ENGL 4371: Cultural Encounters in Early America

Fall 2005

Writing Assignment #2: Finding and Assessing Secondary Sources

Background: Your second writing assignment is an exercise designed to introduce you to finding secondary critical analyses of texts and assessing how they might be useful to your own analysis. It is also designed to jump-start your research paper. In completing it, you should accomplish three objectives:

• Familiarizing yourself with the range of sources currently available on a text that interests you
• Identifying a critical question (controversy/problem) that you would like to investigate in more depth
• Writing an annotation and analysis of three secondary sources that comment on this critical question.

Although simplified and artificial, this assignment is designed to mimic the process any literary critic would use when writing a critical essay. As you move on to longer and more complex kinds of literary analyses and papers, you will still use these basic skills and concepts.

Assignment: This assignment will be completed in two stages:

1. Identifying a topic and possible relevant/useful sources. By Friday, October 21, you will present to me both in writing and in person a statement of your general topic, a brief annotated bibliography of three sources, a statement of the critical question or problem that the sources have in common, and a demonstration of how you located those sources and identified their relevance.

2. Writing a five-page paper summarizing and synthesizing these sources (after refining the critical question or list of sources, if necessary). At the beginning of class on Thursday, October 27, you will submit a paper that puts these secondary sources into conversation with one another. What have these sources taught you about how to think about your critical question? Which critic(s) has/have been most and least useful, and why? If you were to pursue this line of inquiry, where might further research take you?

Advice: Although this is not a research paper as such, the work you will be doing constitutes the kind of preparatory work that goes into writing one. The more seriously and vigorously you pursue this assignment, the more equipped you will be to write the paper itself.

• Start with a topic that interests you. It must be of direct relevance to at least one literary text from our course reading (including texts not yet read). If you can formulate a well-defined question or problem to focus your research, do so. If not, you may need to browse through some secondary sources to get some ideas first. In general, I recommend early consultation with me.
• Find at least three examples of criticism—journal articles or book chapters—that address this critical question. To begin your search, start with electronic resources such as the MLA International Bibliography, Project Muse, and JSTOR (all available through the SMU Libraries Electronic Resources page) and/or talk to a reference librarian. A certain amount of learning on the job will be required. Not all of these databases work exactly the same. You will need to be patient, diligent, and meticulous.
• Do not rely solely on titles of essays. Although you might use first impressions to weed out the obviously irrelevant possibilities, in locating your best sources you should take the time to read critically and carefully. Keep in mind that many times the best way to identify a good critical question is to find problems that have troubled other readers. When you find one good source, scour the footnotes and list of works cited for related sources.
• Ideally, each of your three sources should be relevant to one another, as well as to your research question. In summarizing each source, focus first on stating the author’s argument fairly and objectively, even if you ultimately disagree with it. Then move on to your critical response to it. What’s at stake in the argument, and how well (or poorly) does the author make the case? What about it is useful/insightful/ illuminating/provocative and/or misleading/misguided/distorted/wrong? Maybe you are not (yet) an authority on this question, but you can critically evaluate arguments, evidence, consequences. You can also enlist other, better criticism to bolster and sharpen your own.