Additional Information
Please feel free to consult with the current Director of Undergraduate Studies, Professor Daniel Heller-Roazen, via email (dheller@princeton.edu), or during his office hours (XXX), or by appointment.
JUNIOR PAPER GUIDELINES
A Preliminary Word. Each student entering the Department should discuss his or her areas of interest with the Director of Undergraduate Studies no later than the spring of sophomore year in order to form a preliminary judgment as to the suitability of a supervisor. Either in May of that year or early the following fall, the Director of Undergraduate Studies will assign to each student a supervisor. Once this decision as to an adviser becomes final, it is the responsibility of the student to see the supervisor as soon as practicable in order to discuss possible Junior Paper topics. The student and the supervisor have mutual responsibility, if not for regularly scheduled, then at least for fairly frequent consultation. This might be loosely defined as two or three consultations per paper, although any attempt at strict definition in this area is difficult. In any case, it is the responsibility of the student to seek out the supervisor as early as possible. Because a Junior Paper is independent work, the function of the adviser is to guide research, not to control or to edit it. While an adviser may be relied upon for help in improving the presentation overall, or in identifying broad or recurrent problems of writing or composition, the adviser's function is not that of a line-by-line copy editor: please remember that additional guidance on writing can and should be obtained at The Writing Center, 108 Notestein Hall (258-2797). Finally, just as it is the adviser's responsibility to be regularly available to students during office hours, it is the student's responsibility to respect the office hours posted by each faculty member and to keep appointments.
The Junior Papers. All students are strongly advised to read carefully Writing a JP:The Handbook, obtainable from the Princeton Writing Program, 108 Notestein Hall. This guide offers helpful advice on some of the most important elements that advisers consider when evaluating a finished junior paper: the importance, interest, and appropriateness of the question or problem addressed, the reasoning and evidence presented in support of the thesis, and the writing style.
In general, our design for the two papers includes two major dimensions: (1) the desire to help students express themselves clearly in analyzing specific literary texts (or a single literary text) in a language or languages other than English; (2) the encouragement of students' abilities to deal with larger critical issues as these apply to literary texts. While these aims are not mutually exclusive, they do suggest something about the differing natures of the two Junior Papers.
The First Paper. Not more than 3000 words in length (approximately 12 pages), the first paper should concentrate on textual analysis, and should involve at least one text that is written in a language other than English. Exercises that would be appropriate include the following:
(1) An explication of a shorter text or of a portion of a longer text (e.g., a single lyric poem, an act or scene from a play, a passage from a novel or narrative poem).
(2) A study of two absolutely related works, where one is an imitation of another (e.g., a Wyatt version of a Petrarch sonnet, Yeats's version of Ronsard's sonnet to Hélène, Angela Carter's rewriting of a Grimm fairy tale).
(3) Examination of the more general presence of an earlier work in a later one (e.g., the Vergilian resonances in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Christa Wolf's revisions of Homer or Aeschylus in Kassandra).
(4) Consideration of the relationship between a poet's description of his practice and that practice itself (e.g., Horace's Ars Poetica and one satire or epistle; Schiller's "On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry" and one of his poems; Corneille's "Of the Three Unities "and one of his plays).
The Second Paper. Not more than 8000 words in length (approximately 30 pages), the second paper should concentrate on larger critical issues, and may well serve as an early examination of the student's eventual Senior Thesis topic, or at least of its area of interest. While the many possibilities for this paper defy description, the sort of endeavor that seems appropriate may be gleaned from the following:
