CMP-203: Literature and Composition (Harris, Spring 2020)

Annotated Bibliography and Research Narrative

 

Initial Research Question Due: Thursday, Apr. 2

Progress Reports and Reflections Due: Thurs., Apr. 9

Final Draft Due: Thurs., Apr. 16

 

In your last two essays, you built on and developed skills in literary interpretation, in making connections between texts, and in conducting research to contribute to a scholarly conversation. For your final research project, you will contribute in even greater depth to a scholarly conversation as you explore a literary text or texts of your choosing. 

 

As Janet Gardner and Joanne Diaz note in Reading and Writing about Literature, the process of writing a literary research paper (or any research paper really) is hardly ever “linear and straightforward” (135). Good research involves coming up with a strong initial question based on a close reading of literary texts (your primary sources), reading and rereading what others have said about that text or those texts (considering secondary sources), and developing a working thesis and often revising that thesis several times in response to what you find. 

 

Given that this process is often messy, the first step of our project will involve gathering and exploring ideas before we begin writing the final draft. While the final draft of this 8-10-page paper will be designed to make and support an original thesis, or argument, for a reader, the annotated bibliography and research narrative will offer insight into how you are developing these ideas as a writer. Doing this assignment before writing the final paper, and allowing yourself to think through your ideas and get feedback from the class as you write, is much more likely to result in a more interesting and successful final research draft. To this end, you will submit both an annotated bibliography and research narrative before composing the final paper.

 

1. Annotated Bibliography

 

The annotated bibliography component of this assignment serves two central purposes: 1) This component allows you to both gather, summarize, evaluate, and think about how you might use your secondary sources in your final paper; and 2) This component demonstrates to your reader that you have conducted extensive research into your project and that you can effectively summarize and evaluate the material you have found as well as using it to develop your own ideas. To this end, you will present seven secondary sources in paragraph form. At least four of the sources must be scholarly, which means that they will be published in scholarly journals or scholarly books. (See pages 138-39 of RWL for a review of identifying scholarly sources.)  Other sources may include author interviews, reference sources, reviews, comprehensive web sources, and relevant magazine or newspaper articles as determined by your research question. 

 

Each of your seven paragraph entries on these sources should be structured as follows:

 

--Citation in MLA as it would appear on a “Works Cited” page;

--Context of the source: Who published the source, where was it published, who is its audience;

--Brief summary of the source: What is the central thesis or argument of the source (if it is scholarly) or what is the central purpose and occasion of the source (if it is an author interview for example)?

--Explanation of how the source connects to your research questions. Does the source expand or change your question? Does it challenge your question? How does it contribute to your question?

 

Sample entry:

 

Krouse, Tonya. “Freedom as Effacement in The Golden Notebook: Theorizing Pleasure, Subjectivity, and Authority.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol.  29, no. 3, 2007, pp. 39-56. Project Muse, doi:10.1002/tox.20155. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017.

This scholarly article was published in the modern literature journal  Journal of Modern Literature within the last ten years by Tonya Krouse, an English professor at North Kentucky University. In this article, Krouse focuses on Doris Lessing’s representation of the relationship between the woman writer and her work in her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook. According to Krouse, The Golden Notebook shows how being a woman and being a writer may be contradictory identities in the early 1960s. The difficult style of the book, Krouse claims, attests to the necessity of defining rather than reconciling these contradictions. This article has transformed the way I think about how women writers like Doris Lessing understood their roles in this period. I may use this article in my final research paper to explore in more detail how women writers saw themselves in a period where fewer than 10% of books were published by women (as shown in the above source). 

2. Research Narrative

 

The research narrative component of this assignment will narrate (using first-person “I”) the research journey you have undertaken thus far in finding and exploring the sources included in the annotated bibliography. The research narrative will allow you to process and develop your ideas for the final paper as well as to get feedback on their growth and direction. This 3-4-page (1,000-1,250 word) paper written in standard formatting should be constructed as follows:

 

--The introduction paragraph should offer your initial research question and explain your motivation for wanting to explore this question; 

--Your body paragraphs should be focused on the major transformations in your ideas, your major frustrations, and/or your major discoveries through this exploration process;

--Your conclusion paragraph should offer a working thesis for your final paper and explain why this thesis would be interesting to a reader.

 

Step 1: Developing a Research Question 

 

For this project, the first step will be to develop a research question that interests you in order to begin gathering and considering sources in the library. This question will likely change as you learn more, but it is important to have a good question with which to start. 

 

A good research question:

 

--Is not too narrow or a question that can be answered factually;

--Is not too broad or expansive;

--Suggests approaches and connections to one to three texts.

 

You may develop a question that builds on one of our first two assignments, a question relevant to Suzan Lori Park’s play and our drama unit if you want to explore it further, or a question about a text or two to three related literary texts we haven’t read together in class that you would nevertheless like to explore further.

 

Presearch, or exploring Wikipedia and general Google search results, is a method you can use to find direction for the research question you will take to the library to search for more legitimate sources.

 

Let’s consider the following research questions asking 1) Are these good places to start exploring?; 

2) If so, where and how would we start? What search terms would we use in the library database for example?

 

1. How is James Joyce’s self-imposed exile from Dublin reflected through the protagonists of “Araby” and “Eveline” in Dubliners (1914)? How is his representation of this exile shown especially through the different narrative voices of the stories?

 

2. Although they are writing in different periods and contexts, poets Sylvia Plath and Warsan Shire both focus on trauma from a woman’s perspective in poems such as “Lady Lazarus” (1965) and “The House” (2014). How and why do they approach this topic of women’s trauma and can the voices of the poems be considered autobiographical?

 

3. How do feminist rewritings of “Little Red Riding Hood” like Angela Carter’s “In the Company of Wolves” (1979) and Nalo Hopkinson’s “Riding the Red” (2001) rethink the theme of sexuality in Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” (1695)? Did the feminist movement influence this rethinking?

 

4. What contradictory versions of motherhood do Suzan Lori Park’s Red Letter Plays present? What ideas about motherhood do these plays ultimately offer?

 

5. How have Suzan Lori Park’s Red Letter Plays been staged? What other plays have influenced the distancing and distanced style of her plays?

 

6. How and why does Emily Dickinson represent the theme of death throughout her poems (with a particular focus on her famous “Because I could not stop for death” poem)? In which ways might this representation challenge how we think of death and dying?