How to write a Seminar Paper

A Seminar Paper Contains:

 Title
 Abstract
 Introduction
 Body
 Conclusion
 Works cited
 Title

 The title should summarize the paper’s  Centred on the page

main idea  Typed in 12 - point Times New Roman
 Should not be bolded, underlined, or
italicized
 A Force of Love: A Deconstructionist Reading of Characters in Dickens’s Great
Expectations
 Representation of Children and Childhood in Colonial India: A Study of the
works of Three Indian Writers, Mulk Raj Anand, Nirad C. Chaudhuri and R.K.
Narayan.
 Kaiser Haq’s Voice against the Eurocentric Tradition : A Reflection from the
Poems Published in the Streets of Dhaka
 Split Desire’ of Men and the Representation of the Body of Women in The
Unbearable Lightness of Being and Padma Nadir Majhi
 Diverse Gender Roles and Individual Strife in A.S. Byatt’s Possession
 An ecocritical Reading of Syed Manzoorul Islam’s “The Two Assassins” and
“The Merman’s Prayer”
 Abstract

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a rising class of Indian scholars
produced a rich body of diverse literature in English that presented insider accounts of the
socio-cultural, economic, political, and ideological standings of both public and family lives in
colonial India. Their writing, whether conformative or reformative in implication,
encapsulated both the existing and the rapidly changing mental, social, cultural, and economic
dynamics of their period. Writers have repeatedly used as the focus of their works, the theme
of childhood as a significant and ideal trope for literature that traces a history from colonial
rule to a coming of age through which new identities were articulated as were the dominant
concerns of this period. This paper examines the works of three Indian writers who record and
represent childhood and the child in colonial India at this critical juncture in Indian history.

Keywords: Childhood, colonial education, cultural hegemony, colonial gaze, identity,

alienation, ambivalence, hybridity
 Abstract
Both the East and the West have their unique traditions: own histories, cultures, languages, dresses,
and customs. However, the West stereotypes the East with peculiar customs, images, doctrines,
superstitions etc. to legalize the universal acceptance of the Eurocentric tradition and its colonial
bureaucracies. European countries propagate the idea that non-European countries are inferior to
them, and ironically, take on the divine task of rescuing these substandard cultures. They carry out
this mission through ontological and epistemological violence. Kaiser Hamidul Haq (1950- ),
whose poetry is deeply grounded in socio-cultural issues of the East, resists the marginalization of
non-European cultures and the world – wide internalization of Eurocentric assumptions. He
presents the East as it is- with its values, beliefs, rituals, and myths. Moreover, he sarcastically
portrays the absurdities of the binary opposition between the East and the West (the dominated and
the dominant, the brute and the civilized) to attain equal status for the Eastern tradition. This paper
attempts to trace how Kaiser Haq’s poems in Published in the Streets of Dhaka, especially
“Grishma, Barsha,” “Six Shared Seasons,” “ Durga Puja,” and “Welcome, Tourist Shahib!” “Ode
on the Lungi,” “East and West,” question the hegemony of Eurocentric tradition offering a counter
discourse of a world of mutuality.

Keywords: stereotypes, Eurocentrism, Kaiser Haq, Dhaka, egalitarian, Walt Whitman,

epistemological violence
How to state the aim of the paper in an abstract

 This paper examines

 This paper attempts to
 This paper looks at
 This paper looks into
 This paper aims at finding
 This paper aims to show
 This paper explores
 This paper investigates
 This paper seeks to highlight
In-text Citations

 Quotation
 Summary
 Paraphrase

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/using_research/quoting_paraphrasing_and_s
ummarizing/index.html
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/using_research/quoting_paraphrasing_and_s
ummarizing/paraphrasing_sample_essay.html
American Exceptionalism as our founders conceived it was defined by what America
was, at home. Foreign policy existed to defend, not define, what America was.

“American Exceptionalism as our founders conceived it was defined by what

America was, at home. Foreign policy existed to defend, not define, what America
was” (McDougall 37).

As Walter A. McDougall argues, for the founding fathers America’s exceptionalism

was based on the country’s domestic identity, which foreign policy did not shape but
merely guarded (37).
Verbs that can be used

 Says/Said
 Comments/Commented
 Notes/Noted
 States/Stated
 Remarks/Remarked
 Writes/Wrote
 Argues/Argued

You can also write:

 According to
 Nirad C. Chaudhuri comments “even if the whole generation of adults had
immolated themselves under the car, I do not think that would have made much
difference to the enjoyment of us, the children. It was the fair for boys and girls”
(34).

 Block Quotation: Four or more lines, Separate paragraph, 0.5 inch indented
Human-centered, or anthropomorphic, environmentalism, sometimes termed
shallow ecology, remained the order of the day until the late 1940s, when a
new generation of environmentalists forwarded an earth-centered
environmentalism they termed deep ecology. This post-Enlightenment view
of nature repudiated the modern conception of nature as a machine, reverting
to medieval and even ancient conception of nature as an organism that has
intrinsic as well as instrumental value. (Tong 258)
In-text citations

 Write page number after the author’s last name (Chaudhuri 34).
 If the name of the author is given at the beginning of the sentence, mention page number at
the end of the quotation.
According to Nirad C. Chaudhuri, “…………………………….” (34).
 If the source doesn’t have any page numbers, write only the author’s name (Chaudhuri).
 If a paraphrased idea has more than one source, use a semicolon to separate the authors’
names (Baron 23; Simmons 45).
 More than two authors (Baron et al. 34).
 Indirect source (qtd. in Baron 23).
“Though Shakespeare has created two distinct worlds, readers mostly seem to identify
themselves with Egyptian side of the picture” (Ali 42).

According to S.L. Bethel, “the choice which Antony has to make between Rome and
Egypt is… heavily weighted by Shakespeare on the Egyptian side” (158).

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra gives us a vivid and spectacular picture of palace
life (Ali 38).

Humayun Ahmed described the day Alam came to stay with Matin and his family:
It was the sixth of July, nineteen seventy – one, the third day of the week. It
was a dreadful year- a helpless city in the savage grips of the Pakistani army-
its helpless unprotected people drowned in darkness as if in a blackhole- a city
exhausted by seemingly endless days and endless nights. (18)
According to the narrator of Felicia Heman’s poem, the emerging prisoners “had
learn’d, in cells of secret gloom, / How sunshine is forgotten!” (lines 131-132)

Andrew Marvel in “To His Coy Mistress” mentions the Ganges:

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. (lines 5-7)

The teachings of Abu-l-Fazal had a telling influence on Akbar’s loss of faith (Smith
18). He completely broke with Islam in 1582 ( Smith and Percival 350).

All the major incidents in the drama take place in the broad daylight of the radiant
sun: “Light plays on everything with undiscouraged luxury: on rivers, on islands, and
on the sea” (Abrams).
Ziauddin Sarder delineated the occidental notion of the orient as “an unfathomable,
exotic and erotic place where mysteries dwell, miracles happen, cruel and barbaric
scenes are staged” (qtd. in Ali 100; ch. 3).
Works Cited

 MLA for Literature  APA for ELT and Applied linguistics

 Use the latest edition (MLA 8th edition)  Use the latest edition (APA 7th edition)
 Write “Works Cited”  Write “References”
How to Cite

Write the following:

 Author
 Title
 Publisher
 Date of publication

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Penguin Books, 1996.

Jacobs, Alan. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Oxford UP, 2011.
 More than two authors:
Burdick, Anne, et al. Digital_Humanities. MIT P, 2012.

 Translated work:
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Translated by Constance Garnett, Wordsworth Editions, 1996.
Pevear, Richard, and Larissa Volokhonsky, translators. Crime and Punishment. By Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, Vintage e-books, 1993.

 Journal, Magazine, Newspaper publication:

Afroz, Nahid, and Farhana Yeasmin. “Kaiser Haque’s Voice against the Eurocentric Tradition :
A Reflection from the Poems Published in the Streets of Dhaka.” Spectrum: Journal of the
Department of English, University of Dhaka, vol. 12, 2016, pp. 47-53.
 Title of an essay, story, poem in a collection:
Tyson, Lois. “Psychoanalytic criticism.” Critical Theory Today. Routledge, Taylor
& Francis Group, 2006, pp. 11-52.
Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” John Keats: The Complete Poems. Penguin Classics, 1977.
Euripides. The Trojan Women. Ten Plays, translated by Paul Roche, New American
Library, 1998, pp. 457-512.

 Anonymous Books:
Beowulf. Translated by Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy, edited by Sarah Anderson,
Pearson, 2004.

 Editor:
Nunberg, Geoffrey, editor. The Future of the Book. U of California P, 1996.
Holland, Merlin, and Rupert Hart-Davis, editors. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde.
Henry Holt, 2000.
 Online source:
Land, Green. “Compare and contrast Shakespeare and Jonson as dramatists.” Literaturemini,
10 Apr. 2020, www.literaturemini.com/2020/04/compare-and-contrast-Shakespeare
-and-jonson-as-dramatists.html#. Accessed 30 Dec. 2021.

Goldman, Anne. “Questions of Transport: Reading Primo Levi Reading Dante.” The Georgia
Review, vol. 64, no. 1, 2010, pp. 69-88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41403188.

Chan, Evans. “Postmodernism and Hong Kong Cinema.” Postmodernism, Culture, vol.10, no.
3, May 2000. Project Muse, doi: 10.1353/pmc.2000.0021.
 Multiple works by the same author(s)
Borroff, Marie. Language and the Poet: Verbal Artistry in Frost, Stevens, and Moore. U
of Chicago P, 1979.
---. “Sound Symbolism as Drama in the Poetry of Robert Frost.” PMLA, vol. 107, no. 1,
Jan. 1992, pp. 131-44. JSTOR, www. Jstor.org/stable/462806.

Tannen, Deborah. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational

Discourse. 2nd ed., Cambridge UP, 2007.
Tannen, Deborah, and Roy O. Freedle, editors. Linguistics in Context: Connecting
Observation and Understanding. Ablex Publishing, 1988.
Tannen, Deborah, and Muriel Saville-Troike, editors. Perspectives on Silence. Ablex
Publishing, 1985.
(Borroff, “Sound Symbolism” 45)
Ahmed, Humayun. Flowers of Flame. Translated by Mahjabeen Hussain, Ananya,
1994.
Ali, Sikandar. Shakespeare and the Orient. NAGREE, 2021.
Marvel, Andrew. “To His Coy Mistress.” The Norton Anthology: English Literature,
edited by M. H. Abrams, W.W. Norton & Company, 1993, pp. 1420.
MLA Handbook. 8th ed., MLA, 2016.