History of Love Course Guide 

Best case scenario: Choosing a theme is automatic. For whatever reason, when reading the book, a certain aspect or idea captures your imagination. Right away, you have an idea (neither too obvious or too much of a stretch) that you can develop into a thesis.

More Commonly: Nothing or everything jumps out at you. Figuring out which ideas you can successfully shape into a paper that makes a substantial claim is difficult.

GETTING STARTED: Here are some things to think about when choosing a theme:

1. Pick a theme you find interesting, perhaps because of a personal experience or because it connects with another reading or piece of creative work you know. Don't pick a theme just because it seems easiest. "Easy" can turn into "obvious," meaning that it can be hard to come up with something insightful to say about an observation requiring no reflection. 
2. Pick a theme for which there is enough textual evidence. You need plenty of examples to consider. Go through The History of Love and look for all of the specific pages where a potential theme shows up.
3. Pick a theme that requires some wrangling.  Just because a theme shows up a lot does not make it interesting as an idea.  When you look at the different places in the text your theme shows up, hopefully you can locate tensions worth describing.  Just like how conflict helps to make stories interesting, tensions within and between themes discussed help to make academic essays interesting.  More on tensions below.
4. Pick a theme that connects well to at least two outside sources.  These can be sources other than The History of Love that were assigned to you, sources you find on your own in your research, and/or campus programming related to the novel.  These sources can help you provide your readers with background knowledge they need to understand an aspect of The History of Love.  They can provide information about events, places, or people described in the novel; about the rhetorical techniques Krauss uses; or about your specific theme.  They can help you bring insight to a question that you raised in connection to The History of Love.  They can even offer a different perspective than that provided in The History of Love in order to increase the tension that will make your work interesting.
   

What is tension and why do I want it?  Sometimes, there is a temptation to play it safe and only make claims that are undeniably true.  The problem is that if a claim is obviously true, no argument was needed.  For instance, it would be a “safe” argument to claim that loss is a theme in The History of Love and then to support it with the examples of Alma and Bird dealing with the death of their father or Leo dealing with the loss of his son. True, but so what?  Better to create interest and add to the discussion by putting this fact of loss in tension with the characters’ drive to survive and make connections with others, and then make a claim about how this tension gives meaning to the novel and helps you understand other places in the text.

You have identified a theme that you want to discuss in your paper on The History of Love.  Now, you need to develop a thesis statement that puts forth a claim that is 1) arguable, 2) specific, and 3) significant.

1.  A thesis must be arguable:

If I were to say to you the there is a moon rotating around the Earth, you probably wouldn’t argue with me.  It would be hard to find anyone who would argue with me.  So, the fact that what I say is true does not make it a good thesis.  A decent thesis needs an argument to back it up and thereby justifies having a paper about it.

Following the same line of reasoning, if I say, “The History of Love is about an elderly man named Leo, a young woman named Alma, and how they come together at the end of the novel,” no argument is required, and I haven’t set forth a thesis.  If I say, “the role of loss in The History of Love,” you might say “What about it?”  I have identified a topic or theme, but I have not made a claim about it, so I do not have a thesis. 

2.  A thesis must be specific:

One of the hardest things to do when writing a paper is to narrow down a thesis so that it can be supported adequately in the allowed time and page limit.  If I say, “The History of Love is the most interesting novel ever written about surviving loss,” I have probably bitten off more than I can chew.  First, I would have to come up with criteria by which I am going to measure “interesting.”  Then, I would have to survey all of the books about surviving loss that my audience might know.  If I am taking any other classes, this might be a larger project than I want to consider.  When phrasing your thesis, you have to consider what it would take to support it.

If you want to make an argument, for example, about the effect of loss on families, you can narrow your claim into an acceptable thesis in a number of ways.  You could limit your focus to the families portrayed in The History of Love.  Alternatively, if you have found some good supporting research, you could talk about families more generally using The History of Love as an illustrating example, but you will still want to use qualifying words like “some” or “many” to avoid overgeneralization.

3.  A thesis must be significant: 

The fact that a thesis is arguable helps to make it significant, because disagreement warrants discussion.  The fact that a thesis is specific helps to make it significant, because it sets forth a claim narrow enough that it can be successfully persuasive.  To be truly significant, though, a thesis needs to indicate that its truth or falsehood matters.  It has to pass the “So What?” test.  Does it solve an existing problem or correct an existing misconception? 

One of the most effective ways to achieve this is by showing that others care about this subject, by showing that an ongoing conversation exists to which your paper will contribute.  As Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein argue in They Say / I Say, “effective  persuasive writers do more than make well-supported claims (‘I say’); they also map those claims relative to the claims of others (‘they say’)” (xii).  Whether or not your thesis explicitly refers to outside sources, it should raise a point that you will relate to the writings of others in the body of your text.

Most of us have experience with taking timed writing tests and have been taught something like the five-paragraph essay to make this a manageable task.  This training has its benefits and drawbacks.  The good thing about it is that it demonstrates the value of being organized and having examples that support our opinion.  The bad thing about it is that it only prepares us to write about the kind of reflection that can be accomplished in a few minutes and gives us little help with integrating sources.  Performing well on this paper will require both good organization in which a claim is well supported and sustained thinking about several sources.

Subtle Thinking or Equivocation?   

      Those timed tests usually ask us to take a side on an issue.  If we don’t, we know we will be graded down for being wishy-washy.  In preparing this paper, looking at your chosen theme from a number of perspectives can only help you.  Your instructor and classmates can help you come up with ways to describe the tensions and conflicts you see in a way that will seem subtle and smart rather than like equivocation or self-contradiction.  In large part, your success in doing so will come from the care with which you use textual support from The History of Love and outside sources. 

Textual Evidence

      An English paper doesn’t have to prove a point 100% or even beyond a reasonable doubt.  It does, however, have to provide enough evidence to explain what you are saying and make a compelling case that your readers should consider your ideas.  You have to support your opinions and, while bringing in personal experiences makes your writing more interesting and shows where you are coming from, nothing can replace careful readings of specific passages of the texts under consideration.  Ask yourself questions about a theme, like, “In The History of Love, where do I see love displayed and love tested? How do the events change the characters’ attitudes about love?  Do I feel the same about love having read The History of Love? What happens when I put these instances from the narrative of different kinds of love and lack of love together in juxtaposition?  How does the theme of love relate to the book as a whole?”  You may or may not decide to spell out one or more questions in your paper, but whichever questions you do address will need to be answered using textual evidence from The History of Love and your outside sources. 

Apart, Side-by-Side, All Together

      Having selected a few passages, take some time writing a paragraph or more about each.  Generate as many ideas as you can, writing more than you will use and not worrying at all about grammar or “correctness.”  Write down everything that seems significant about the passage, including both what is said/shown and how it is written/drawn and including what is related to your theme and what is not.   One you have considered each individually, compare them.  Finally, consider all of these passages and juxtapositions in relation to the whole, both the whole of The History of Love and the whole of the text you want to create.  This thought process should generate a lot of rough material; select from this which ideas to work into your first full draft and which passages will be most useful to discuss.  When you quote or paraphrase these passages in your draft, don’t assume your reader will automatically see everything you saw in your brainstorming exercises.  Tell your reader what you need them to see, how you interpret it, and how it supports the main idea you set forth in your thesis.