Annotated Bibliography

Paper #3: Annotated Bibliography

Options- Godfather Death, Happy Endings, The Tell Tale Heart, Everyday Use, Dead Men's Path Young Goodman Brown, Aunt Jennifer's Tigers", "Out, Out", and "My Last Duchess", "Helen", "Siren Song", "First Love", "Cinderella, English Con Salsa", "Rites of Passage", "Lady Lazarus", "Daddy","I, too" and The Handmaid's Tale. 

An annotated bibliography is simply a list of consulted sources followed by a summary of each source. The point of these assignments is to familiarize yourself with secondary sources: critical books and scholarly articles that discuss one of the stories, poems, and/or authors that we read. The purpose of this assignment is to compile a list of secondary sources that discuss, comment and analyze ONE story, poem, or author of your choosing from any story or poem we have read so far. It’s important to read and understand what experts (scholars) say about a text, so that you can gain a new perspective on a text beyond your own analysis. If you cannot find 6 critical texts that discuss the text, you can include secondary sources that analyze another work by the same author. Your list should be comprised of 6 sources with correct MLA citations and summaries.

Ideally, your list should be made up of the following:

• Two scholarly articles from the library databases

• Two book sources (these can either be selections from anthologies or entire critical books)

• Two online sources (they CANNOT be Wikipedia or any other summary-type source. They must be

  from reputable sources like professors or scholars). If you cannot find viable sources on a general web search, you can simply choose two more scholarly articles from our library database.

  **If you cannot find many critical sources on the story or poem you have chosen, I would suggest choosing another one. I can tell you that popular stories like “Young Goodman Brown” will have many more scholarly articles published about it than a shorter and lesser known poem like “Cinderella” by Anne Sexton.**

  As in an MLA works cited page, your list should be organized alphabetically, by author’s last name. After each citation, the summary should follow. Then write the next citation and summary.

  In your 100-150 word summary, you must provide the following:

1. A conceptual summary of the article or book. In a few sentences, explain what the essay or article’s

   main points. Make sure you DO NOT COPY the published abstract. I expect that you will read the

   articles and write your own summaries. A copied abstract is plagiarism and will result in a F.

2. Description of the language and level of difficulty of the article

3. The most interesting specific fact or idea you learned from this source.

Before your summary, you must provide a correct MLA entry of the book itself (as it would appear on a works cited page). Make sure to refer to the 2009 MLA format in the back of your textbooks. If you need to refresh your memory on MLA format, check out the Purdue University MLA website:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/06/

Example of one annotated bibliography entry:

Hunt, Constance. “The Persistence of Theocracy: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.” Perspectives on Political Science 38.1 (2009): 25-32. Ebscohost. Web. 3 March 2011.

This article demonstrates that Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter can provide insight into how a society is affected by a theocracy. More specifically, it argues that a community run by religion can be morally and politically appealing. By analysis of three puzzles raised in the structure of The Scarlet Letter, the articles displays Hawthorne’s rethinking of theocracy as part of American history, and in a sense, encourages his readers to reflect on theocracy as an interesting alternative to materialism. While the article was notably dense and at times, difficult to read because of the various references that I didn’t always understand, I did find some concepts interesting. For example, Hunt spend a lot of time discussing Hawthorne’s interest in Puritan values and ethics which she insists is why American culture today is obsessed with human perfection—because of Puritan ancestors’ interest in being “perfect” citizens as even the state was run by God. Thus, to be a perfect citizen meant to be Godly and well-viewed in the eyes of God.