire: a) appeal of Gothic fiction, b) female gender role

The methodology is based on a feminist reading, with key theorists (Heiland, Benedict) being named.

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