What to Work on for your Keywords

1. Keywords are not feelings. Abjection, the eerie, and the sublime were nearly always defined as emotions, rather than as situations. Understood as feelings, these three terms collapse into a vague sense of unease and stop being distinguishable from each other. But they are not interchangeable. They are analytical terms, and each raises different concerns. Abjection considers the dissolution of borders and boundaries. Eerie calls attention to the problem of agency. Sublime questions the limits of our comprehension.

2. Keywords demand precision. Many responses gave a summary of a scene instead of faithfully recreating or paraphrasing a key quotation. For example, several responses were some version of “In Frankenstein, Victor sees the Alps and describes them as sublime.” That is a description of what happens. It is not a quotation, and it is not a paraphrase of a quotation. Now that you have access to the texts and your notes, all your definitions should be precise and precisely cited. Strive to go beyond surface-level definitions. Consider the broader context of the term (for example, abjection comes from psychoanalysis, the sublime from aesthetics). Also think about what the humanities gains from the keyword. What does each keyword help us make sense of?

3. Keywords are analytical tools. To the question of what a keyword does and why it is useful, most responses simply repeated the definition. A common pattern in your responses looked like this:

   Definition: the eerie is an uncomfortable feeling that something is out of place. What work it does: this term is useful for describing the uncomfortable feeling that something is out of place.

   The second sentence adds nothing. A keyword can always describe the thing it names. That’s not what we’re after. Every keyword is an analytic tool that lets you notice, argue, or explain something that you could not before.

4. Use keywords to explain, not to label. Most responses named an example and asserted that the keyword applied to it. Naming is not analysis. The test is whether the keyword tells us something about the example that we would not have seen without it. Compare the difference between a label and an analysis:

   Label: The abandoned shopping mall is eerie. It is empty and it feels unsettling.

   Analysis: The mall is usually bustling, but now it’s utterly empty and silent. What makes the shopping mall eerie is not just the emptiness. It’s that it should be full of people, and there’s no explanation for what happened. The mystery of the emptiness compounds the eerieness.

5. Keyword examples should be robust. The typical example simply named a cultural artifact, often from pop culture, without explaining why the keyword applied to the example, and more importantly, what thinking about that cultural artifact through the lens of the keyword helps us better understand about that cultural artifact. Avoid examples from your childhood (for example, Harry Potter, Pixar movies, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc.), and use a different cultural reference for each keyword.