Students are asked to write a 20-page paper on a topic of their choice that assimilates several texts and/or authors from the syllabus. Some students can elect to conduct independent external research (on debates over public funding of the arts, for instance).
In the past, most students have written close analyses of the material read in class during the semester. Some topics have included: the late eighteenth-century distinction between the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful; the origins of art-for-art's-sake in the writings of Immanuel Kant and John Keats; and arguments for the alleged symmetry of beauty and justice in William Wordsworth and Elaine Scarry.