Love, Sex and Science: How Society Would Benefit From A Realistic Approach To Intimacy

OR

Sex and Censorship: Where to Draw the Line in Contemporary Storytelling Outlets

This is a rewrite and/or integration of a previously rejected Masters thesis into a new submission. I am attaching the old thesis as well as the reviewers notes about how the thesis could have met her expectations. It seems that she wanted more integration of the literature of DH Lawrence or of gender studies, while the thesis is written from a contemporary, sociological view using mostly online and current day resources. The challenge I’m running into is how to create a fluid hybrid that retains some of the original contemporary interests of the writer and the 20th century literary/gender reference desired by the person marking the paper.

If this is too difficult, I have the freedom to change direction and create a paper that addresses the second proposed title for this project.
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Added on 22.03.2016 13:23
The comments from the thesis revision are copied and pasted below:

Title of:
Term Paper/Dissertation
Love, Sex and Science: A Realistic Approach to Intimacy

Comments:
This dissertation has another title on the formal sheet which accompanies it: Sex and Censorship: Where to Draw the Line in Contemporary Storytelling Outlets

My studies as a sexpert have taught me that our relationships and the expectations that go along with them are beginning to change. So the dissertation begins, in a relaxed and idiomatic tone describing the authors attendance at a discussion of intimate relationships. The dissertation sets up a contrast between D.H.Lawrences observations about these and current problems with intimacy in part to create a sense of historical distance, in part to find a way of thinking beyond the impasse of the present. But the problem I encounter here is that the dissertation does not engage with Lawrence as a writer or with his fictions about the possibility or impossibility of intimate relationships but with his Fantasia of the Unconscious from which the paper cites very occasional and unreferenced quotations. (The dissertation has no footnotes or citations so it is impossible to link text to bibliography.)

Much of the dissertation moving to speak in the voice of an undefined collective we is made up of generalising and unanalytical observations about sexual relationships in the present day. The paper presents itself as a confrontation, an explanation, a call to action. But what it does not undertake is an analysis of literary texts either texts by Lawrence or a set of contemporary texts in which some of the problems described in the paper might have been explored.

Much of the discussion of Lawrence is dependent on an obscure source Tianying Zangs D.H.Lawrences Philosophy of Nature: An Eastern View when the reader might reasonably expect the citing of more distinguished sources, not least some of the major revisions of Lawrences treatment of sexuality present, let us say, in the work of Hugh Stevens or in Howard Booths collection of essays, The New D.H. Lawrence. In fact, this is the only literary source cited in a long bibliography made up of sources which belong in a paper on couple counselling or psychotherapy.

This is not an analytical paper and it is not a paper on a literary topic. The paper could have profitably used Lawrences work to explore historically the emergence of a discourse on sexuality and intimacy in English or American culture (after the manner of Stephen Kerns celebrated The Culture of Love) or it could have compared and contrasted Lawrence with a contemporary writer exploring similar topics Doris Lessing, let us say. This is a discussion with no critical frame, no evidence of familiarity with feminist texts or standard texts in gender studies.

I am afraid it does not reach the standard required for a pass mark not because it is not fluently written but because its content and its mode of argument are not what might be reasonably expected in a paper submitted for a course concerned with the study of literature, however broadly conceived.