Paper 2 Watchmen (Definition Argument)
Audience: Intelligent Senior
Arguing with status quo by way of a definition. (5 pages)
For specific citation guidelines, please see:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_mla.html
In your second paper, I want you to build on your experience from paper one in a specific way. When we
argue about a text we have read, our goal in arguing is to develop our understanding of the text. Our
argument isn’t directed toward victory, but toward some sort of truth. What that normally means is that we
are arguing against a status quo, asking others to accept some revision of what they have come to
understand about a text. In your first paper, though I asked you to direct the assignment to a friend I really
was asking you to argue with yourself. You’re goal in that paper was to define a status quo. What would an
intelligent reader like yourself say if asked to define the book? What can we agree upon?
But as we have seen, summarizing what is essential about a book doesn’t do the entire experience of the
book justice. By its nature, summary excludes things we don’t see as immediately important to our
understanding.
In this paper, I want you to argue against the status quo. I want you to focus on one of the details of the
book that you may have discarded from your summary, and I want you to examine it with an eye toward
arguing with what you previously believed the text to be all about.
In this case, I’d like you to focus on defining one of the words or ideas in Watchmen. As part of our short
definition assignment, we’ll develop a list in class, but you won’t have to restrict yourself to that list.
So, given what we would assume an intelligent reader thinks is the book’s main claim, I want you to
develop an argument that somehow complicates or overturns that original claim. In order to pursue that
argument, I want you to focus on defining a word or an idea in the text.
Like with the short definition assignment, don’t restrict your investigation just to the literal definitions
offered by dictionaries. How does this word or idea play out in the text? How does it operate in a given
scene? You need to anchor your argument in the text, and so you have to show that your definition
meaningfully alters our understanding of some part of the book.
Like with your last paper, I will expect a provocative argument firmly anchored in the specifics of the text.
In this paper, I hope you will start to see the tension between those two ideas. The argument needs to be
novel, non-obvious, unexpected. You are, after all, over-turning a status quo with this argument. But at the
same time, your argument can’t be wildly illogical. It has to be anchored to a close reading of the text.
Academic argument is at its best when it is both weird and systematic.