I am making this optional. Do this only if you need the extra credit, and you ha

I am making this optional. Do this only if you need the extra credit, and you have the time this week.
RESEARCH PAPER 5-10 pp. Analyze a family history, not your own, from fictional literature, films, sociological ethnographies, or your own interviews, as well as theoretical texts we discuss here in class and those you find on your own, to understand what social forces, within and without this family, have worked to make that family what it is, or undergo the process in which it is involved.
Outline:
Introduce your family to the reader.
Present your topic–what do you want to talk about, in terms of concepts from this course, about this family?
Present a multigenerational, emotional genogram of this family, and discuss the psychological patterns you see: patterns that abuse, neglect, concerted cultivation, ideologies of childrearing, may have created across the generations. (you can use powerpoint to construct this genogram)
Present your argument. How does your family under study illustrate the concept(s) from this course that you picked?
Conclusion–summarize your findings
Bibliography–cite the texts from which you learned about this family: a novel, movie, biography. And the texts you referred to for the concepts (the Cohen textbook, Waller and Hill, Christopher Lasch’s writings for this course, Floyd Dell, Napier and Whitaker, etc.)
Here are pages about films about families:
25 Best Movies about Families – IMDb
25 Great Movies About Terribly Dysfunctional Families (flavorwire.com)
i would also recommend the film Ordinary People, with Mary Tyler Moore as a narcissistic mother, Donald Sutherland as her husband, and Tim Hutton as their schizophrenic, suicidal son.
Novels you might consider using:
Novels Focused on Family Dynamics (248 books)248 books based on 46 votes: Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, The Bean Trees by Barba…
If you’ve got a lot of money, perhaps you could see a play by Tom Stoppard, Leopoldstadt, on Broadway, about an Austrian Jewish family at the turn of the last century, eventually facing the Holocaust.