Well, it's not because I don't have enough material to draft my paper, or because I waited too long to start, or because I haven't given it enough thought. I'm pretty sure that I feel like I'm going crazy because I've never written a paper like this one before. The peer review is Friday (today's Sunday), and this entry is supposed to be about problems I'm having. The way it's going so far is that I keep thinking of stuff I needed to put in my outline but didn't, so every time I finish one task (for lack of a better word), I have to go back and put something else ahead of what I just wrote. In other words, this thing is growing in every possible direction, and it may be totally out of control.
The one "task" that's given me the most trouble is defining a term: action hero. I guess that if I knew more about action/adventure stories in the 1800s, I'd be able to come up with a more scholarly definition that would take that into account. As it is, I'm basing the definition on a couple of sources (the Tasker article and the one about Gladiator), and I think/hope I've finally got it to work.
The argument itself is shaping up okay, thanks to that Slate.com article. I'm refuting it point by point. My conclusion sucks. That's the next big problem.
Speaking of peer reviews, my feed just popped up a batch of articles about a group of academics "corrupting" the process of academic publishing. Take a look:
I'm getting a jump on next week; I just checked the course site, and Toffee has posted the journal prompt for week 9 of the semester. She wants us to talk about how we "want to compose" our essays. This is kind of an interesting idea. I've never written about what I plan to write, unless you count outlining, which she says not to do for this entry.
I think I actually started doing this in the last couple of entries. I selected Nathan Heller's review/article about the film because it's representative of all the reviews that complained about Sherlock Holmes being too action-oriented to be faithful to the Conan Doyle stories. I'm thinking now that the point I brought up last time about Watson might just explain the difference; I talked to my father about it, and he agrees (gave me a few good ideas, too). In all but a couple of the stories, Watson is the narrator, and we see everything from his point of view. For a former army officer, Watson is also pretty stuffy and judgmental -- a real Victorian, according to my dad -- and it's clear in the stories I've read so far that he doesn't tell us everything he knows that we would like to know, too. That bit I quoted from "The Musgrave Ritual" is a good example, and I think I'll use that story as my main comparison with the film. He also brushes over a lot of action, especially travel. SH really gets around, according to Watson, but the doctor just says that they went from point A to point B (and sometimes the whole rest of the alphabet) without giving any of the details of the trips or describing the places they travel through. The film, however, does NOT use Watson's point of view, and now that I think of it, I guess I've never seen a SH film that does (and thanks to my dad, I've seen plenty). I read something in one of my sources, which I guess I'll have to find now, about Watson being an "unreliable narrator." That seems to sum up the problem I see. He has his own personality quirks that lead him to criticize Holmes for various things and to praise Holmes for things that he (Watson, that is) approves of. Watson isn't ever going to talk about things he thinks should not be talked about in public, and he's not going to tell us stuff that he thinks we should already know, like what Mayfair looks like as opposed to Stepney (which he does describe, in "The Six Napoleons").
So, it appears that my thesis is being revised already! I'm not sure how to word it, but it's something like how everything Heller is noting as a deviation from the stories is only a deviation if you believe that Watson's point of view is the only point of view that matters. Well, this is going to take more thought than I thought it would.
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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