Image via WikipediaOn the assignment sheet, the project is actually called "The Documented Argument Essay," a pretty intimidating name, I think. Anyway, here's the way I see it. This is a fairly long essay (minimum 2500 words) for most people, but I'm really gonna have to edit this time; you may have noticed that I tend to write a lot once I get going. The essay has to have a few things, I guess to show that we know how to do them, like a bunch of sources and a "survey" of the articles and books on the "issue." Maybe it's me, but that last word seems kind of important. The issue isn't the topic, really. The topic is only part of the deal. There's also the academic approach. So, I have to think about my issue, which I think is whether Sherlock Holmes -- which is pretty clearly an action flick -- is a distortion of the character Conan Doyle wrote about. I've got sources on Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and action films, and it looks to me like I have to go over all of that. The stuff on action films goes to my academic approach, which is "genre criticism," according to Toffee, who says that it's a kind of approach that scholars in film studies use all the time. My thesis is sort of geared toward talking as much about what makes an action film an action film as it does about Sherlock Holmes. In fact, I think I'm going to have to open the paper with a definition of action films; some of my film sources should fit in there.
And what about the argument? The sheet says the paper has to have "a well-developed argument that appeals to logic rather than emotion (or anything else!), considers counterarguments, and contains no serious logical fallacies." I feel some pretty serious confidence about this requirement, mainly because I have a target to argue against in that Slate.com review I talked about in my last post. Once I've got my definition of an action film set down I need to do some brainstorming about the points I need to make about the stories and about the film. I think I mentioned before that some of the stuff in the film comes right out of the stories (for one example, there's a scene early in the film where SH is shooting at the wall in his room, and it's drawn from one of the stories, "The Musgrave Ritual." Watson is complaining about what a slob SH is, and he says,
" . . . pistol practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an armchair, with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. [for Victoria Regina] done in bulletpocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.").
The main difference I see between the stories and the movie is that Watson, as written by Conan Doyle, tends to describe things rather than action, as above. He doesn't tell us what he does while Holmes is "adorning" the wall, but based on his earlier complaints, it seems that we are supposed to know that Watson was probably trying to get Holmes to stop. And, it looks like I've stopped analyzing the assignment, doesn't it? Now that I think about it, I guess I'm trying to think of counterarguments.
The one logical fallacy that I'm worried about is overgeneralizing. It can be hard to tell when you are doing it; at least it is for me, but since I know I do this sometimes, I'll be extra careful. What burns me right now is that I'm pretty sure Lisa already has her draft done.
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