annotated bibliography instructions
E314L: Banned Books and Novel Ideas
Annotated Bibliography Instructions
Due Date:
Tuesday May 1, in class
Instructions:
Write an annotated bibliography of 3 scholarly articles about either Lolita or The Bluest Eye, or both. (Ideally, you will cite at least one of these articles on your final paper, so it makes sense to choose articles on whichever book you intend to write about.) Each entry should provide full bibliographic information for the article or book chapter, and a brief (150-200 word) description of the author’s argument. Note: articles should be at least 8 pages long.
More detailed instructions:
An annotated bibliography serves several of functions. Scholars sometimes write exhaustive bibliographies of all the existing scholarship on a given work or author as a service to other scholars researching the same topic. More frequently, scholars write annotated bibliographies for their own use, as a way of keeping track of what they’ve read and as a way of getting a grasp on the ongoing critical conversation about a work or author. Since I’m asking you to consider and respond to the arguments of other critics on your final paper, this annotated bibliography assignment will give you practice boiling down an article to its essence for subsequent use in an essay.
Annotated bibliography entries should recapitulate the author’s argument as objectively as possible. Each entry must balance the need for brevity with the desire to capture as much of the article’s original logic as possible. Entries should quote from the source article when necessary, but should attempt to restate the article’s thesis in the bibliographer’s own words. Often—but not always—an entry will finish with a more subjective evaluation of the article’s strengths and weaknesses, and of its potential uses. Annotated bibliographies should be arranged either alphabetically by the author’s last name, or chronologically. Here are three examples:
Lester, Julius. “Morality and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 340-348.
Huckleberry Finn is an immoral book, one which Lester finds demeaning to black people and their history. Lester points to several aspects of the novel’s treatment of Jim as evidence of Mark Twain’s “contempt for blacks” (344) and disregard for the actual experience of slaves: Twain’s false parallel between slavery and child abuse; Jim’s unrealistic decision to head further south after running away; Twain’s stereotypical depiction of Jim as passive and meekly faithful to whites; and the transformation of Jim into a ridiculous play-thing in the novel’s final chapters, with no mention of what happens to Jim’s wife and children, still trapped in slavery. Lester then goes on to argue that racism is not even the book’s worst flaw: Twain idealizes an immature vision of freedom as the evasion of all responsibility to one’s community. True morality, Lester argues, means taking responsibility for one’s self and the problems of one’s society, but Huckleberry Finn only presents us with “a dismal portrait of the white male psyche” whose fantasy of escape is a parody of true freedom (348).
Trilling, Lionel. “The Last Lover.” The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, Edited by Leon Wieseltier. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000. 354-371.
Trilling’s 1958 essay argues that Nabokov’s Lolita is a love story in the traditional sense of that phrase. The essay is divided into four parts: In sections 1 and 2, Trilling suggests that although Lolita is not pornographic, it is nevertheless shocking. Section 3 observes the way Lolita provokes our outrage, both for its depiction of pedophilia and for its ability to seduce us into sympathizing with Humbert’s crime. In the end, however, Trilling suggests that Nabokov’s purpose is not satire, but rather to write a loves story. In the article’s last section, Trilling explains how much of western literature has devoted itself to describing what Denis de Rougemont called passion-love, the obsessive, scandalous, and often destructive kind of love that has been replaced by the ideal of the healthy marriage in modern times. Since our society is no longer scandalized by marital infidelity, Nabokov must turn to pedophilia to write a story of modern passion-love. Thus, Lolita is ironically “regressive” and “archaic” (369), despite its shocking subject matter.
Donno, Elizabeth Story. “Thomas More and Richard III.” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Autumn 1982): 401-47.
Donno reads Thomas More’s Richard III as a paradoxical encomium of the reviled king, arguing that he crafts his history not as Tudor propaganda, but as an epideictic display piece designed to denigrate its subject through “ingenuity and artifice” (418). More uses many rhetorical techniques of sophistical Latin writers of late antiquity to complicate and obscure the motives of his characters and lend to his account a “rippling complexity” against which “his one-dimensional evil protagonist is allowed to stand out starkly” (423). Read this way, Richard III joins Utopia, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, and Ortensio Lando’s Paradossi as a work which explores of both sides of an argument. In his treatment of the same historical material, Shakespeare responds to More’s “artful, sometimes devious, manipulation of language…and the ironic perspective on human reactions to dynastic rivalry” (443). Though perhaps over-long, Donno’s essay will interest scholars exploring the interaction of sixteenth century rhetoric and literature, as well as those studying More’s influence on Shakespeare.
How to find books and articles:
You can find an annotated bibliography of secondary sources for Lolita at http://www.coh.arizona.edu/inst/eng102-lolita/biblio/biblio.htm. Feel free to use it to lead you secondary sources, but note that most of the entries are not detailed enough and won’t make good models for your own entry. The same goes for this annotated bibliography for The Bluest Eye: http://web.cocc.edu:80/lisal/thebluesteye/annotated_bibliography.htm.
The UT library homepage is your one-stop shop for finding secondary sources. From the “Databases and Indexes to Articles” page, try the following:
*MLA International Bibiliography (under ‘M’)
*Literature Online (LION) (under ‘L’)
*JSTOR (under ‘J’ or at www.jstor.org)
To find books in the PCL stacks, search by “title keyword” and then use the entry to find more specific subject headings.