Engl. 434: Bibliographic Projects

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Purpose: The bibliographic projects afford you the opportunity to do the research required for your final scholarly essay, and to do so with the support of classroom instruction, library workshops, and feedback from me. As you engage in this research, you will become familiar with the Modern Language Association Bibliography, the McConnell Library electronic catalog, and other library catalogs like World Cat. You will also master MLA documentation format in preparation for your scholarly essay. You will complete two bibliographic projects. The grades on these two projects will be averaged together as one grade, constituting 33% of the final grade.

Be sure you begin thinking about a topic for your project immediately. I have included a list of possible research essay topics in the description of that activity. See Scholarly Essay for the complete description of the scholarly essay and the list of possible topics.

 

Portrait of Ben Jonson

Format--Each Bibliographic Project will consist of:

1) A working bibliography. This will include at least ten items, typed in proper MLA format, including the author, title, and publication information for each source. Consult the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (available in the bookstore) for correct documentation format. Select the choices for your working bibliography after doing an MLA and electronic catalog search to determine what has been written on your topic. The MLA Bibliography is an index of all the scholarship available on literature. You must use the MLA Bibliography for at least one of your projects. The electronic catalog and other electronic resources--like JSTOR, Historical Abstracts, and Infotrac Expanded Academic Index (to name only a few)--will help you locate sources on seventeenth-century history and culture as well as any other collateral areas that you need to explore as contexts for your study of literature.

2) Five 1-2 page typed analyses. Choose the five most interesting or useful articles or chapters from your working bibliography and write an analysis of each one, following the suggested outline below. At the top of the first page of your analysis of each of the five articles or chapters from books, type the complete bibliographic citation in proper MLA form, using author's name, title, and full publication information.

Your analysis of each article or book chapter must do the following:

1) Nail down the author's thesis. Explain the author's main idea in about three sentences.

2) Analyze the author's use of evidence and argument. Explain what kinds of sources the author uses in arguing his or her thesis (historical, cultural, social, political, literary). Assess the effectiveness of the argument. Are you convinced? Why?

3) Determine (if you can) the theoretical perspective from which the author writes (e.g.: traditional historicist, new historicist, new critical analysis of the text and its formal qualities with little consideration for other contexts, reader-oriented analysis of how the text works upon the reader, Marxist, feminist, deconstructive, gay/lesbian, post-colonial, etc.)

4) Explain how the piece might be useful to you in your own scholarly essay. Explain how you might use in your own scholarly essay some of the author's ideas or the contextual information he or she uses (agreeing with them; disagreeing with them; using them to support your own ideas; using them as a spring board for your own ideas; using some of the historical, social, cultural, political information but for your own purposes). If the article does not seem useful to you in your own study, explain why. This will necessarily be speculative or "guess work" right now and subject to much change, but it will help you see how you might put your scholarly essay together later on.

Assessment: I will assess each bibliographic project on the clarity of its analysis, its ability to "nail down" a thesis, its ability to define the author's use of evidence, its articulation of the author's theoretical approach, its evaluation of the effectiveness of the author's argument, its explanation of how the text might be useful in the scholarly essay, its proper use of MLA format, and its correctness and clarity of expression. No late projects accepted.

Baker's Home Page | 434 Description | 434 Requirements | 434 Syllabus | Course Descriptions and Syllabi