Writing a thesis: research question

[entanglingbriars]

So after a semester or so of back-and-forth emails and discussions with my advisor, I have a thesis topic: Olaf Stapledon and the human-animal boundary. Specifically, I want to look at a feature of two of the utopias of Last and First Men: a wilderness preserve where young adults are encouraged to essentially go savage, give up the trappings of civilization, and live on the edge; the Eighteenth Men in particular are described as being both more fully human and more fully animal than we First Men. I'll also probably end up looking at Sirius and The Darkness and the Light since both also deal with crossing the human-animal boundary.

Sadly, it's not a religion-intensive thesis topic, although I'll doubtless pull in some RS material; I plan to do at least some work with Gilgamesh as a sort of starting point for literature exploring the human-animal boundary, and Gilgamesh is a fundamentally religious text.

But I'm also kind of stuck. Next semester I'm taking a class that will essentially result in the creation of my thesis proposal, which I will have to defend before I can start my thesis, but in the meantime... what to do? Create an annotated bibliography, maybe? I'm really not sure.

Comments

[unknought]

I don't have anything helpful toward your question but that sounds like a really fascinating topic.

[child_of_the_air]

Congratulations, and good luck! And unfortunately, while annotated bibliography sounds right, I don't really have good ideas on how to go about literary research.