Practicing Annotated Bibliography Entries

Our textbook, Critical Theory Today, focuses primarily on the example of The Great Gatsby in its demonstrations of various critical lenses at work. To give you further practice in recognizing how critical theory actually gets used (actual essays that use the different theories), I'll ask you, from time to time, to locate additional essays online and in our library. You will summarize and evaluate each of these works in an annotated bibliography entry, tailored for our uses in this course.

Hint: it would be very worthwhile to take a look at our homepage, under "Helpful Resources," especially the Bedford-St. Martin's material on documentation and research.

Creating an Entry

1) Find an anthology article, book chapter, journal or online essay in which you see the assigned type of criticism at work. For instance, as we cover Chapter 2, you will search for pieces which provide psychoanalytic readings of your choice of literary works. If you were interested, say, in the poems of Sylvia Plath, you might look up psychoanalytic criticism of her book Arial. In the search engine for EBSCO, Project Muse, Google, etc., you would type in a variety of search words and phrases, such as "psychoanalytic analysis of Ariel" or "psychoanalysis and Sylvia Plath" or "psychoanalytic criticism and Sylvia Plath," etc.

2) Provide a bibliography entry for the critical work(s) you've found, using MLA format.

3) Provide a 1-3 paragraph annotation for that source. Your annotation should:

• summarize the source;
• explain what it is about the piece which makes evident the kind of criticism being applied (psychoanalytic, Marxist, structuralist, etc.);
• evaluate its usefulness in helping you to understand the kind of criticism in question;
• report on what you learned from the piece about the kind of criticism in question. (In your research for this bibliography, you'll likely run into concepts, names, and terms which aren't covered in CTT. Use this as an opportunity to research further and learn more about the theories we're studying in class. Building your bibliography thus becomes a supplemental learning tool.)

Evaluation Criteria for Your Entries

Each annotation should include the information described under "Instructions" above, and my evaluation will take into account the good-faith effort you made to find and understand sources which apply the theories we're studying in class. I'll look for entries that are well-developed, thoughtful, and relevant. Finally, your bibliography should be proofread and formatted according to MLA guidelines.

Sample:

Annotated Bibliography

Simpson, Homer ed. "Sibling Rivalry and the Cycle of Barbarism in Ridley Scott's Gladiator." Psychoanalytic Readings of

        Contemporary American  Films: A Casebook. New York: Harper Collins, 1999.

This article makes frequent use of common Freudian terms (sibling rivalry, Oedipal complex), and so it is easily identified as psychoanalytical criticism. It examines the dynamic between Commodus and his father (Marcus Aurelius), his sister (Lucilla), his rival Maximus, the Senate, and the people of Rome. Marcus Aurelius clearly prefers Maximus to his real son Commodus, and Commodus's resulting emotional wounds lead him into a pattern of destructive behavior which results in his own ignominious and pointless death. Lack of paternal love, in fact, becomes the core issue which organizes all of Commodus's behavior, both personal and social. It's interesting to see how such unresolved psychological issues in a politically powerful person can have far-reaching, harmful, even brutal social and political repercussions. (It even made me wonder about real, current-day politicians and their own psychological complexes!) Overall, the article helped me understand psychoanalytical theory a bit better, though it was way over my head in spots. Simpson mentions concepts such as "male hysteria" and "compulsive masculinity," for example, which are unfamiliar to me, and he refers frequently to theorists such as Erik Homburger Erikson, whom I've never read.

Decker, Hannah S. "Erikson, Erik Homburger." World Book Online Reference Center. 2005. World Book, Inc. 13 August. 2005.

        <http://www.worldbookonline.com/wb/Article?id=ar184020>.

Since, while researching Gladiator, I kept running into references to Erik Erikson, I decided to look him up in a general encyclopedia. This World Book entry was helpful because it explains concisely that while "Freud focused on the psychological and biological aspects of development," Erikson believed "that social and cultural influences also are significant to development." This helps explain to me why Simpson in the source cited above so often refers to Commodus's relationship to the Roman public, the Roman army, and the Senate. The social world he lived in was every bit as important in shaping his core psychological issues as the dynamics of his own personal family.

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