What is an annotated bibliography?
The term annotated bibliography sounds more intimidating than it is.
The short version: You will choose a book of literary merit, some exclusions apply, and read at least 30 pages of literary criticism (2 or three scholarly articles) on your chosen book. You will write a summary / response paper for each article.
Annotating is simply commenting, in note form, on something you’ve read. When you make notes in the margin of a book, you are annotating. Thorough annotating involves interpreting, questioning, evaluating, summarizing, and explaining the source with which you are working. You are also annotating when you introduce something of your own, which may be a question, a comparison, or an opposing argument. Since this takes a good deal of time to do well, start now.
For this project, you will choose a book you like of literary merit and read a minimum of thirty (30) pages of literary criticism on your chosen book. This translates to two or three scholarly articles written about your book.
A scholarly article is a peer-reviewed article written by someone with a PhD in literature and published in an academic journal.
A scholarly article is NOT a book review, masters’ thesis, doctoral dissertation, or essay written by a high school teacher and published in The English Journal. Don’t use The English Journal.
How do you know if your article is authored by a PhD? Google the author. If the author is a full professor at a college or university, and if the journal where the article is published is a scholarly journal that publishes literary criticism, you’re good.
Scholarly articles are also known as “critical essays.” Use this as your search term. If your book is The Mayor of Casterbridge, search “mayor of casterbridge critical essays.”
What do I have to do?
Find two, three, or four articles about your book. You will read at least thirty pages of literary criticism, so if you select long articles you may only read two, but if you read shorter articles you will need more than two.
Number and type of sources: Minimum two articles. Most people read three. It depends on the length of the articles. You must read at least thirty (30) pages of criticism.
All but one of your articles must show publication dates after 1980. You may use one (1) article published before 1980, but it’s best to use relatively current material.
Look for articles of at least eight pages. Most good ones are longer than eight pages.
For each article, write a summary and a response. Follow these guidelines:
Minimum summary / response paper for each source: 3 pages for a 10-page article, 5 for a 20-page article, 4 for a page range in between.
Total minimum pages: 9 (see below)
Maximum pages: 12. Anything over 12 pages won’t get read. Focus your points.
Specifications: double spaced, MLA
Point Value: 200
Due dates:
1. Articles, including bibliographic information, for my review: Feb 26. Start looking for articles ASAP. If you order a book of critical essays through ILL and it has to be shipped, show me the link to the book so I can confirm that you’re using the right source material. Please bring the actual book to class for verification by March 3. Early submissions encouraged.
2. First summary/response paper for review: March 22. I don’t plan to grade this until it is resubmitted with the final product. I just want to know you’re doing it right. If less than half of the class submits one, however, I will grade them.
3. Final draft of project: April 19. The grade goes in M4.
Early submissions—of articles for approval and summary/response papers—are welcome.
A Works Cited page is not required. Document your source according to MLA specs at the top of the page of each summary/response.
Procedure:
Will will follow the same plan as we did with the Streetcar paper. You’ll write the whole thing in the same doc and share the link with me.
Choose a novel or play you have read—preferably one you enjoyed. I have to know it, so I have to approve it before you begin your research.
Order a book of critical essays from the library, borrow one from Ms. DaSilva, or browse essays in an online database and read around in the criticism that has been written about it. From among the zillion critical essays available in books and journals, choose a few to explore. Depending on the length, two, three or four of these will constitute the source material for your project.
Each critical essay you choose must be at least eight pages long, and must be approved by me. Recent articles (last 30 years) tend to be better suited to our task, but some of these can be convoluted. Choose articles that are written in a style accessible to you. If the first page doesn’t make sense, don’t waste your time on it. Move on to another article.
You will read a minimum of thirty pages of literary criticism about the novel you have read and turn in a 3-ish page summary / response paper on each source. Longer sources will result in longer summary / response papers.
An annotated bibliography is a bibliography with comments. A simple annotated bibliography lists the works consulted for a paper along with remarks geared toward helping the reader decide whether or not the source would be useful for his/her purposes.
Your annotated bibliography will involve more than simply taking notes, because your evaluation of each source should be presented as a formal response. No more than half should be summary. The rest should be your own thoughts. Which, if any, critical perspective is represented in the article? What do you think of the critic’s assessment of your novel? Remember that the key is to support your points with evidence from the text, which you can’t do very well if you haven’t read the novel. Take care to summarize in the summary and respond in the response. Your response should not be an extended summary. The scholar’s key points go in the summary. Your response goes in the response. You will cite both the article and the text in your response.
Once you have written your summary/response papers, write a one-page comprehensive analysis of the whole research package. How do the sources stand up to one another? Where do the critics agree? Where do they disagree? What connections do you see? You may include comments about your research experience in general. Were your sources fairly straightforward or difficult to interpret? What did you learn about doing research in general? Be sure to comment on your sources specifically in terms of how they engage with the novel you chose.
This project focuses almost entirely on the research, but you will do some analysis as you engage with the novel and the critics. Good literary research involves analyzing and responding to your sources and the way they interact with one another, and finally integrating them into a finished product which supports your own position on your subject. By the time you finish, you will be a stronger reader, a better writer, and an expert on your selected book.
*Academic journals include
PMLA
Studies in the Novel
The Sewanee Review
Modern Philology
College English
Critical Inquiry
Modern Language Quarterly
American Literary History
These are just a few. There are more, but any of these will work.
Where do I find my articles?
Your BEST BET is Bloom’s. Mrs. DaSilva purchased a subscription last year just for you. Link and pw can be found here.
Link to the database is here:
https://sites.google.com/mcvts.net/edisonacademymediacenter/research-tools?authuser=0
Passwords are here: https://classroom.google.com/c/MTI1OTc2OTEyNVpa
Another good option is to locate a bound collection of critical essays like those linked below and have it shipped to your town library through Interlibrary Loan. Your local library might even have the one you want if you are a lucky person.
Fahrenheit 451 Tess of the d’Urburvilles Grapes of Wrath
How do I search for a bound collection? Go to Libraries of Middlesex Automation Consortium. Select your town’s library. Set the first field to the right of the “home” icon to “all libraries.” Try a couple of ways. You can search “critical essays great gatsby” or you can try setting the field to “subject” and enter the title of your book. The second option will likely yield more results. You don’t want a book by one author. You want a bound collection of critical essays by different scholars. There will be one editor, but multiple authors. Buzzwords to look for include Twaynes, Modern Critical Views, Twentieth Century Interpretations, and Harold Bloom.
If the book of essays you want is at another library in the network, click on “place hold.” The book will be shipped to your library and you will be notified to pick it up. Might take a week. Start now. Don’t wait.
Mrs. DaSilva has a LOT of collections of essays on novels and plays. Some are available as ebooks.
JSTOR and EBSCO are only moderately useful for this project. EBSCO is better. The school has an EBSCO account. You can access it here: Edison Academy Media Center
Click “Research Tools” at the top of the page. You want “Literary Reference Center.”
Use your school email account to sign in from school. To access the database from home, use the login info linked above.
The district does not have a JSTOR account, but Middlesex County College does. You can sign in with your MCC email. Go here: JSTOR. Scroll down to Humanities. Select Language and Literature.” Type your book title into the search bar. You may get 1000+ results. On the menu at the left, select “Journals.” Scroll down under Journals and select “Language and Literature.” This will filter out some of the other subject areas, but not all. You don’t want an article from The English Journal, or any other education journal, and you don’t want film or sociology or any other discipline. We want journals that publish the work of literature scholars and not high school English teachers. A search of To Kill a Mockingbird got me nowhere. Every other article was from The English Journal. The others were not literary criticism. My Lord of the Flies search was more promising, so it depends on the book, but it was still a needle in a haystack process.* I would try JSTOR only as a last resort.
*Academia.com and Google Scholar won’t help at all. They publish high school papers and masters’ theses, and wading through all of that won’t be worth your time.
Due dates:
1. Articles, including bibliographic information, for my review: Feb 26 at the very latest. Start looking for articles ASAP. If you order a book of critical essays through ILL and it has to be shipped, show me the link so I can confirm that you’re on the right track. Early submissions encouraged.
2. First summary/response paper for review: March 22 I don’t plan to grade this until it is resubmitted with the final product. I just want to know you’re doing it right. If less than half of the class submits one, however, I will grade them.
3. Final draft of project: April 19. The grade goes in M4.
Early submissions—of articles for approval and summary/response papers—are welcome.
A Works Cited page is not required. Document your source according to MLA specs at the top of the page of each summary/response. Refer to the example below.
The first page of your paper should look like this:
Lastname 1
First name Last name
Ms. Burke
Section (11-1 or 11-2)
Due Date
Lovegood, Xenophilius. “There’s more to Harry Potter than you Think.” Journal of Modern Philology. 91 (2004): 67-85.
Summary
Xenophilius Lovegood argues in his essay “There’s more to Harry Potter Than you Think” that people who read Harry Potter are deep thinkers. Harry Potter is immortal fiction because it addresses great truths in an entertaining way and alludes to academic things, including the history and mythology of many countries, and incorporates words from Latin and Middle English and old Scandinavian languages into its nomenclature. It also has many icons. And so on for a page or so. Include the critic’s key points, and all points you will address in your response.
Response
While parts of Lovegood’s article are compelling, his contention that people who name their cats after aurors are getting a little carried away is short-sighted and pompous. Tonks is a great name for a cat. Cats figure prominently in the series. Crookshanks is an important cat, as is Mrs. Norris (named after a nosy Jane Austen character), and Professor McGonagall’s animagus form is feline. And so on for about a couple of pages. Cite the critic and the text.
Do this for each article you read.
Do NOT, anywhere in the paper, reproduce the language of the article verbatim without enclosing the words in quotes and citing the page number.
Obviously you will be paraphrasing in your summary. The danger of puttig this off until the last minute is that it’s easy when you’re in a rush to succumb to plagiarism. Don’t do this. Start early, take your time, and complete the assignment with integrity.
Scoring:
Depends on how many summary/response papers you have. Each one gets scored individually. If you have three s/r papers, then each counts 25 percent (with the summary and response weighing equally), and the synthesis counts 25.
Total available points for the project: 200
I will post a rubric separately. Grading looks at
MLA Citation as in sample first page (exactly)
Content: did you read and understand the full article?
Support: do you use sufficient, appropriate examples from the article and the novel? Are your quotes integrated smoothly and logically?
Clarity
Coherence
Literary present tense
No second person
Third person only
Correct use of critic’s name: First and last the first time you use it, and then last name only, spelled correctly.
Conventions of formal English: spelling, punctuation, s-v agreement, pronoun agreement, fragments and run-ons, contractions
I have sources that you can use I will upload the articles here. Make sure the response is true to the book The Joy Luck Club.
