Papers for HIST 332
Book reviews
There are general guidelines for writing book
reviews here.
A list of (some) possible books for this class is here.
For this class the books tend to be a bit more specialized and
technical than they are for more modern topics, so it is important to
get a hold of the book early and make sure you can deal with it.
Remember part of your grade is based on your book selection, so if you
end up picking a book you can't understand that will be reflected in
your grade.
Source papers
A source paper for this class is an analysis base on
one
or more parts of a primary source. A primary source is anything that
was
written by people living at during the time we have been studying. One
advantage
of doing this particular period is that a lot of stuff has been
translated,
so there are a lot of things to work with.
There are two steps to coming up with a good paper for this assignment.
You
can do them in either order, although picking a text first is probably
the
best way.
Picking a text
One step is to pick a text. There is a lot of stuff
that
has been translated and some of it is even available at the IUP
library.
You should probably pick out a topic or area that would be of interest
to
you and then pick a text. Most of the major philosophical works have
been
translated, as have many of the histories, lots of poetry, and a lot of
the
later Buddhist and Daoist texts. You will need to pick out a text or a
part
of a text that has not been assigned for class and that would work well.
Picking a question
The point of the paper is to answer some sort of
question
about Chinese history or philosophy or religion or something using this
text.
There are lots of chunks of primary source that are not really good for
anything,
that is to say they do not really help you to answer any questions.
What
type of questions you can ask will vary from text to text, but here are
some
suggestions.
-If this is a philosophical text, how is it different from other texts
(Legalist,
Daoist whatever) that we have studied? How is it the same? This is a
great
topic to do with mixed texts like Lu Bowei.
-If it is a historical work what specific things can we learn about
this
society from it? There are several sections in the Shi ji that would
work
well for this.
-For both historical and literary texts you can learn a lot about how
the
people who wrote the text thought about things. What did the author of
the
Han shu biographies think was good behavior? What makes someone a hero
in
Three Kingdoms?
-In the case of poetry you could do something more literary and look at
use
of particular images or themes.
Writing the paper
Once you have a topic and a text you may want to do
some
more research. Quite a number of other people have no doubt worked on
this text and there are probably a number
of
things that you can use. Research actually makes the process of writing
a
lot easier. JSTOR and Historical Abstracts, both available on the
Library
page are good places to start. So are the bibliographies of things you
have
already found. If you are having trouble you need to come talk to me as
soon
as possible.
The paper itself should be fairly short, 10 pages or so. Try not to go
over 20 pages. You need to get a draft of the paper to me as soon as
possible
if you want me to review it.
The paper needs to have a clear thesis and organization, and to be well
supported
by evidence. Here
are some general tips on
writing papers.