![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A research paper for classics is a different beast from a literary analysis paper.
Oh, it's not a wildly different beast. I'm talking cats and dogs, here, not cats and caterpillars. But it's different. And for a variety of reasons--mostly having to do with things being pulled off the syllabus for lack of time in various classes--it's been years since I've been asked to do a research paper, and this is the first one I've had to do for classics.
Also, it's 25% of my grade in this Latin class. So. You know. A bit of pressure there.
Anyway. I'm finding it...mm. Not exactly more challenging. Differently challenging? More likely to make me nervous? Something like that. At one of the process, it's actually frustrating in that I have to have a much simpler premise and set of arguments than I would in a lit paper. There was a certain expectation, in a literary analysis paper, that I was only beholden to the text, and could go do something really interesting with it. When I need five secondary sources--I'm still trying to work out if other texts by Cicero count as secondary sources, or if those are primary ones--it starts to turn into a game of "How broad of a topic can I come up with such that I can find supporting evidence in what's already been written."
It probably makes for much more grounded papers, but it's annoying. It's just not as much fun when I have to keep reining things in this way. It's probably more academically rigorous in some ways, but I don't get to be nearly as creative. (Ask me some time about the paragraph of essay I got on a single punctuation mark in a five-line poem!) And I keep finding myself doing three pages of intense textual analysis, and then stopping to awkwardly wedge in a bunch of "Also, secondary sources say relevant things, I guess," references in some half-assed paragraph.
It's not that the secondary sources aren't relevant. It's just that they're mostly relevant in helping me understand how to parse the text. Needing to reference them directly is...awkward. Once I've confirmed through a secondary source that it was downright usual for Roman aristocrats of that time period to be constantly borrowing and loaning money, I can go on to address more accurately why Cicero is denying that Caelius has any debts; but it's awkward as hell to need to devote a paragraph to "Also, it was standard for aristocrats of this time period to be loaning and borrowing money all the time." Especially since it ends up feeling like I'm telling my professor things that she already knows full well, instead of showing her some cool new take on the text.
I was spoiled by literature classes, I guess. I get deeply annoyed at people who claim that's all groundless bullshitting, but it does require a very different type of work, and, well. I prefer an essay where I can show my prof something Interesting to an essay where I can show my prof that I have done enough research to have the basic context around the text at hand, and that I've thought about things a bit thereafter.
Oh, it's not a wildly different beast. I'm talking cats and dogs, here, not cats and caterpillars. But it's different. And for a variety of reasons--mostly having to do with things being pulled off the syllabus for lack of time in various classes--it's been years since I've been asked to do a research paper, and this is the first one I've had to do for classics.
Also, it's 25% of my grade in this Latin class. So. You know. A bit of pressure there.
Anyway. I'm finding it...mm. Not exactly more challenging. Differently challenging? More likely to make me nervous? Something like that. At one of the process, it's actually frustrating in that I have to have a much simpler premise and set of arguments than I would in a lit paper. There was a certain expectation, in a literary analysis paper, that I was only beholden to the text, and could go do something really interesting with it. When I need five secondary sources--I'm still trying to work out if other texts by Cicero count as secondary sources, or if those are primary ones--it starts to turn into a game of "How broad of a topic can I come up with such that I can find supporting evidence in what's already been written."
It probably makes for much more grounded papers, but it's annoying. It's just not as much fun when I have to keep reining things in this way. It's probably more academically rigorous in some ways, but I don't get to be nearly as creative. (Ask me some time about the paragraph of essay I got on a single punctuation mark in a five-line poem!) And I keep finding myself doing three pages of intense textual analysis, and then stopping to awkwardly wedge in a bunch of "Also, secondary sources say relevant things, I guess," references in some half-assed paragraph.
It's not that the secondary sources aren't relevant. It's just that they're mostly relevant in helping me understand how to parse the text. Needing to reference them directly is...awkward. Once I've confirmed through a secondary source that it was downright usual for Roman aristocrats of that time period to be constantly borrowing and loaning money, I can go on to address more accurately why Cicero is denying that Caelius has any debts; but it's awkward as hell to need to devote a paragraph to "Also, it was standard for aristocrats of this time period to be loaning and borrowing money all the time." Especially since it ends up feeling like I'm telling my professor things that she already knows full well, instead of showing her some cool new take on the text.
I was spoiled by literature classes, I guess. I get deeply annoyed at people who claim that's all groundless bullshitting, but it does require a very different type of work, and, well. I prefer an essay where I can show my prof something Interesting to an essay where I can show my prof that I have done enough research to have the basic context around the text at hand, and that I've thought about things a bit thereafter.