Writing 125/English 120:
Critical Interpretation

Fall 2009 · Professor Paul Fisher

Contents:

Find background information
Find books
Find scholarly journal articles
Key websites
Evaluating what you find

• Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
• Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century
• [Columbia] Granger's World of Poetry has full text of more than 250,000 poems, commentaries, plus a history & criticism section
• Contemporary Women Poets - Clapp Ref PS151 .C67 1998
• An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia - Clapp Ref PS1541.Z49 E47 1998
• Encyclopedia of African-American Women Writers
• Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present - Clapp Ref PR113 .F45 1990

Use the Wellesley library catalog to find books, videos, and journals (not individual articles). You can try searching our new interface, Encore, and compare your results.

a few tips:

• use a keyword search for simple concepts
  
  - find a book that looks useful, click on the title, then click on the Full Record tab to see the subject terms
  - click on each subject term to find "more like this"
  - for example: a keyword search for gwendolyn brooks race leads to these subject terms (and more books on your topic):
  
  
• American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism
• Race in literature
• American poetry -- Women authors -- History and criticism
  
• for a more complex search, use Advanced Search and combine multiple concepts using AND for best results
• use synonyms to find all the ways your topic is expressed  (language or communication or speech)
• use truncation to save time (assimilat* for assimilation, assimilating)
• use parentheses to enclose each concept "string"

Some generally useful subject headings for this course might be:

• Brooks Gwendolyn 1917 2000
• Brooks Gwendolyn 1917 2000 Biography
• Brooks Gwendolyn 1917 2000 Criticism And Interpretation
• Dickinson, Emily 1830 1886
• Dickinson Emily 1830 1886 Criticism And Interpretation
• Dickinson Emily 1830 1886 Criticism Textual

• if our copy of a book is checked out, click on to the right of the title to request a book quickly (2-4 days)
• Search WorldCat to find material we don’t own, click on and request through ILL (interlibrary loan)
• In a hurry? Get a BLC card and borrow the book directly from a nearby library

tips:

• to find the full text of an article, click on the title for the full record, then look for the Find It! @ Wellesley button to link to the full text (online if we have it, or in print, or to the Interlibrary loan request if we don't own the journal)
  
  
• do your searching early and place interlibrary loan requests NOW for books and articles we don't have -- then, when you're ready to start reading and writing, you'll have a great selection of materials. If you wait, your choices will be very limited.

the most useful databases

• Literature Online (LION) - Literary texts from 1600 to the present, literary criticism full-text 1998 to present.
• Literature Resource Center - Biographies, bibliographies and full-text critical analysis of authors from all genres and eras, including the contents of Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and Contemporary Literary Criticism.
• MLA International Bibliography - Articles on literature, linguistics, film, and folklore, from all cultures, 1963 to present.
• Project Muse - Academic journals in the humanities & social sciences, from the past five years - see JSTOR for prior years
• Academic Search Complete - Multidisciplinary database
       
  
• Google Scholar - excellent tool for interdisciplinary topics that "fall through the cracks" of databases - click on "Find It @ Wellesley" to link directly to our databases if we have the full text, or to request through Interlibrary Loan if we don't

 key scholarly e-journals

• Emily Dickinson Journal

• Emily Dickinson Lexicon - is a comprehensive dictionary of over 9,275 words and variants found in the collected poems. Visitors to the website may search the lexicon to view alphabetical entries that consist of a headword with its inflected forms, part of speech, etymology, webplay, and definitions.
• Emily Dickinson - from poets.org
• Gwendolyn Brooks - from poets.org
  

Criteria to keep in mind when choosing and using soures:

• Accuracy - Does the author cite her/his sources and are they legitimate?
• Authority - Who wrote the source? Are they credible?
• Objectivity - Does the author have a bias, political or commercial or persuasive?
• Currency - Is this information new or based on outdated sources? Can you tell how current it is?

Wellesley College Library • WCIS • Alana Kumbier • last modified: October 24, 2009