Stasis Theory and Me

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I mentioned a while back that I blew the first assignment for this course (like almost everyone else!  Only Lisa and some guy who dropped a couple weeks ago got it right).  We were supposed to analyze a newspaper editorial using "stasis theory," which none of us had ever heard of before, and Toffee told us to go to the (very helpful, if only I'd thought it through) Purdue OWL website to learn about the theory (she talked about it a lot in class, too).  I guess I thought that I just had to say something about the theory, but it turned out that what she wanted was for us to write about what kind of argument the editorial was making.  In class, she said the topic of the editorial was irrelevant, which I took to mean that the theory would work on anything (which it does), but what she really meant was that we had no reason to spend any time talking about the editorial's topic in our essays.  So, of course, we all talked about the editorials' topics and barely said anything about the theory.

Well, that's what happened, and later on we discovered how serious she was about the theory, since she's been applying it right and left to everything.  This week, I'm supposed to journal about what kind of argument I'm making in my research paper.  My thesis is "A filmed version of a Sherlock Holmes story has to be an action film unless it is told from Dr. Watson's point of view" (yeah, I'm not happy about the wording yet).  Anyway, I think it's an argument of definition, since it depends on how you define an action film. 

The Big Deal: Creating New Knowledge

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Yeah, I know I already posted one today, but spring break is almost over (no, I didn't go anywhere.  I'm broke!) and I've got the day off, so I'm catching up with the prompt I skipped last week, which was to analyze the assignment for the research paper.  I keep thinking about what we were told on the first day of class:  the purpose of academic research writing is to create new knowledge.  I'm not really sure how my project is going to do that, although Dr. Toffee says that it is. 

On 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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I Still Need a Hero! (or at least some information about one)

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I've been doing some article and book searches for the past couple of weeks, and it's been interesting, but I'm not sure how helpful the stuff I've found is going to be.  I started looking at heroes (the Library of Congress subject heading) in Academic Search Premier, then in the MLA bibliography, and finally in WorldCat.  So far, I've ordered a few interlibrary loans (the college library is really tiny, bookwise), and I hope they arrive in time for the annotated bibliography assignment.  Anyway, some of the books and articles look really interesting.  I ordered:
Tasker, Yvonne, Ed.  Action and Adventure
       Cinema. London:  Routledge, 2004.
This is a collection of essays about action films, and a couple of the essays turned up in my MLA search.  I think that those will count individually on the bib assignment, so this is great.  Another book I found has a pretty intimidating title:
West, Russell, and Frank Lay, Eds.  Subverting
       Masculinity:  Hegemonic and Alternative
      Versions of Masculinity in Contemporary
      Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.
I'm not too sure what that even means, but it sounds good for my project (I think I have to deal with the gay subtext that RD put on the table during promo interviews).
I still have work to do on the Sherlock Holmes searches, but more about that later.  I was pleased to see that I'm already doing what the professors who wrote the tips below say I should do.

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I need a hero!

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I'm sort of inspired today by something that came up yesterday in class, which was the idea of heroes.  In an action film, there's always a hero, right?  And what makes this Sherlock Holmes different is that it is an action film, with Holmes as the hero.  Like I said before, I never thought of him that way, but, as you can see from the picture here, he seems to have always been a hands-on kind of detective without my realizing it.  My dad says that I don't know the stories very well, or I would know that Holmes fights and uses disguises.  (Thanks, Dad.  Actually, I think he may turn out to be a lot of help.)  I think that I may have a research question:  is Sherlock Holmes an action hero?

Dr. Toffee says that in an academic research project, you always wind up researching several things (she calls them components), and I guess she's right, because I can already see that I need to know about Holmes, heroes (specifically action heroes), and I'll  probably have to read some of the stories, too.  I got lucky there; my dad has all the stories plus a bunch of books about SH, which means I won't have to wait for interlibrary loans on them.

So I guess the next thing I need to do is look for background stuff, but I think I'll talk to Dr. Toffee during her office hours and see what she says.  I'll start checking out the short stories today and tomorrow.