How to write a thesis proposal (statement of purpose)

Since it will be needed in the coming days, i thought it useful to post some tips about how to write a thesis proposal.


The proposal for a thesis or dissertation is essentially an outline of the research - kind of like an architectural blueprint for building a house. The clearer the plan, the more timely and successful the completion of the house. And the clearer the plan, the more likely it is that it will be approved by your advisor or dissertation committee, with a high probability that the final paper will also be accepted. A well - done, acceptable proposal, therefore, is a kind of personal contractbetween you the candidate, and your committee.

The challenge lies - as usual - in deciding exactly what topic you want to propose! It is true that some fortunate students
maybe offered a specific topic or problem to pursue by a mentor whose preferences agree with the student's own. But more often, your job is to come up with a specific topic or research question that shows promise for extended study. Do not worry if a topic does not suggest itself to you immediately. Be ready and willing to try out a number of possibilities to see how they develop. How do you "try out" a topic? - by doing a topic analysis.


This is really a simplified proposal form that includes the following parts:


1. Problem, hypothesis, orquestion

2. Importance of research

3. Significant prior research (or what some call 'the review of literature' =all research previously made on your topic)

4. Possible research approach or methodology

5. Potential outcomes of research and importance of each



Analyzing a potentially useful topic in this step?by?step way forces you to look at it objectively and precisely within two
to four pages. Here are some points to watch for:


1. If you are unable to write your topic in either the form of a hypothesis or a clear statement, you need to refine and clarify the topic. It must be stated specifically, not in vague, imprecise terms.


2. You'll need to be able to justify what you're doing and prove that it's worthy of your time and energy. It's always handy if you can quote a major authority who is stating a need for the research. But if you don't have an authority on hand, try to demonstrate that your research is in some way significant to a major activity.


3. Be sure you have a reasonable (if not exhaustive) grasp of what's been done before. This will help support #2.


4. Extremely important part! Exactly how do you plan to approach the research? Try to explain as precisely as possible, and include an alternative methodology. This part may still be in rough form, but it should indicate the likely nature of your approach.



5. This will be important in assessing the worth of your topic. For example, let's say you might propose the use of a questionnaire to collect evidence. You would then need to analyze the results of the questionnaire. Your potential outcomes (speaking generally) might be a positive correlation between two factors, a negative one, none at all, or unsatisfactory responses. Perhaps only one of these outcomes could lead to a dissertation. That result could suggest the need for a different approach to the issue, which in turn could lead you down a more productive path.


Let's say that's what has happened, and you're now in the happy position of writing the first draft of your formal proposal. This is an expansion of the topic analysis and will be your final work plan, so it will probably end up being anywhere from ten to forty pages. Again, here's a generally accepted proposal with an idea of expected page length:

Section of Proposal	Page Length
1. Summary	1-2
2.Hypothesis, problem or question	1-3
3. Importance of topic	1-2
4.Prior research on topic	1-7
5.Research approach or methodology	2-8
6.Limitations and key assumptions	1-2
7.Contributions to knowledge (for each potential outcome,if there are more than one)	1-3
8.Descriptions of proposed chapters in dissertation	2-3

Here is my thesis proposal, if you want a sample of a statement of purpose (i generally don't like to put subtitles indicating the sections for, in my view, it doesn't look much as an academic paper when one does so but some teachers ask their students to do so otherwise they get lost. So here i put them, though in the original one they are not included). It is also available on net if you want to see how references are arranged, just google the title.


Gothic Novelty and Uncanny domesticity in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1848)

Introduction:

As part of the Romantic rejection of rationality and return to the medieval and barbarian, Gothic literature emerged by the late eighteenth century as a genre which cultivates terrifying, supernatural sensations. By the mid-nineteenth century, this literary genre witnessed a great change as it associated itself with other popular genres (i.e: sensational, domestic, and fantastic). Through this fusion the Gothic had won a realistic touch affecting its settings, plot and characters. Charlotte Bronte is undoubtedly one of those Victorian writers whose novel Jane Eyre (1848) artfully demonstrates the geneosity of innovating a new 'wrought' and elaborated Gothic.


Justification of the topic, problematic, and justification of the problematic:


This present research entitled "Gothic Novelty and Uncanny Domesticity in Jane Eyre (1848)" discusses Bronte's achievement in re-inventing the Gothic through her transformation of the domestic world into a place of fear and unease. This subversion of the Gothic conventions aims at requestionning the Victorian consideration of the 'home' as the safest place ever. In other words, the research's ultimate purpose is to explore the multiple new facts Bronte brings to the Gothic genre for the sake of turning the 'home' to an 'uncanny' space.

In fact, Bronte's insertion of the Gothic within the household is in itself a rejection and violation of such ideals of domesticity already well established in the Victorian society. Therefore just as the Gothic, in its nature, has a tendency towards transgressing and disrupting the established, Bronte's 'new' Gothic also aims at breaking a strong belief rooted in the Victorian society ( i.e: the safety and domestic bless of the private sphere).



Our research will bring light to the various ways in which Charlotte Bronte makes use and sometimes transgresses Gothic clichés and generic conventions as well as highlight her creation of a new form of Gothicism through her mixing of high literary mode (i.e: realism) and popular ones (i.e: Gothic and sensational) in her process of domesticating the Gothic. In other words, it will demonstrate how Charlotte Bronte realized that the literary writing process was not conflictual between, the so often regarded as, opposing camps of literary style (i.e: Realism v.s Gothic and supernatural) but rather a constant conversation and negotiation between generic conventions and innovations. Thus, the research's purpose is to bring light to the ways in which Charlotte Bronte domesticates the Gothic and gothicizes the domestic.



Through our analysis of the apparent Gothic aspects of the novel and contrasting them with Gothic generic conventions, Bronte's Gothic seemed unquestionably remodeled. This led us to

raise such questions as: why do realism and fantastic modes work in perfect harmony? Was the choice of associating them meant to produce a certain effect?. Certainly, that effect was meant to create a brooding 'uncanniness' over the work, a disturbing uncanny that would requestion the safety of the private sphere.



The first part of the research will explore how the Gothic novel came to a sort of fusion with the sensational fiction and how the two techniques of 'Gothicizing the domestic' and 'domesticating the Gothic' came to be adopted by many novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century as Charles Dickens and how Charlotte Brontë's work successfully illustrate these transformations. This will help us understand better the evolution and context in which the Gothic was subjected to various mutations which affected its generic conventions first established in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the realistic touch that the Gothic had won through its association with popular literary styles such as domestic and sensational fiction. This part of the research is of eminent importance; as it will not only put us in the context of an important phase in the history of the Gothic fiction (i.e: the domestication of the Gothic) but also clear up the various influences which favored the appearance of such a mutation within the genre.

Review of literature: (context and previous research made on the topic)

The nineteenth century in literature was always referred to as the fin-de siècle or the age of decadence by sever critics who favored realist, rational and moralist styles of writing. The decadent writers were generally writers of Gothic, sensational and romantic works of fiction. Very rare indeed are the writers who could reconcile the latter modes of writing with the realist demands and exigency of the critics as Charlotte Brontë successfully did in her novel. Some rigid critics qualified horror literatures as “terrorist” fiction as did an anonymous critic humorously prescribe a formula of this style of writing in “Terrorist Novel Writing” in 1798 which advices the writer to follow this “recipe”:

Take__ An Old castle, half of it ruinous.
A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones.
Three murdered bodies, quite fresh.
As many skeletons, in chest and presses.
An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut.
Assassins and desperadoes, quant.suff. Noises, whispers, and groans, threescore at least. Mix them together, in the form of three volumes, to be taken at any of the watering places, before going to bed.1



The abandon of such mystic and extravagant gothic generic conventions is obvious during the mid-nineteenth century in order to fit the standards of the period. This phase of mutation of the Goth
ic we are interested in is sometimes referred to by critics as the process of ‘the domestication of the Gothic’ which some have explained by the fusion of the Gothic with the sensational fiction which was to appear in the second half of the nineteenth century. Though critics rarely dealt with this concept of domesticated Gothic, we find an interesting definition of the process of the ‘domestication of the Gothic’ which fits the case of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre given by Henry James in his review essay to Wilkie Collins’s The woman in White (1860) with whom sensational fiction is said to have begun:



To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors. This innovation gave, a new impetus to the literature of horrors. It was fatal to the authority of Mrs. Radcliffe and her everlasting castle in the Apennines. What are the Apennines to us, or we to the Apennines? Instead, of horrors of “Udolpho”, we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible.



No where we could find such an innovation so artfully illustrated as in Brontë’s Jane Eyre. If Mr.Collins is said to have initiated the sensational fiction, I will rather gently discredit him by saying that Charlotte Bronte previously anticipated this innovation some years before with a much more wrought Gothic Realism which delicately avoids falling into excess and pathos.



Fred Botting in his study of the evolution of the Gothic genre notices that the period of the mid-nineteenth century witnessed ‘a significant diffusion of gothic traces throughout literary and popular fiction within the forms of realism, sensation novels and ghost stories’2 which put in advance ‘homely’ terrors. As a result, gothic mutations discredited the genre from some of its exotic and extravagant aspects. Far were gone the surrealist castles of Walpole and the monstrous villains of Mary Shelley. The flirtation of the gothic with popular literary forms as sensational fiction and ghost stories resulted in a ‘new’ Gothic which affected the traditional Gothic with its exotic and mystic elements. Some gothic generic conventions were radically changed: the aristocratic castles transformed into domestic spaces providing an atmosphere of unease and horror, the villains epitomes of evil metamorphosed into corrupted humans or hero-villains, prisons and convents and other traditional gothic sites of suffering and brutality became simple domestic rooms which symbolized transgressed social boundaries and injustice.

It is true that the Gothic generic conventions were subjected to various transformations in this process of domestication, however it seems essential to look deeper into the roots of domesticity in fiction to reach a better understanding of this phase in the history of Gothic fiction. Nancy Armstrong in her Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) traces back the appearance of the domestic fiction to 1848. Armstrong notices that this kind of fiction exploits the ‘household’ and other domestic aspects in order to restore the transgressed boundaries which unrestricted desire had caused. Therefore, most of the literature written during the second half of the nineteenth century was marked by this process of domestication. But what is more interesting in Armstrong’s study is that she sees that the domestication was not the only way to solve such problems engendered by uncontrolled desire but the recurrent use of representations of madness, obsessions and ‘violent scenes of punishment and exclusion’1 all together with fantastic elements within the household, is another technique typical to the domestic fiction. This may but reveal to us the co-existence of the contradictory natures of both techniques used within some works of fiction of the period (i.e: the realistic aspect conveyed by the process of domestication v.s the supernatural and fantastic ones put forward by the diffusion of gothic elements as unusual events, enclosures and punishments).



Though Armstrong’s analysis has an evident feminist alienation as she explores the feminizing role of domesticity, her mapping of the historical process undergone by the domestic novel helped me realize the reciprocal nature of the relation between the domestic fiction and the Gothic genre or more precisely realistic and fantastic.

Hence our concern with what may at the first glimpse seem as contradictory processes of ‘Gothicizing the domestic’ and ‘domestication the Gothic’ through displaying a mutual and inseparable relation.


Another type of fiction which played an undeniable role in the ‘domestication of the Gothic’ is the sensational fiction. I have stated previously that my observations of the elements often attributed to the sensational fiction led me to conclude that Charlotte Brontë anticipated Wilkie Collins, the assumed forefather of the sensational, by her re-writing of the Gothic. Maureen Moran in Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (2007) explains the transformations that the Gothic was subjected to after the appearance of sensational fiction:

The domestication of such Gothic Clichés as oppressive labyrinthine spaces, exotic Continetal locations, murderous assassins, and intricate, impenetrable plots also creates new meanings. Dark, claustrophobic enclosures- the monastic dungeon and the prison- are transformed into familiar, protective institutions of British culture.



Consequently we notice that sensational fiction aimed to offer a terrifying perception of the ‘home’ through transgressing and domesticating gothic traditional elements by ‘shak[ing]‎ belief in the security of the ‘home’’.

These sensational elements and many others are all present in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre which is marked by a transformation of the “home” and other ‘protective institutions’ into dangerous asylums. Lowood School and the Reed House in Jane Eyre are spaces for usual scenes of punishment and imprisonment which give birth to claustrophobic fears and ghostly apparitions experienced by Jane.



Diane Long Hoeveler’s Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (1998) explores how the female, both as author and gothic heroine, redefines the concept of family in a patriarchal society which considered the familial cocoon as ‘the only sure and certain reality in a perilously shifting world of values’3. Thus, I came to assume that among those writers of the Gothic during the age of decadence, Charlotte Brontë is the one who artfully redefines both the Gothic as a genre and reshapes the notion of domesticity through cultivating an ‘uncanny’ and doubtful perception of it. In fact, Brontë in her re-writing of the Gothic through domesticating it; is not discrediting the Gothic from its capacity of terrorizing; on the contrary this confirms it by her invention of a Gothic realism which lets a brooding uncertainty about the supernatural and doubts about domesticity. This made me realize how the domestication of the Gothic optimizes the creation of a unique sensation of uncanniness and terror.


Canon Schmitt, for his part, in his essay “The Gothic Romance in The Victorian Period” (2002) traces the history of the Gothic novel stating the various shapes it had embodied during the Victorian era, it informs us that ‘in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Gothic is brought home to England, as in Dickens’s Gothic London or sensational fiction’s domestic terrors’4. Therefore, we notice that the Gothic did no longer take place in the Italian castles and other exotic spaces like

those of Walpole but rather in the most familiar homes and landscapes with which the reader is much more familiar with. However, I noticed that the domestication of the Gothic does not only affect the geographic settings but it also affects characters as we are no longer confronted to villains or demoniac evil inventions as Shelley’s Frankenstein, but rather to corrupted evil humans or hero-villains which demonstrate a better elaborateness in the psychology of the Gothic double . These characters illustrated a disturbing complexity of the psychology of the double. This complexity is often accompanied with a tragic uncertainty concerning the inexplicable events. Emily Dickinson’s lines of poetry “One need not be a chamber to be haunted / One need not be a house; / The brain has corridors surpassing/ Material place.” 1 might well illustrate Brontë’s domestication of traditional characters. In fact, Brontë’s heroine’ minds are occasionally haunted by their doubles: Bertha, often seen as Jane’s double, embodying the heroine’s fear, anger and sexual desire2. Thus, the incorporation of uncertainty on the nature of these ghostly apparitions provides a more frightening sensation, a sensation transmitted to us through the heroine’ puzzled mind who sometimes mocks such romantic lapses.



In our quest for Gothic elements in the novel of Charlotte Bronte, it seems that feminist critics contributed widely in throwing light to the different aspects of the Gothic in Brontë’s novel. Cannon Schmitt in “The Gothic Romance in the Victorian Period” associates the use of Gothicism in Jane Eyre with the issue of foreignness which highlights Brontë’s xenophobia as she ‘deploys a Gothic demonization of the foreign’.

Diane Long Hoeveler in Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes (1998) considers that Charlotte Brontë, at the demand of a ‘newly emerging bourgeois class of women’1, redefines gothic feminism by imagining a world in which the civilizing process’ undergone by her new ‘feminine’ middle-class heroines could triumph over the aristocratic women and patriarchal institution.
Susan Wolstenholme in Gothic (re)visions: Writing Women as Readers (1993) associates the ghostly apparitions and other gothic elements in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to nineteenth century gender issues as ‘women’s silence and self-effacement’2



But one of the eminent feminist critical works is undoubtedly The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (2000) in which Gubar and Gilbert explore the social issue of “la cage à folle” in works of Charlotte Brontë and other forms of enclosure of the nineteenth century in which women were incarcerated by oppressive patriarchal forces.



But if there is one eminent critic whose work was revelating for this research it's undoubtedly Donna Heiland. Indeed, Heiland was the only critic who tried to connect Freud's theory of the uncanny with Bronte's novel. In her feminist work, Gothic and Gender (2004) Heiland explores how the Gothic aimed to give a frightening account of the patriarchal society, historically tracing writers from the 1760s till 1840s. But regardless of her feminist motivations, Heiland in a chapter "Confronting the uncanny" could find a plausible reading for Bronte's use of Gothic. Heiland explores how Jane disturbs the houses she enters and how the novel can be seen as a feminist bildungsroman as Jane "finds a way out of the episodic gothic of her life"1. In sum, Heiland considers that Jane escapes that gothic circle and raises from homelessness to domesticity. On the contrary, our research concentrates on how Jane and other characters like Bertha or the Rochester the Byronic hero achieve to create homelessness and disorientation at home. A disturbing 'uncanny' which invades the home and challenges requestionning the Victorian belief of the safety of the private sphere.



From this wide range of criticism the novel of Brontë have receive, it becomes clear that feminist critics tend to read gothic elements as marks of patriarchal repression and domestic imprisoning which did not satisfy my enthusiastic interest in Gothic fiction. This is what has motivated me to look deeply in the new techniques Brontë uses to produce a narrative which artfully reconciles tradition and innovation, realism and fantastic, wildness and domesticity. However, almost all feminist critics implicitly explore a Freudian theory that I will adopt in my research, that of the ‘uncanny’.


Method or approach:

Freud's theory of the ‘uncanny’ is one of the most influential psycho-analytic studies in Gothic literature. In fact, Freud's study offers a structure which explores how a familiar situation

which is not usually considered as frightening, can raise in us a feeling of uncanniness. In his essay "The uncanny"(1919), Freud defines the uncanny as 'related to what is frightening –to what arouses dread and horror'1. But an etymological study of the German word ‘unheimlich’-equivalent of ‘uncanny’- undergone by Freud would be revolutionary in the field of horror literature. Freud had previously declared that the unheimlich means unfamiliar. However, Freud notices that ‘unheimlich’ happens to be the opposite but also a sub-kind of ‘heimlich’ or ‘homely’. Thus Freud adds the ‘heimlich’ (homely) as a sub-category of the ‘uncanny’ and, implicitly, of the Gothic genre at large as he aims to discover the various ways in which ‘the familiar can become uncanny and frightening’.



Our aim in adopting Freud's view of the ‘uncanny’ is to demonstrate how these ‘homely’ connections with the ‘unheimlich’ are in narrow relation with the fusion of the Gothic literature with other literary modes of writing (i.e: sensational and realistic) in Brontë's Jane Eyre and at the same time justify her choice of domesticating the Gothic. In his study of ghost tales and horror literary texts, Freud notices that those techniques used by writers to raise in us ‘uncanny’ sensations are both in close connection to the real world and surpassing it sometimes. For Freud, the uncanny feeling ‘cannot rise unless there is a conflict of judgment’1 between what is real and what we agreed to be not:


…an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality.



According to Freud uncanny experiences find their origins in repressed infantile complexes which ‘civilized people’ just ‘surmount’ as he says ‘the uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been repressed’3. Therefore these complexes and beliefs are still existent and create a ‘conflict of judgment as to whether things which have been 'surmounted' and are regarded as incredible may not, after all, be possible’.4

Thus we notice that a sentiment of uncertainty towards the old and familiar belief is omnipresent and produces a clash when they occur in real life situation, especially when paralleled with our obsession with 'seiz[ing] upon any confirmation about their existence’1. We can clearly see that Brontë was conscious of the importance of the realistic dimension in creating uncanny situations.

Our view then matches perfectly with Freud's consideration that the ‘conflict of judgment’ is the result of the writer's creation of an ‘intellectual uncertainty’ within his work. This is can be illustrated by Jane Eyre's hesitation to consider the surrealistic events as real or not. Freud sees that the ‘intellectual uncertainty’ depends on the world the writer chooses to put us in. In fact, he notes that:

The imaginative writer has this license among many others, that he can select his world of representation so that it either coincides with the realities we are familiar with or departs from them in what particular he pleases. We accept his ruling in every case.



So, in choosing a surrealistic world as that of fairy tales the reader forgets about the rational and real world and accepts to ‘play the game’ and is no more impressed by the presence of the unreal and supernatural elements. Consequently, the writer can achieve no uncanniness. On the contrary, the writer is more likely to raise in us this sensation if he chooses a more realistic and familiar world, ‘the world of commonly reality’3. On the same trend, Freud suggests that the writer has the possibility to increase this sensation by ‘bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact’. Such events, I suppose, may take the form of ghostly apparitions and other inexplicable events. For Freud, the incorporation of such unreal and uncommon events within a familiar and real situation would re-question our previously ‘surmounted’ superstitiousness and hence raise a unique sensation of uncanniness.


Freud’s theory displays the geniosity of elaborateness of a framework which re-organizes Gothic elements (i.e: ghostly apparitions, gothic doubles, enclosure and imprisonment, entrapment, and improbable events) in such a way that both the writer and the reader would be able to recognize a pure uncanny feeling. The uncaninness favored by Freud is the one which the writer creates taking into account both the fears and the intelligence of the reader by avoiding excess of mysticism and extravagant exoticism. This kind of uncanninness is well illustrated in Charlotte Brontë’s novel which demonstrates a much more wrought Gothic by her ‘flirts’ with a multitude of modes of writing as sensational and realist.

Indeed, the ‘intellectual uncertainty’ is omnipresent in Jane Eyre . Though the heroine adopts a contemptuous and humoristic tone, her narration of the unusual experiences melt uncertainty and hesitation in qualifying the events as real and thus managing to create an uncanny perception of reality. In fact, the heroine’s efforts to escape facing the Gothic are in vain, hence my previous assumption that Brontë’s subversion of the Gothic is but a way to confirm its threatening presence. Brontë’s modeling of the Gothic within a familiar space and realist tone of narration achieves to break the reassuring rationality which her heroines strive to maintain. As a result, Gothic and realism are no longer seen as contradictory but they work on the same trend and seem to collaborate in creating an original form of uncanninness. In Jane Eye the intellectual uncertainty is contrasted by her infantile reaction to ghostly apparitions is in the Red room and her mature reaction and realist account of the ghost of Thornfield which do not allow us to doubt it. The heroines’ denials of the unreal, lucid explanations of Rochester and other realist techniques are in fact the source of the uncanniness which marks the novel. Jane's realistic accounts of the events are unquestionable and render the Gothic more vivid and uncanny. Therefore, the adoption of a realist and mocking tone in treating the Gothic helps to produce a reverse situation by confirming the surreal and re-questioning the real.



As stated before, the uncanny is in constant relation with the familiar. This familiar resonance within unfamiliar occurrences has two foundations: Firstly, the heroine’s past experiences or what they perceive as familiar are in fact Gothic in nature. Jane Eyre is orphan and without prospect and trying to improve her situation and seem to have led a Gothic life. However the problematic of the melting of the Gothic and realist is in the ending Charlotte Brontë chooses as Jane Eyre succeeds to get rid of her Gothic life and past experiences through a reconstructed and re-defined familiarity and domesticity.



Plan or Chapter devision:


The first chapter of my dissertation will put us in the context in which the Gothic was remodeled by Charlotte Brontë and the multiple reasons which helped its appearance. This chapter is devided into two sections: the first section called "Formation of domestic Gothic" will try to explore the various influences which favored the appearance of this new form of Gothicism (i.e.: fantastic, domestic, and sensational fictions). In the second section called ‘Unthroned traditional Gothic’ will look for the reasons which pushed Charlotte Brontë to abandon the extravagancy of the traditional Gothic as exigency of publication of the period. These influences and constraints of publication would give us a first glimpse at the realist aspects found in Jane Eyre and allow recognition of Gothic generic conventions and other forms of innovation within the works.


The second chapter of this research called 'intruders at home' would focus on how such uncommon and unfamiliar characters like Jane, Rochester and Bertha infiltrate the domestic sphere, violate its equilibrium to create an uncanny atmosphere. Figures like Jane and Rochester would be compared and contrasted to the normal standards of domesticity of the period and how they are far from these. Bertha, a more fascinating case, would be studied in close connection to Freud's uncanny theory of 'the return of the dead'. All these intruders Charlotte Bronte uses render the domestic sphere strange and above all frightening but undeniably, like the uncanny, echoes something familiar and already experienced.



The third chapter called 'memory of the walls'1 explores how settings, an important Gothic element, give a sensation of both strangeness and déjà vu, and thus familiarity. The 'domestic' settings, though made non-domestic, play an important role in the work as they are often responsible for the brooding uncanniness in the work and the fears of Jane. Besides, these settings can be seen as 'strangely familiar' for Jane as all the places in the novel seem to echo one another and Jane's past experiences. Similarly, just as the Gothic echoes something familiar and previously experienced, setting dissimulate family secrets and hence a sense of familiarity. In sum, the previous chapters aim at exploring how Charlotte Bronte succeeds creating 'homelessness at home' by exploiting the uncanny 'return of the dead' to break the boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar and disrupt the canons of the domestic sphere.

Some conventions to follow while typing your statement of purpose (or any other academic paper):

-Do NOT use ANY color other than black (if i put the titles in red it is but to highlight them in this post)

Titles of books should be underlined OR written in italics . Titles of essays, should be put between inverted commas and written in italics.

-In your Word, always use POLICE 12 TIMES NEW ROMANS and the space-line should be DOUBLE (interligne 2) some teachers may ask for 1.5, you need to ask them and see.

- go to your layout (mise en page) and make sure your have a distance of 2.5 cm on the top, bottom, left and right of the page.

-espace all your paragraphs and make sure each paragraph is demarked from the previous one by 5 spaces (not lines, but spaces =espace)

-Bloc quotes: i think you noticed the few lines in my paper written in bold and small letters. This is called a bloc quote. When you want to quote lines that exceed 27 words, this is a bloc quote (generally more than three lines). For this bloc quote, you need to go to the next line, make 10 spaces and write in POLICE 11 TIMES NEW ROMANS and in BOLD and space-line should be 1 (interligne 1)


There are many conventions some related to references and other specific cases , one can't mention them all but these are, in my view, the basic ones.

There is but one 'sassy' girl sweet Hadiya i'm really happy to see you again sister

ooooooooooooooh my dear Sassy86 is here again. welcome sister! You're really a great person. Thank you a billion for your post. It's really helpful. Thank you again dear.

hiiiiiiiiiiiii Sabine, my dear neighbor all pleasure is mine sweety

Hi brother, bless you ! wow, such a warm welcome from dear friends cheers one up

thank you sassy.

You're welcome bilinda Good luck

Hi Sassy! I'm a little bit confused about writing my literature review

literature review means intertextuality between our work and others, is it that?

are we supposed to write about some works treating the same issue as ours
or
what critics had said about our issue in the same work?

thank you my tender sister

Hi my sweet Sabine ! Good question indeed. Well, in your review of literature your must simply show us that you have read what is related to:
*your field of study that you have selected -in general- ( ex: post-colonial literature, Gothic literature, ...etc)
* your novel (the work you have selected to work on).

In order to make all this clear, I must give you an example:

I worked on Gothicism in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. This is how I decided to organize my review of literature:

-First, I gave a list of works I have read which talked about the Gothic genre and especially the type of Gothicism of the 19th C (the one which concerns me, the literary period which concerns my novel)
You must write something like 1 paragraph for each work (each book of criticism you have read). Sometimes you can group 2 or 3 books of criticism within the same paragraph if they are similar and share the same view.

-Second, I moved to the list of works which have dealt with the Gothicism in general in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (This is my concern). Once I have read these works which have dealt with what I am concerned, I have noticed -and this is a logical process which comes by itself- that these works have missed or neglected a given point or that they have talked about something but not enough and I feel that I can do more, contribute more.

This is how your topic 'appear' . The review of literature is the step which gives birth to your topic.

The review of literature is the transition which will allow you introduce your topic (stating your topic and its problematic) -It's like you're saying "I have read this and that, these books informed me about this and that, and I've discovered this and that, to finally decide that I'll talk about this and that"

You'll read a lot, and everytime you think that you've finally discovered what you want to do but at a given time you see that you falsely took the wrong road. But you read other works of criticism, meet something more interesting, questions melt in your mind but hopefully you'll come to something clearer.

If you need anything I'll be here, don't worry

I don't find the words to thank you may sweet friend you always explain things in a plain way now things are more than clear thank youuuuuuuuu sassy love u my doll

Oh hamdolah, nothing can make me happier ! Don't hesitate dear, I know how is it like to work alone, but the fruits of success taste much better that way you'll see Saha ftourak sweety