STEP 1: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY (due Sunday April 7 5am)

The annotated bibliography must contain 5 secondary sources.

These five sources could include:

• scholarly, peer-reviewed articles that perform interpretations of your chosen literary text(s) or that provide information about medieval literary traditions or about aspects of medieval culture or history that pertain to your literary text(s);
• scholarly books or book chapters that do the same;
• trade publications that provide information about your subject;
• online sources such as news articles or blog posts.

The MLA International Bibliography is the best source for literary sources, but other databases specialize in other disciplines such as history, women’s and gender studies, psychology, and sociology, and you can find these on the Library’s LibGuides page.

From the start, search broadly and pursue a range of sources (rather than 5 journal articles that interpret the literary text) and don’t limit yourself to JSTOR! If you need help with research, see me during office hours or ask a librarian at the information desk in the library: we’re here to help.

In the annotated bibliography itself, bear in mind that if you use two chapters from one book, that counts for two sources, with each one listed separately on the Annotated Bibliography. None of these may be essays or chapters assigned for class. You may, in your paper, use essays or chapters from class discussion.

See this site for information on annotated bibliographies in MLA style.

Your annotation should begin with a traditional works cited entry for the item. (If none of that makes any sense to you, look here.)

That should be followed by a cohesive paragraph of 6-10 sentences including the following:

1. Introduce the source by indicating what kind of item it is (journal article, book chapter, interview, online article, podcast, video, etc.) and the nature of the larger source (book, journal, website) in which it appears.

2. Summarize, to focus primarily on the aspects of the source’s argument and/or information that you are likely to make use of in your own paper.

3. Offer some analysis, where you process the material you’re summarizing and situate it in terms of other ideas you’ve encountered in your reading.

4. End with evaluation, considering the purposes of the annotation (recording your sense of the worth of the source to the essay you’re planning to produce). Here you will also indicate to me what you anticipate the role of this item to be in the paper you’re working toward.

Following is an example of just one annotation (which should be double-spaced, unlike this example):

Strohm, Paul. “The Social and Literary Scene in England.” The Cambridge Chaucer Companion. Eds. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. 1-18.

This is a chapter from a book collection that contains essays by more than ten scholars, all of them addressing aspects of Chaucer’s artistry, life, culture, or literary texts. Here, Paul Strohm provides a concise overview of Chaucer’s cultural milieu (especially the “Literary Scene” of the title) and of events (focusing on “The Social…Scene”) in Chaucer’s life. He also discusses the literary conventions that influenced Chaucer’s writing, the audiences “for who[m] he wrote, and in what ways he expected them [his texts] to be promulgated” (5). The essay concludes with a discussion of Chaucer as a social poet, stating that while “Chaucer is neither profoundly topical nor profoundly historical, he is nevertheless profoundly social” (13). It is on this conception of Chaucer, as a commentator on late medieval English society, that Strohm focuses. His essay seems to have its roots in the conventional nineteenth-century belief that Chaucer’s importance as a writer stems from his skill as a story-teller and a recorder of medieval life. The chapter’s usefulness lies in its brief summary of the historical and social highlights of the era; I don’t find his essay to be particularly analytical, but instead more descriptive. If I find I would like to use one, this could serve as a good example of the kind of Chaucer scholarship that was primarily interested in the real experiences of the real man, so far as we can reconstruct him, we have come to know as Chaucer.

My concerns in grading your annotated bibliographies will follow this rubric:

a. how well you are following MLA conventions for works cited entries (30% of the grade)

b. what the items you have selected demonstrate about the thoroughness and depth of your research thus far (10 % of the grade);

c.  how well the annotations represent the item you are describing, summarizing, and evaluating (60% of the grade).