Historical-Contextual Analysis

Mechanics
As before, all style and citation decisions should follow the MLA style manual. Assessments of the paper will be made by averaging two grades on the paper, a “content” grade (e.g. consisting of clarity of ideas, quality of argument, logical progression and organization of the paper) and a “style” grade (e.g. grammar issues, appropriate citation, proper bibliographic work, subheadings, and in general style decisions appropriate with a publication level essay).

You should cite at least five sources in your essay and produce an appropriate bibliography/works cited page for those sources.

This paper will work through two elements. You DO NOT have to use these as a device to order your essay, although you are free to do so.

Objective #1: Providing a Rich Sense of Context
You have, no doubt, had to deal with some sense of context in your first effort. Here, I am asking you to revisit the question of context and to expand upon that description by demonstrating the relationship between the elements you highlighted for analysis and the context that “anchors” those elements and therefore produces a particular “meaning” (or set of meanings) from the text. Perhaps, you want to explore the way in which the same “text” operates differently in different genres or contexts. Perhaps in the first effort you were following something like Bitzer’s notion of fittingness to show how at a particular moment a speech or mediated text accomplished a particular end, but now you are more interested in showing that it worked because of some long held cultural beliefs or ideological views and you want to trace the history of some of those views. Again, the question as always is what elements of the context do you need to describe to most inform your text selection.

Objective #2: Staking out a Place in a Conversation
As we try to imagine the significance of our work it is oftentimes helpful to imagine it contributing to an ongoing scholarly conversation of some sort. Imagine the authors of an essay as they likely sat around and discussed their idea for the analysis. They might have thought: “Well, what issues/conversations will our piece impact?” It is likely that they would then say “If we are convincing in our claims, then it would necessarily alter/impact/change/revise the way that ________ scholars think about their work.”

In short, for this component of the project ask yourself two questions: 1) “What is my essay really about and does my assumption about the way the text operates implicate/challenge any areas of study?
And 2)”What context and/or areas of study do I need to know in order to competently analyze this text?” From these questions you ought to be able to generate a sense of your importance in various conversations and expand your review of literature to demonstrate that commitment.

The "text" the directions are referring to is actually a speech and can be found on YouTube, it’s called "Jim Carrey’s Commencement Address at 2014 MUM Graduation." Or here is the link to the speech: https://youtu.be/V80-gPkpH6M

I also added my considerations for the essay in the attached document that should be incorporated in the paper.