American Literature, 1800-1915 (EL 266)


13 October 2005

Emily Dickinson (selections)

Please write two agenda items for this collection, each one referring to one or two poems.

Vol 1. Life
X: "In a Library"
XIII: "The soul selects her own society"
XX: "I taste a liquor never brewed"

Love
XIII Renunciation

Nature

IV Perhaps you'd like to buy a flower?

Time and Eternity
XVII I never saw a moor

Volume II
Life
The Railway Train

Love
VI The way I read a letter 's this

Nature
XX Old Fashioned

Time and Eternity
VIII I have not told my garden yet



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Paper 1 Draft (4p minimum)

The basic criteria for this paper are the same as those introduced for exercise 1-2, although that exercise included a sample outline only because some students were clamoring for one. (We talked about how the outline didn't really help you write the paper, so I think that experiment has served its purpose.)

What is different for this paper is that I am asking you to include academic research -- that is, a peer-reviewed academic article.

Required Reading:
Researched Essays
Doing Literary Research

If you use Google as your starting point when you seek sources for your literature paper, you will waste plenty of time, and you may end up with sources that were authored by high school sophomores. Plenty of academic journals publish full versions of their articles online, but most do not. Since academic journals cost money to produce, the publishers don't give their articles away for free -- instead, they sell access rights to libraries.

Remember the research skills you learned in freshman comp, and use the library database to find academic books on literature, and peer-reviewed academic journal articles.

Databases you should use include Academic Search Elite, Modern Language. You might also ask a librarian to show you the new Literature Resource Center.
You may not find a whole book devoted to color symbolism in The Scarlet Letter. You may not find a whole article devoted to the particular Edgar Allen Poe poem you want to write about.

But that doesn't mean you should eject your topic and look for something else. If you can't find a source on parallels between the disease described in The Masque of the Red Death and the ebola virus, you might instead look for a book that describes Poe's basic knowledge of science. (Though I did, in fact, find just such an article in a journal called Emerging Infectious Diseases.)

But herein lies an important lesson:

If you write your paper first, and then "look for quotes" to support the paper you have already written, you will find the research process tedious and meaningless.
That "research" strategy may have sufficed in high school, but it will not work in college.

You should know the author, the article title, and the name of the journal in which the article appeared.

Be very careful to note whether you have found an article that reviews a book. In this case, the author of the article is not the one who conducted the research that went into the book. (Ideally, you should go and find the book being reviewed.)

SHU has an inter-library loan program that may help you get books in time for you to submit your revision of this paper, even if you'll have to write the rough draft based on resources that you can get your hands on now.

Continue reading...

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