![]() ![]() It’s always a good idea to check the Library Catalog for the call number associated with your author or subject: browsing the books near that area of the shelves may give you useful ideas for other directions your project could take, or new ways in which to approach it. There is also an extensive collection of available films-popular, indie, documentaries, filmed performances. ![]() The library’s stacks contain multitudes of monographs, volumes of collected essays, and back issues of numerous journals. You should also check the Modern Languages Association (MLA) Bibliography, the single most comprehensive index to literary scholarship in English, which is hosted by EBSCO, along with many other useful databases. JSTOR saves library storage space by digitizing academic resources and making them available electronically. The database JSTOR is a good source for full-text, peer-reviewed articles and some monographs (a monograph is an entire book on a single subject). In this library guide, you will find links to useful reference works: encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries devoted specifically to writers in the field of literature. (Not that those are untrustworthy, but they might not be very informative.) Choosing “peer-reviewed” resources means you are dealing with a qualified scholarly opinion, and are ruling out profiles and blurbs in popular magazines. I can limit the search to peer-reviewed journals and collections, the content of which have been reviewed by experts in the field, who read the content, thought it worth publishing and offered suggestions to improve it. I can also limit the search to full-text electronic sources that I can then email to myself. Using the Advanced Search options I can add more key terms: biography, Gilead, poetry, or perhaps the name of a specific work by Atwood. You will need to define your search terms with precision and to restrict the search to appropriate resources.įor example, I type in “Margaret Atwood.” I get a quarter of a million hits (she is among the most important living Canadian authors, but still…) To narrow the results, I can first choose between Margaret Atwood the author (works by Atwood), and Margaret Atwood the subject (works about Atwood). You can use P rimo, the primary search engine on the Library’s home page, but if you don’t plan carefully you should be prepared for a huge amount of data to appear in the results, much of it irrelevant to your needs. Why is Sethe singing a song about wildflowers at the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as she lies in a room where people go to die? What other major literary figure went to her death singing about wildflowers? (Hint: try Hamlet) Will Sethe live? If so, what is different this time from that previous instance?.Why are there so many hard-to-dispose-of bodies in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things? What is the author saying about a culture in which all the major religions prescribe specific burial rituals when these unruly corpses fill the book?.In what ways does the rhyme reflect Winston’s life and his culture? Why does Winston obsessively collect stanzas of a nursery rhyme in George Orwell’s 1984? Looking up that rhyme, including its surprise ending, will give you an interesting new understanding of the book.Your assignment may, of course, be different, but you can use these as models of how to best develop your own thesis: Below are some examples chosen from works that are typically taught in undergraduate English courses, and topics that students are asked to write interpretive/critical papers about. A good way to start the process is to ask yourself about some aspect of the work you did not understand and then reason through it until you arrive at an interpretation. In this kind of paper, you should have a clear idea of your argument before you start researching so that the paper doesn’t turn into a report about what other critics said instead of your original interpretation. This kind of paper is thesis-driven: any research you do is to enrich and support a thesis you have already come up with or, if it contradicts your own understanding of the work, you will need to explain why yours is the better interpretation. In this kind of assignment, your instructor has asked you to come to an original conclusion about some aspect of the work you are studying. ![]()
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