Unit 3 Project:
Climate Change and World Literature
Option A: An Annotated Bibliography
In this class, we’ve largely focused on personal reflection and parsing out the major themes of the course as we’ve read. We haven’t done (nor will we do) any formal research papers, but as I also want y’all to gain some useful skills to carry past this class, one option for this unit is writing an Annotated Bibliography. For this assignment, you’ll spend time finding 7-10 sources about Climate Change and World Literature as they pertain to our two novels. (If this feels too vague of a subject, then you can narrow things down to one research question, but that’s not necessary). Not only is practicing how to format a bibliography an important skill for any college paper, but knowing where to find sources you can trust is also paramount for any project that involves research.
For this project, you’ll use our university library and not Google. The sources you’ll be after will be scholarly in nature, and can include journal articles, book reviews, book chapters, edited volumes (a book with chapters by several different authors about one subject), or monographs (a book written by one author about one subject). You will read the abstract or summary of each source, find out what you can about the author, and then evaluate why that source is both reliable and useful for our topic. This is the part of the project that involves annotations. You’ll structure your bibliography according to either MLA or the Chicago style, and then write up your thoughts about the source. Your annotation for each source should be about 70-100 words long. Here’s an example of what an annotated bibliography entry might look for a paper about Omeros:
Woodcock, Bruce. “Derek Walcott: Omeros.” A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, edited by Neil Roberts, Blackwell, Malden, MA., 2003.
Although there isn’t a lot of information about the scholar Bruce Woodcock online, the book in which I found this chapter tells us that he is a senior lecturer at the University of Hull with several published books. This, and the fact that he was included in this volume, tells me that he is a reliable source. His book chapter is useful because it offers a detailed breakdown of the main themes and characters in Omeros, which can help me understand Omeros better. He also explains the historical significance of the epic’s setting and the literary traditions the author incorporates into his writing.
I’ll also share some examples of annotated bibliographies in the links below.
