Final Project: Selection of Humanities Topic and Analysis

Part 1: Selection of Topic

This part of the final project is your choice of topic. 

Choose one of the following subjects or propose one of your own.

1.One particular emotion or state of mind such as anger, jealousy, fear, gratitude, confusion, etc.

2.One specific fairy tale, myth, fable, or classic story from any culture

3.One religious or spiritual lesson or belief such as humility, hope, enlightenment, renunciation, reincarnation, the Trinity, the eight-fold path, ahimsa (non-violence), etc.

4.One political or social theme such as social justice or injustice, social inequality, social progress, political conflict, etc.

5.One form of cultural/societal identity such as race, sexual-orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, or class, or you could combine two of these such as "black women," or "Chinese-American fathers," or "LGBTQ Native-Americans."

6.A specific fictional character such as a character from a novel, play or film or a specific public personality such as a news anchor, a religious leader etc. 

7.One natural force or element of the natural world, like a kind of weather (snow, rain, sun), an animal (cat, dog, horse), a kind of landscape (mountain, oceanic, desert), vegetation (trees, flowers, grass, rivers etc.).

8.Explain two reasons for your choice in a short paragraph of 4-5 sentences. Be sure to include the significance of your choice to your own thinking about the world and/or its cultural significance.

This part of the final project is a summary of your ongoing work on the final paper; it should include three paragraphs, one covering each selected work. You should also make sure to re-state what your subject is.

Identify how the subject you chose in Part 1 appears in three different works, each from a different Humanities discipline (visual art, music, dance, poetry, prose, theater, film, religion). For instance, you could choose a poem, a painting and a scene from a film, all of which express and represent the theme of anger. Or, to be even more specific, if you choose the emotion of "love," the final paper could analyze and discuss love as it is expressed in Shakespeare's Sonnet 147 (literature), Boticelli's Birth of Venus (visual art), and in the ballet Swan Lake (dance).

Write one short paragraph (3-5 sentences) about each of your selections in which you:

1.Choose reliable and appropriate examples (a good-quality image, recording, video, etc.).  

2.Identify and cite the source, including the artist, creator etc as well as where you found the example.

3.Explain why you find the example relevant for this assignment and mention one tool from the class materials and discussions you might be able to use to talk about it.

Due Date for Part 2: This submission is due during Week 6, with the final day of submission being the Sunday of the sixth week (11:30pm ET). Please see the Course Schedule for the exact final due date for this submission. The submission should be carefully edited and proofed for standard use of English.

This part of the final project is the paper that presents your description and analysis of your selected works.

1.Explain the subject you chose and why it’s worth exploring in the Humanities

2.Describe each of your selected examples, including 1) information about its creator; 2) its historical or cultural context (how it fits into a historical period's or a specific culture's attitudes, events etc. Think about what else was going on in the culture and history when the piece was created); and 3) link to the example or an embedded image with a citation in the paper where you write about each example. 

3.Use at least one specific interpretative tool from the course to explain each of your selected examples. You should use a different tool for each example, so you should use at least three different tools in your paper.

4.Assess the effectiveness or impact of each representation. In other words, how well did the representation present the subject? How effective was it? What impact did this representation have? What specific elements of the representation lead you to your conclusions?

5.Provide a correctly formatted paper, complete and proper citations for any references you consult, using MLA format