Annotated Bibliography and Critical History
Due: 3:00 p.m. on Friday, April 29
The purpose of the Annotated Bibliography and Critical History is to familiarize you with the critical history of a particular British, American, or Anglophone literary text of your choosing. In the process you will learn about some of the main developments in literary history and theory, as well as how best to utilize the Hauser library and the basic scholarly materials of the discipline. The Annotated Bibliography and Critical History will thus also familiarize you with the skills needed to properly research a senior thesis.
Choosing a Topic
The Annotated Bibliography and the Critical History are two intertwined projects involving the same literary text. You will settle upon a topic, in consultation with the professor, early in the semester (formal proposals are due in class on February 8 and we will discuss them shortly thereafter). Here are some criteria to consider when weighing potential topics:
Producing the Annotated Bibliography
In a sense, the Annotated Bibliography is the keystone of your work in Junior Seminar, and completing it will probably occupy the lion’s share of your time this semester. We will be having two informational sessions at the library (February 8 and February 22) to help you explore some of the library’s scholarly resources. You may also wish to consult with me, with any of the reference librarians (especially Xan Arch), or with other professors in the English Department as you pull your bibliography together.
There are three basic steps in the process of compiling the Annotated Bibliography.
The Critical History
It will be necessary for you to have the Annotated Bibliography completed, or mostly completed, before you start composing the Critical History. In the Critical History, which should be 12-15 pages, you should synthesize, analyze, and present the work you’ve done over the semester, using your Annotated Bibliography as a loose framework for discussing the trends of literary scholarship on your chosen work over the last fifty years or so. You will not, in general, want to replicate the work you’ve done for the Annotated Bibliography but should instead step back a little and discuss the overall trends in scholarship. It can certainly be appropriate to critique specific articles – or even specific types of scholarly approaches wholesale (“New Historicists? Who needs ‘em?”) — in the course of your Critical History. It can also be appropriate to identify potential areas for further research. And who knows? — This could all lead you to a rich and already well-researched senior thesis.
The Critical History will be due at the end of the semester (Friday, April 29).
Choosing a Topic
The Annotated Bibliography and the Critical History are two intertwined projects involving the same literary text. You will settle upon a topic, in consultation with the professor, early in the semester (formal proposals are due in class on February 8 and we will discuss them shortly thereafter). Here are some criteria to consider when weighing potential topics:
- The literary text you focus on must have at least about a fifty-year critical history. More recent works simply will not have had enough published about them over a sufficient range of time to do the Critical History in a fruitful way. So, for practical purposes, the cut-off date for publication of your chosen text is 1956 or earlier.
- The literary text you choose must have been originally written in English; texts from any Anglophone countries are theoretically viable.
- Shorter novels (such as The Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Dalloway, etc.), famous plays (Death of a Salesman, Saint Joan), or famous lyric poems (“Lycidas,” The Waste Land, a famous Shakespeare sonnet, etc.) would be very appropriate.
- Longer works (like Daniel Deronda, The Faerie Queene, Clarissa, etc.) should be avoided unless you’ve read them before and know them well. Remember your literary text needs to be of manageable length so you can (re-)read it quickly and immerse yourself in its critical issues expeditiously.
- You may wish to stay away from major canonical works (like Hamlet or Ulysses) because so much has been written on these texts that it may be difficult to know how to delimit your work.
- Conversely, you may also wish to stay away from works that have been “discovered” only relatively recently (like The Booke of Margerye Kempe or the novels of Charles Brockden Brown) and thus do not yet have a sufficiently long critical history to draw from.
Producing the Annotated Bibliography
In a sense, the Annotated Bibliography is the keystone of your work in Junior Seminar, and completing it will probably occupy the lion’s share of your time this semester. We will be having two informational sessions at the library (February 8 and February 22) to help you explore some of the library’s scholarly resources. You may also wish to consult with me, with any of the reference librarians (especially Xan Arch), or with other professors in the English Department as you pull your bibliography together.
There are three basic steps in the process of compiling the Annotated Bibliography.
- You need first to identify and locate at least forty sources. A “source” is generally an article, a book chapter, or an entire scholarly book (a monograph). All forty of these sources will be part of the bibliography you pass in.
- After some reading around, some consultation with relevant professors in the department, with me, or with the reference librarians, you will then select twenty-five of your initial forty sources to annotate. Your choice of which twenty-five to do should be governed by your sense of which works have been the most important or influential among scholars studying the work. (There is obviously some leeway here for personal judgment and preferences, but you do want to make an effort to responsibly reflect the real currents of literary scholarship in your annotations.) As an aid to producing the Critical History part of this project well, you should more or less group your twenty-five annotated sources thus: five from before 1955, five from 1955-1968, five from 1968-1980, five from 1980-1995, and five from roughly 1995 to the present. Although not cast in stone, these general chronological categories reflect some of the major shifts in literary scholarship over the past few generations and will allow you to garner a broad sense of how discussions about your chosen literary text have developed.
- To do the actual annotations, you have to, of course, actually read the twenty-five articles. An “annotation” consists of a brief summary of the source discussing its “thesis” or main idea, its methodology, its main points, its use of evidence, its possible relationship to an identifiable “school” of literary scholarship, etc. It is also possible to briefly comment on the quality of the article or on problems it might have (though in general, it would be better to save such discussions for your Critical History). An annotation should be, on average, about four to eight sentences long. I would recommend that you write out the annotation for an article, chapter, or book immediately after you finish reading it. We will take time at some point in conference to look at some examples of annotations together. Also, in order to assure that you are progressing in a productive way, I will ask you to pass in five annotations to me on February 29 and then ten more on March 30.
The Critical History
It will be necessary for you to have the Annotated Bibliography completed, or mostly completed, before you start composing the Critical History. In the Critical History, which should be 12-15 pages, you should synthesize, analyze, and present the work you’ve done over the semester, using your Annotated Bibliography as a loose framework for discussing the trends of literary scholarship on your chosen work over the last fifty years or so. You will not, in general, want to replicate the work you’ve done for the Annotated Bibliography but should instead step back a little and discuss the overall trends in scholarship. It can certainly be appropriate to critique specific articles – or even specific types of scholarly approaches wholesale (“New Historicists? Who needs ‘em?”) — in the course of your Critical History. It can also be appropriate to identify potential areas for further research. And who knows? — This could all lead you to a rich and already well-researched senior thesis.
The Critical History will be due at the end of the semester (Friday, April 29).