LITR 5731: Seminar in American Minority Literature
University of Houston-Clear Lake, fall 2001
Student Research Proposal

Jill Reioux

I am considering "voice" as my topic, but I am unsure about how I should approach it.  Some ideas I have considered are:

1. the author's purpose in choosing a particular voice

2.  the different types of voices that the authors use such as standard English and eubonics

3.  the narrator vs. the character voice

Please give me some feedback on which ideas I should focus on and any other ideas about voice that you would like me to consider.

The primary sources that would be well suited to this topic would be Song of Solomon, Push, and the Langston Hughes poems.  Please tell me which one(s) of these you would prefer I used.  I must say that I am really into Langston Hughes and would love to write a paper about him. 

I was leaning toward the essay option.

Dear Jill,

Yes, an essay sounds right. To narrow the topic, you might consider developing an idea of "voice" and applying it to Hughes's poems, maybe reserving other texts as backgrounds either to the development of the idea or comparison/contrasts to Hughes and his poetry.

I like the word "voice" too but I'm also somewhat wary of it, as it's one of those words--like family, tradition, dream--at which everyone nods in agreement, but when or if you ask people what they mean by those words, they often emphasize very different aspects. So you want and need to define as exactly as possible what you mean by the word--and what you will mean may partly be decided by what you're going to emphasize in Hughes.

One first move, just so you don't get overwhelmed by what you find in research, would be to review some of Hughes's poetry and try to isolate as far as possible what you have in mind, in your own words, when you think about his voice. Make some notes.

Some first moves in research would be to see if you can find "voice" in some of our reference section's handbooks on literary theory and terms. (You may not, as sometimes "mystic" terms like this slip through the nets.) The surest thing would be to do a keyword search on the MLA database in the library using "voice." You'll get more items than you need, but by scanning through them you may find some articles that deal with the distinctions you mention in your proposal.