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Bibliographical Essay
due by March 22, 2013
Writing a bibliographical essay
develops a skill that will serve you later in your graduate studies,
most notably in the writing of a comprehensive examination and a
thesis/dissertation prospectus or introduction, but also in other
scholarly studies and proposals. The rhetorical style in this type of
writing, which calls on you to summarize, analyze, organize, and
discuss multiple pieces of scholarship, is a necessary academic skill.
In that way, this exercise is part of your professional training,
preparing you for future work and your career.
In the course context, however, working on a focused survey of a decade of scholarship written on a particular work
affords you an opportunity to see similarities and dissimilarities in
the ways scholars have approached that writer. After completing your
bibliographical essay, you will (probably) be more expert on the decade
of scholarship concerning your chosen work than anyone in the class,
witnessing how critics have (re)construed,
(re)constructed,(re)theorized, (re)discovered, and (re)addressed the
literary text. In that way, this assignment is an immersion in
scholarly discourse and current approaches to literature, affording you
a sense of current types of research and publication.
To write this bibliographical essay, select a minimum of 10 sources,
not necessarily the first ones that come up on your search. (Because
the emphasis for this assignment is critical/interpretive, deal
briefly, if at all, with biographical studies and textual or linguistic
problems—unless there seems an important debate—and almost
certainly exclude other editions.) You will want to read your work,
then begin reading the articles (or books, if you like), just as if you
were going to compile an annotated bibliography, to determine the main
point(s) of each item.
But instead of an annotated bibliography, you are writing a
bibliographical essay. Rather than leaving each article as a separate
description, write a coherent and organized synthesis of studies of the
work during the selected decade. Determine any debates or dominant
assumptions, then write the findings in the form of an essay. But write
your essay less like a “report” and more like a discussion
of the contemporaneous state of affairs in studies of the work. You
need not reconcile any conflicting interpretations, only discuss the
variance in reading and the persuasiveness of the arguments.
The completed assignment should consist of a one- or two-page, numbered
bibliography followed by a three to four page (maximum) summary of
research. On the bibliography, use MLA format for citations, but you
are not obliged to alphabetize by the author’s last
name—you can organize the bibliography in the manner that you
deem best/most useful. The numbers should be used in the text of your
essay to refer readers to each bibliographic citation. I will evaluate
the paper not only by its proficient combination of both thoroughness
and selectivity, but also by its ease of use to your
readers—namely, the other graduate students in this
course—and by your ability to summarize.
Organize and sub-divide the essay clearly so that your readers can get
a coherent overview of recent research. Discussing the items
chronologically, while certainly an option, is not necessarily the best
way to direct your exploration. For example, as a possible
organizational pattern you might choose something similar to these
categories: Historical, Contextual (i.e. social, political, etc.),
Literary (Structuralist, Feminist, etc., numerological, exegetical,
etc.).
Present an overview at the beginning, relating what is to follow to
previous trends and issues, information you gather from reading in your
sources’ bibliographies. This summary is no place for your
original thoughts on the work under discussion, except as they appear
in your organization and separation of the wheat from the chaff. Save
your own literary critical opinions for your critical paper. Try to
give a fair evaluation of each interpretive work under discussion, even
if you disagree with the author’s conclusions or critical
methods. Indicate (briefly) important contributions that are referred
to in other studies, but that are not available in the Dupré
Library. You might additionally note trends and areas that seem ignored
or little studied.
Provide copies of your bibliographical essay to your fellow graduate
student classmates when you submit this assignment, in duplicate, to
me. Bringing those copies is part of the assignment. These essays may
prove useful in your own research for the final paper, and, perhaps, in
preparation for your comprehensive examinations.
Given the time involved in reading the items for your essay, I
recommend you get started very soon. And please note, your seminar
paper does not have to be on the same author as your bibliographical
essay.
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Last modified: January 16, 2013