Annotated Bibliography
An annotated bibliography gives citations, just as a regular bibliography (or even a Works Cited) would. But with one major addition: it provides explanatory information about that citation, an evaluation or description of the subject, author and contents of the entry (1-2 sentences). For your assignment, you will need to include the above, as well as a sentence (or two) telling whether or not the source will be useful to you in your project–such a discussion will necessarily explain how the information will relate to that final product (1 sentence).
The format for this bibliography should be MLA (available in the Little Brown Handbook or at mla.org), with special attention paid to the inclusion of ALL relevant information. Each bibliographic entry should be formatted with "hanging indent" and each annotation should be fully indented (if you are viewing this on a web page, my formatting may have been altered, so keep that in mind). You may single space the bibliographic entries and annotations, but leave at least one line between the entries. You may use the examples below for format as well as content.
Writing Class
(*Note that the hanging indent created an extra space between the first and second lines of each bibliographic entry. Your essays should not have this extra line break.)
Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and*
Achievements of America’s Educational Underclass. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
Mike Rose gives an account of his own life as one of the "educational underclass," his rise as a teacher, and his experience and methods with educationally underprivileged students. His attitude towards the subject matter is understandably biased, though he presents his past with a keen critical eye. I intend to use this book to talk about and define what "literacy" is, and how it is variable in different segments of the population.
Scribner, Sylvia, and Michael Cole. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981.
The authors went to Africa to study how gains in literacy reflect gains in knowledge. Their biases are clearly spelled out in the introduction, as is the rather scientific structure of their study. It sounded more relevant than it was. All things considered, it was pretty silly and I don’t think I’ll be using it for my paper.
Trimbur, John. "Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis." In The Politics of Writing
Instruction: Postsecondary. Eds. Richard Bullock and John Trimbur. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1991.
Trimbur asserts the "literacy crisis" is an invention of the elite and educated to maintain power over knowledge. I tend to agree with him, and his examples are really helpful (he cites studies that were done at the beginning of the century), so I will use this for examples and some really key statements.
Literature
Hawkes, Terence, "Comedy, Orality and Duplicity: Twelfth Night." In
Shakespeare’s Comedies, ed. Gary Waller. London: Longman, 1994. 168-174.
Located within a book that discusses all of the comedies, Hawkes’ essay introduces a few of the major critical perspectives towards comedy: Northrup Frye’s structuralist approach, Mikhail Bahktin’s theories of carnival and historical readings of oral culture in Elizabethan/Jacobean England. It does so in easy-to-read language (though there is some jargon) and uses the play I need to discuss as the example (it also uses Midsummer Night’s Dream, but not extensively). I will use this to help ground my claims about the play and add background to my approach.
McDonald, Russ. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction
with Documents. Boston: Bedford, 1996.
McDonald’s book was designed as a supplementary text for a Shakespeare class; thus, it includes sections on "Authorship," the theater in his period, bibliography, "Shakespeare’s Reading," genre, language, "Life in Shakespeare’s England," gender and family, and "Early Modern Ideologies." I turned to this book again and again when I wanted to know more about some aspect of the period. It saved me some research time, too, since it has such a wonderful bibliography and includes snippets from contemporary authors. I will use this for a variety of purposes during the presentation.
Pequigney, Joseph. "The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and
The Merchant of Venice." In Shakespeare and Gender: A History, eds. Deborah Barker and Ivo Kamps. London: Verso, 1995. 178-195.
The article studies the two characters in Shakespeare’s comedies who share the name Antonio–though one has a larger part than the other. His imputation is that they are both homosexual or at least homosocial. While I am not interested in the Merchant of Venice, the sections on Twelfth Night were thought-provoking, looking at a character I had initially labeled as unimportant. I will use this article because it has made me think about the possibility of alternative sexual orientation among Shakespeare’s characters and given me a "catchy" approach to the play.
Last revised 3/08
C. Eskin