Annotation Assignment English 630
Due: April. 10
Compile an annotated bibliography of about 15 literary critical, historical, theoretical or literary sources relevant to the production of your final research paper. “Relevant” here should be understood, especially with regard to literary critical work, as not just about the authors you’re working on, but about your particular subject/focus on these authors’ work.
The bibliography should include the full citation of each reference, in MLA or University of Chicago style, and then an annotation with the some or all of the following information. A one or two sentence summary of the argument of the cite, a comment on what’s important about the argument, how the argument would inform your own project, and how persuasive you think the argument is. It need not be the case that each annotation covers each of these four areas. On the other hand, it also seems unlikely that most annotations wouldn’t cover all or most of them (e.g. why is the citation in your bibliography if it’s not directly relevant to your argument or if it isn’t of particular interest more generally. How will you be able to situate other arguments in your final essay if you’re not thinking already about their persuasiveness or problems?). For literary texts, describe the genre and subject of the text, and its relevance to your project. You might also include common formal qualities that have particular relevance to your project.
I’ll evaluate the bibliographies based on the correctness of their citation form, the cogency of the annotations, the completeness and focus of the bibliography as a whole (i.e. do the citations really seem to lay the ground for a focused critical project?), and the quality of the sources (e.g. does the bibliography have several old sources without recognizing that a particular debate/point of view was reframed in succeeding decades?).
The bibliography should be double spaced with standard margins. Here are some examples of bibliographic entries for an imaginary paper entitled “‘Seek to Please’: Literary Bad Boys and the Pleasure of the Text.”
Brown, Georgia. “Breaking the Canon: Marlowe’s Challenge to the Literary Status Quo in Hero and Leander.” Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe. Ed. Paul Whitfield White. AMS, 1998. 59–75. Argues that Marlowe’s erotic and transgressive “Hero and Leander” flouts the decorum expected of literary texts and in doing so creates a new sense of authorial creativity, originality and independence (61, 62, 63) against “humanist morality” (68). For example, the homoerotic incidents in “Hero and Leander” describe “forbidden and marginalized love” (63) and thus make the author a rebel who asserts his imaginative independence, even as he recycles materials of the classical canon in a “self-consciously frivolous re-reading” of it (63). While Brown is certainly correct that Marlowe explores elements of classical literature and literary education that gave some early modern pedagogues and moralists pause, I think she exaggerates the extent to which Marlowe is truly a rebel. These are still school texts, after all, and Brown further assumes that Marlowe is writing against the humanist moralist, rather than writing for the young gallant about town. The latter is not rebellion, just a different audience served.
McEleney, Corey. “Spenser’s Unhappy Ends: The Legend of Courtesy and the Pleasure of the Text.” ELH 79.4 (2012): 797–822. Argues that Spenser’s text, rather than subscribing to the didactic norms of humanist literature and poetic defenses, instead revels in the useless pleasure of the text (797-98). McEleney shares Brown’s interest in early modern literary texts that go “beyond the bounds of poetic decorum” (798). This wandering has affinity with Marlowe’s digressions in “Hero and Leander.” But McEleney’s post-structuralist refusal to name any principle that drives the text—which could become a new “end” for it (809)—in favor of the wanderings of language itself (814; echoing Roland Barthes’ “‘pleasures of the text”) seems to me ultimately less interesting than Brown’s argument, and less persuasive. If Marlowe could embrace textual pleasure, why can we not assume that Spenser does as well, at least ambivalently? Why should we assume the pleasure of the text for Spenser is failure, rather than synthesis or a different kind of authorial aim?