Alright, today we will be learning about how to make a thesis evolve and what the evolving thesis is. The evolving thesis is the main tool, will be the main skill that you'll be using in this essay. It's the kind of one new skill you'll be learning in this unit and it's a natural extension of the XYZ thesis, but it's going to allow you to accommodate and use a lot more sources than you did in essay 2. So let's begin.
So first, what is an evolving thesis? The important thing to know about the evolving thesis is that your thesis is evolving and changing over the course of your essay, but it's making essentially the same claim throughout your essay, but that claim becomes more complex as it encounters your evidence and sources. There's a direct relation between your sources and evidence and also the claims that you're making throughout the essay.
They're really linked together here and one is building into the other. A good way to visualize this is the snowball metaphor, which I'm going to show you in a second. But first, let's look at Cohen's thesis, right? So when I first talked about the evolving thesis, I said Cohen uses this in his essay.
So I just want to kind of map this and show you how it's working here, right? He starts with his first thesis 1.0, where he's saying, you know, the monster's body is a cultural body. Now, this is his first thesis, but it's still a claim, right?
It's still arguable, it's still specific, and it's still compelling. So you want to make sure your first thesis, likewise, is still a thesis you could argue about. But he doesn't stop there.
He could hypothetically have written a whole essay just about how the monster's body is a cultural body. But he doesn't end there. Instead, he uses that and builds on it to make increasingly more complex claims, moving on to thesis two all the way through seven.
Now, notice that each step of his thesis, he's introducing something new. In thesis two, he's introducing the idea of transformation and how the monster changes over time. Here he's introducing the idea of categories and how the monster is hybrid.
Then in thesis four, he's introducing the idea of difference and cultural difference. Five, the idea of what is allowed and permissible and what is not allowed. Six, the idea of desire and fear and how they're related.
And then in seven, what he does in seven is he doesn't add something new, but instead this final thesis is his, what he's doing here is kind of tying everything together and synthesizing everything he does. And this is a really good model for what you should be doing. your when you get to the final thesis of your essay is that that final thesis thesis seven should be able to account for everything you've said before but it should be synthesized right he doesn't just repeat everything he says before he kind of ties it together in a way that makes it really clear how it's all related and he really hits home on that so what claim now of course he's got his so what claims throughout the essay just like you should have as well so if you're thinking about what does the evolving thesis look like Cohen is a really really wonderful example of it of course he has more evolutions than you will need to have in your essay because, you know, he's writing a 20-page paper, so bear that in mind. Now, how to do this?
The metaphor of the snowball I think is really helpful here. So essentially your thesis evolves by incorporating new sources and evidence like a snowball. That means that your final thesis, thesis five here, is going to be much more, it's going to encompass everything that came before. It's going to encompass your theses one through four. but it's also going to encompass all of the sources and evidence you've introduced before you get here, essentially.
So that's the really kind of key thing to bear in mind is that this thesis is going to be more complex. It's not necessarily going to be longer. It might be, but it's going to be able to account for everything mentioned earlier in the essay.
So but here, let's talk about where you start. Right. So you start with thesis 1.0. And this is a thesis where you're essentially going to be making a claim about your film or TV show that you don't need a source for, that you're just like, okay, here's my read of the film.
Now, of course, you're presenting this at the start of your essay, but you've already done all your research. You know where you're going. So this first thesis should be informed by your research, even though your reader doesn't see it yet.
They haven't seen it. Essentially, you're hiding your cards close to your chest. Here's your kind of lensless, sourceless analysis of your film, just in kind of layman's terms, no technical terms. no specialized language, just what is a claim you can make about your about your film or about your TV show.
Then, you know, so you make that claim and then you support it with evidence, of course, right? You want to make sure to support that claim and make sure that, you know, your reader can buy that with some analysis from your, basic analysis from your film or TV show. And that'll be just like you did in, you know, kind of like the analysis you did in Assignment 2. where you're working with, you're kind of doing more technical analysis.
Now this might not be technical analysis, it might be plot, it might be dialogue, right, but you don't want to be bringing in sources yet. Then you're going to be introducing your first source, and what that source is going to do is it's going to force you to rethink how to say your claim. So you're going to have your second thesis, your second evolution, where you're arguing for basically the same thing, but it's allowing you to draw on the language and the ideas and the things that your source makes available to you. For instance, if you're introducing Curtis in Source 1, and that's going to give you access to the language of sovereignty, violence, beings inside or outside of language and law, right?
These are all things that you could introduce using Cohen, and depending on what you introduce when you talk about your source will shape how you can restate your thesis with this new information in mind. So you're gonna be making a different claim that is directly following the claim you made before. And then you're going to want to of course support that with evidence from the film, make sure that that's a...
because you know your source probably might be talking about the film, but it might not. Like Curtis isn't probably talking about the film you're doing, so you need to make sure that what he's saying here applies to your film and drawing evidence from it. Then you're going to just repeat that process, introduce a new source, figure out how that requires that you reframe your thesis, how your thesis is going to be able to account for everything you said before, support with evidence, repeat, do the same process again until you're out of sources and until you're kind of at the end of what you think is the most complex claim you can make about your film or tv show. given the sources that you have and given the kind of space that you have. So that's kind of the rough overview of the process of evolving your thesis.
So this model is assuming that every source you're using is being used to actually evolve your thesis. Now, there are some exceptions to this. So let me talk for a second about how your sources can be used in your essay. So there are kind of five main ways I can see you using your sources. One is to provide background or context.
So this is, you know, say if you find a source that is talking about, you know, an interview with the director or talking about how the film was made or some intentions or maybe also some background or context could be like genre background, right? So if you're working with a film maybe that's playing with genres that are outside of what we talked about in class, you might want to be drawing on a source that is helping you explain what those genres are and what the tropes are in that. Depending on what exactly the nature of this source is, if you're using it for background or context, will shape whether it's being used to evolve your thesis or not, right? Because you could imagine that something that's providing background and context could be used as evidence, right? It might be in this evidence part of it rather than really functioning as a proper source that's evolving your thesis.
Instead, it might be supporting a claim you've already made. That's okay. But you can also imagine that, say, you're using a source that explains what the tropes are in the romance genre, because your film is playing with the romance genre in some ways, or playing with those tropes. Then once you've kind of explained what those are, introduced that source and explained what those tropes are, then you could talk about the romance genre when you reframe your thesis, right?
That could become part of your thesis because you've now kind of explained what that means. So that could work both ways. Now, most of the rest of these are going to be used mostly to evolve your thesis. So one is to use your source to introduce a useful concept or term. So this would be like taking a definition, a more technical or specialized term from another discipline or from, you know, film studies or something like that, and using that to kind of introduce and reframe your thesis.
This is a really helpful thing and a really great way to use your sources, but you're not going to have space to use every single source as a lens, right? Because as you saw from writing lens analysis, it takes a lot of time. Maybe you just need to borrow a word or two.
that's completely fine and a valid way to use your sources. But a natural extension of using a term or concept is to use it as a lens. Now this is a little bit different because it requires that you kind of dig in more. You can't just define the term and kind of move on.
You need to explain the overall argument that the source is making, how they're using that term, and what the implications are, and then apply it to your scene. And that will lead you to a new interpretation of your scene. So that's the kind of it's a it's a kind of spectrum.
between taking a definition to using a lens in this way. So you know how to use lenses, I'm not going to talk about that. Obviously it leads you to a new thesis. Now you can also use your source to help support a claim that you're making.
So again this can kind of go two ways. Say if you find a source that's directly about your film or TV show and they're making an argument, an interpretation, and say that interpretation lines up nicely with yours, then you can draw on the analysis they've done of the film or of the TV show. and use it to support the claim you're making. Now, so this could, to kind of go back, that can be positioned in the evidence section, right? You might already have made that claim and you're just bringing in their voice to be like, oh look, someone else has made the same argument.
You know, here, if you needed any more convincing, this, you know, this expert in their field also did this, you know, that way it's, it works as support. But also you could frame it as a source, right? You might introduce this interpretation of your, of the film. and then use that as a kind of stepping stone to get you to a new thesis, a new claim that you couldn't get to before. So there's two options there.
And lastly, you could introduce an alternative reading. So here, say you find, again, find a source that is talking directly about your object, and, but they're making, taking an approach to it that you disagree with, that you want to argue against. You could introduce, summarize what their argument is, and then make a case for why you, why it's not a useful way of seeing that film or why your interpretation is going to be more helpful. So this will necessarily evolve your thesis because essentially it's going to mean you need to account for the things they bring up.
And the chapter in They Say, I Say, which is about the naysayer and bringing a naysayer into your text would be a really helpful thing if you want to do that. And what this allows you to do is it means you can interact with sources that you find that aren't maybe directly supporting your argument. So if you find a source and you're like, this is great, but actually it's arguing the exact opposite, don't throw it out.
You can still find a way to fit it into your argument and because you can still use it as a stepping stone to evolve your thesis. So you don't need all your sources to agree with you, basically. So these are the ways to use your sources.
Some of them might fall more into evidence, but most of them should ideally be used to get to that next evolution of your thesis. Alright, so to kind of summarize what I just said, each time your essay introduces a new source, your thesis should become more complex. Now this is true regardless of whether you're using a source as evidence or as a kind of lens or as a no matter how you're using it, your thesis needs to be responding and react to the information that your source introduces into your essay and adapting and evolving in response to it. You should never be going backwards and you should never be just saying the same thing. Each time you restate your thesis it should be different in some way.
Alright, and then lastly some things to avoid, some things to know that some signs that you're maybe writing a thesis that is not an evolving thesis or things to avoid if you're trying to write one. One is you want to make sure your thesis doesn't begin too simply or too vaguely. You want to make sure that your initial thesis is still a thesis that is arguable, compelling, and specific. If you start too simple or vague, or you just start with summary, that's not a good place to start. You still need to start by making a claim.
On the other side of that, you don't want to start with something that's too complex or too specific. Now, this is an easier thing to fix because if you craft your initial starting point, your thesis, that you think you're making but you realize that oh god this is actually going to take several steps to make and there's a lot of complexity here you can just kind of reverse engineer an earlier and simpler thesis now you the hard part is finding out what is simple enough um to begin with and that's a kind of hard call and that's um something that we're going to be talking about in the peer review session which is why i'm making you do a peer review of your evolving thesis so that people can be like oh maybe you should start here instead or maybe your initial thesis is still too complex so you want to make sure you find a nice middle ground Another thing you want to avoid is that you want to make sure that your thesis is actually evolving. You don't want to just be pointing to the same thing over and over again and using your sources to just say the same thing you said in thesis 1.0.
So if you find yourself using phrases like, so once again we see that, or here we see again, or this demonstrates once again that, you want to make sure you want to sit back and think, why am I just, why aren't my sources helping me say something new? Why am I just repeating myself? You do not want to be repeating yourself here.
you want to be actually saying things that are more complex, more interesting, things that have bigger stakes. Another problem that sometimes happens is that your sources aren't actually the thing evolving your thesis. You have an evolving thesis, but it's just you, it's just your writing and your analysis that's doing it, but your sources aren't playing a role in that evolution.
So you want to make sure that there's a direct link, just like that diagram showed, where your thesis is kind of addressing a source and then using that source to reframe your thesis, and then they're not happening separately. That's a really important part. And lastly, you want to make sure that you're not skipping steps in your argument. You want to make sure that you've given enough information, provided enough evidence and analysis to actually support each step, and that when you move to the next thesis, you're not introducing too much at once. So you shouldn't really be introducing two sources and then involving your thesis because it's hard to follow that.
So you want to make sure you be doing things one step at a time so that your reader can follow your argument and make sure that they don't get lost. All right, I think that's it. That should cover the basics of what the Evolving Thesis is.
If you have more questions, feel free to reach out to me, but otherwise, good luck writing and researching!