Assignment : Annotated Bibliography
• MILLIE JONES: Hello. I'm Millie, a tutor with the writing center. For this week's written assignment, you'll complete an annotated bibliography. This might be a new term for some of you, so I'll explain. A bibliography is a list of reference works used in a research paper. An annotation is a note about each work. Therefore, your annotated bibliography for this course will contain the list of works you intend to use for your literary analysis paper and a note about each.
This might sound simple, and it is. However, there are still certain expectations placed upon you for this assignment. First of all, you need to understand the differences between a primary and a secondary source. For your literary analysis paper, your primary source is the story, poem, or drama that you'll write about. And secondary sources are the articles you find where another scholar writes about the primary text.
In the sample essay, the primary source is Kafka's The Metamorphosis and the secondary sources are the two articles that are used in the paper to support the analysis. For your annotated bibliography, you will include an entry for your primary source and two secondary sources.
Be sure that your sources are scholarly. See the information in the course material on how to use the Ashford Library for research. More is not better, so two sources should be plenty. Don't forget to adhere to APA formatting for the assignment. We've included a template and a sample annotated bibliography to help you understand exactly what is expected of you in this assignment. Good luck with your research.
For this assignment, you will write an annotated bibliography on three sources. For detailed information on how to create your Annotated Bibliography, please see this Sample Annotated Bibliography
Prompt #2: "In some stories, characters come into conflict with the culture in which they live."
Working thesis:
Gregor Samsa's physical transformation into a vermin is a physical manifestation of his already alienated state and demonstrates how his family viewed him as a thing instead of a son or brother that they loved.
Kafka, F. (1990). The metamorphosis. New York, NY: Scribner Paperback Fiction. The Metamorphosis begins when Gregor Samsa wakes up and discovers he has been transformed into a large insect. The story tells how he and his family deal with his transformation, which a focus on the dehumanization that Gregor faces in his job and his family role. Gregor attempts to communicate, but cannot and, isolated and misunderstood, he slowly deteriorates.
Kafka uses Gregor's transformation into an insect as a metaphor for how modern life squashes our ability to interrelate with others and create meaning in our lives.
Ryan, S. (2007). Franz Kafka's Die Verwandlung: Transformation, metaphor, and the perils of assimilation. Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 43(1), 1-18.
This source by Simon Ryan explores how Kafka's Jewishness created anxiety about his body, particularly since anti-Semitism pervaded his Czech culture. The stereotypes of Jewishness did not allow Jewish people to easily assimilate into the dominant culture, though many Jews attempted to do so. Gregor Samsa's transformation into an insect is a metaphor of the power and pervasiveness of anti-Semitism and the inability of a Jewish man to fully assimilate.
The insect 2 body symbolizes how Jewish people were viewed and Gregor's quiet extinction foreshadows the Holocaust. This source helps to define how body image, coupled with Jewishness, can alienate a person from the culture around him
Sokel, W. H. (1983). From Marx to myth: The structure and function of self-alienation in Kafka's Metamorphosis. Literary Review, 26(4), 485-496. Walter Sokel discusses the concept of self-alienation and how Kafka's story represents it in a literal way. Using a Marxist analysis, Sokel shows how labor, as it is defined in the story, is structured within a capitalist system where the worker -- Gregor -- is alienated from the product of his labor.
Therefore, his work has no meaning to him. However, describing this as a "mythical setting," Sokel shows how Gregor assumes guilt for his inability to provide labor and, as a result, dies without ever recovering his humanity. This source will help define why Gregor turned into an insect and how the economic system alienated him from himself and his family.
List of Required Sources Click each source below:
• Primary Source
• Secondary Source
The term primary source refers to:
• Original documents: Diaries, speeches, manuscripts, letters, interviews, news film footage, autobiographies, official records, etc.
• Creative works: Short stories.
The primary source is the short story you choose to write about. Please see the List of Literary Works (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. to choose a primary source. The source must come from this list.
List of LiteraryWorks If there is not a hyperlink provided below, you can find the text or poem in the course textbook. Following is a complete list of the texts that you may explore in your literary analysis.
Be sure to refer to the List of Writing Prompts in order to know which of the following texts are the possible selections for your chosen prompt are:
Stories:
• "The Blue Hotel" (Crane, 1898)
• "A Hunger Artist" (Kafka, 1924) - 7.5 in Journey Into Literature
• "Sweat" (Hurston, 1926)
• "Guests of the Nation" (O'Connor, 1931)
• "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (O'Connor, 1953)
• "Good Country People" (O'Connor, 1953) - 6.6 in Journey Into Literature
• "A Very OldMan with EnormousWings" (Marquez, 1955)
• "Sonny's Blues" ( Baldwin, 1957)
• "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" (Oates, 1966)
• "The OnesWhoWalk Away from Omelas" (LeGuin, 1973)
• "No NameWoman" (Kingston, 1975)
• "Greasy Lake" (Boyle, 1985)
• "The Things They Carried" (O'Brien, 1990) - 5.4 in Journey Into Literature
• "A Rock Trying to Be a Stone" (Troncoso, 1997)
• "Interpreter ofMaladies" (Lahiri, 1999)
• "What You Pawn, IWill Redeem" (Alexie, 2003)
• "The Cheater's Guide to Love" (Diaz, 2012)
Poems:
• "The Raven" (Poe, 1845) - 9.7 in Journey Into Literature
• "Theme for English B" (Hughes, 1951)
• "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" (Thomas, 1952) - 11.2 in Journey Into Literature
• "Smokey the Bear Sutra" (Snyder, 1969)
• "Immigrants in Our Own Land" (Santiago Baca, 1977)
• "Child of the Americas" (Morales, 1986) - 11.1 in Journey Into Literature
• "Blood" (Nye, 1986)
• "To live in the Borderlands means you" (Anzaldúa, 1987)
• "What It's Like to Be a Black Girl" (Smith, 1991) - 11. 1 in Journey Into Literature
• "Ways of Talking" (Jin, 1996)
• "Grief Calls Us to the Things of ThisWorld" (Alexie, 2009) - 11.2 in Journey Into Literature
• "Bright Copper Kettles" (Seshadri, 2010)
• "A PointWest ofMount San Bernardino" (Delgado, 2013)
• "Burial" (Che, 2014)
Dramas:
• The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde, 1895) - 14.3 and Appendix C in Journey Into Literature
• AMidsummer's Night Dream, (Shakespeare, 1590)
• Macbeth (Shakespeare, 1606) - Appendix B in Journey Into Literature
• Mistaken Identity (Cooper, 2008) 14.3 in Journey Into Literature
List of Required Sources - Secondary Source
Secondary sources are publications like textbooks, magazine articles, histories, criticisms, commentaries, encyclopedias, etc.
An appropriate secondary source to use for your literary analysis is a journal article that interprets and offers analysis of a literary work.
In your Annotated Bibliography, you will
• Copy and paste the writing prompt you chose to explore in Week One into a Word Document.
• Restate the working thesis you created in Week One below your writing prompt.
• In this same document, identify your primary source (your short story) and two secondary, academic sources.
• Summarize each source and explain how the source supports your working thesis. These summaries should be 100 to 150 words for each entry.
For the Annotated Bibliography assignment, you will write annotations for three sources. One source should be a primary source. Next, you will choose two secondary sources that are additional to the text.
The two sources you locate must be academic sources and come from peer-reviewed journals or other scholarly publications. For information on finding sources within the Ashford Library.
The Annotated Bibliography includes a citation of the source in APA format. It also includes a brief summary of the source.
Click each example below:
• Example of the Primary Source for the Annotated Bibliography
• Example of the Secondary Source for the Annotated Bibliography