Extending the Conversation of Fun Home
The goal of this project is simple: to expand upon the existing scholarly conversation about Fun Home in a way that matters. There are four essential steps:
- Summarize the current conversation about the angle of Fun Home you’re addressing.
- Show how that conversation either ignores important issues, doesn’t go far enough, or is simply wrong.
- Intervene with your contribution, backed up by evidence from Fun Home.
- Demonstrate why your contribution is important and to whom.
What “angles” should you address?
With a text as complex as Fun Home, there are countless possibilities. Including but not limited to the following: father-daughter relationships; queer identity; Fun Home as memoir; identity and performance; artifice versus reality; dissimulation and simulation; Fun Home as archive; the intertextual web Fun Home weaves; the breakdown of gender binaries; narrative strategies in Fun Home; Fun Home and documentary evidence; Fun Home as gothic literature; the role of place in Fun Home; city versus country; & etc.
You might also consider the intersection of several of these angles as itself a worthwhile angle.
Whatever angle you choose, be attentive to both the visual and textual elements of Fun Home, and how they interact with each other.
What’s this about a conversation?
An enormous number of scholarly essays and book chapters have been devoted to Fun Home. Few texts in the past ten years have generated as much scholarly interest. There is legitimate debate about the novel, with differing perspectives about its politics, narrative strategies, and meanings. You cannot hope to summarize every side of this discussion, which is why you are focusing on only one angle of Fun Home.
For this paper you must integrate at least four scholarly sources in a substantive way. “Substantive” doesn’t mean merely quoting at length. In fact, as Graff and Birkenstein point out in They Say, I Say, there are many ways to integrate outside voices besides lengthy quotes. Paraphrasing and singling out a key phrase are just two alternatives among many.
Key Dates
- A draft of 1,250 words is due in class Thursday, April 21. Bring 3 copies of your draft to class that day.
- The week of April 26 and 28 we will meet one-on-one instead of as a class to talk about your drafts
- The final version is due Tuesday, May 3 by 10pm.