The purpose of this presentation is to discuss research methods, specifically
research for literary writing. Now, I know that since most of you are in
composition II or a more advanced literature course such as the short
story or British literature I or Shakespeare, this will be a refresher for
many of you. If some of you have been out of school for a while or have not had
the opportunity to conduct research at the college level specifically for
literature, this could be a good place for you to start. The first thing we do
for a literary research paper,, as for any research paper, is to come up with our
research question. Some people attempt to start coming up with a thesis before
they conduct any research -- this is a little backwards. You usually start with
the general topic and you come up with a research question such as the one that I
presented here. I'm interested in D. H. Lawrence's short story "The Rocking Horse
Winner," so rather than imposing a thesis about what object are symbolic in "The
Rocking Horse Winner," before I do any research I'm going to come up with this
question. I want to find out more about what subjects might be considered
symbolic in D.H. Lawrence's short story "The Rocking Horse Winner" so as you can
see this is phrased as a question and all of the research that I am going to
do is going to be an attempt to answer that question. This is the whole purpose
of research, whether it be in the humanities or the hard sciences or the
social sciences. We conduct research to attempt to learn more about a particular
subject. Now, I've already read Lawrence's short story so I have an idea of what
objects might be symbolic. He titled his short story "The Rocking Horse Winner," so
that indicates to me that the rocking horse might be symbolic, but I want to
read more of the secondary sources. I want to see what
literary critics who are experts in their field have have to say about
Lawrence's story before I formulate my own thesis and my own opinion. So how do
I do that? Well, luckily research has moved on from the time that I was in
college and you no longer physically have to go to your library for much of
your research. You might need to visit occasionally but it is not something
that must be done in person. We have wonderful databases available online. As
long as you have your student I.D., you will be able to search those remotely from
the comfort of your own home and you can also do things like limiting your
results to sources that are peer reviewed (or to sources that have been
written by experts in the field and reviewed by other experts in the field,
in this case literary studies). For any literary paper I recommend the databases
of Academic Search which is a great database dealing with the humanities and
JSTOR which will return specifically literary sources and I always start by
just typing in the title and author of whatever I'm writing about. I can add
or delete terms as needed.
Here's an example of what happened when I started typing "the rocking horse
winner" into Academic Search. As you can see it offered me several suggestions
for other terms. I went with "the rocking horse winner and greed" because that was
something that really jumped out at me as I read the story. I also was able to
limit this to peer reviewed sources. At the college level you should not be
using general sources such as unreviewed internet websites (things like sparknotes or
shmoop). Even if you find literary journals online
if they have things such as advertisements or if they are open
submission they're not considered peer reviewed.
There is another video located on web study that you can view if you're still
not sure about the difference between peer reviewed or scholarly sources
and general or popular sources which would be things like time magazines such as
Newsweek. General websites fall into that category as well. When I searched for
"the rocking horse winner and greed," I also narrowed my search down. I checked
the box that says "full text" because I didn't want to just get abstracts and
then have to request the sources through interlibrary loan. I wanted things that I
could look at right now. I also checked the box that said "scholarly/
peer-reviewed journals" and I limited it to more recent publications as well but
that's up to you. If that's something you feel you need in literary research it
doesn't always have to be the most up-to-date source. If you're working in
the hard sciences or if you're working in social sciences you might want to check
that you're looking at the most recent publication date unless you're looking
at a historical perspective of your topic. So, when I limited that (and this is
just in the one database) to full text and scholarly journals, I got nine hits.
Now I obviously have to look through all of these sources and see if they are
appropriate for my paper. I can do that by looking at the abstracts. An abstract
is like a brief summary of the scholarly essay and it can help you eliminate
sources that are not very helpful for your topic but you should not quote from
them. Abstracts are not typically written by the authors of the piece, they're
written by editors and they are just a summary so they don't capture all of the
nuances of the scholarly source.
And then once you have a source you do need to read them thoroughly. Scholarly
sources are typically long. The literary journal Explicator has very short and
readable essays, usually about two to three pages, but many other literary
journals do have long and involved essays that can be twenty or thirty
pages, and again, this is what's appropriate for the college level
audience. You should be reading works of some depth and you should be reading
them in their entirety so when you use any quotations from them you're not
misrepresenting what the authors of those sources originally wrote.
Please do not write your essay and then go to the library looking for sources
that you can simply "plug in" to support what you've already written. That sort of
defeats the purpose of research because you're ignoring sources that might take
you in a different direction, that might help your thesis evolve, and that might
lend more depth to your paper, so always do your research first. Read your
secondary sources taking notes on them, make highlights if you have printouts, do
an outline and move your main points around depending on what you find in
your library sources. So here's an example of an abstract for the very
first source that popped up when I searched for "the rocking horse winner
and greed." It gives me the author of the piece,
it tells me where it was published, it indicates that this is an academic journal; it is not a
popular source, it is a scholarly source. It tells me when it was published. The
abstract tells me exactly what's going to be covered in this longer piece. In
this case, we're going to be looking at the role of capitalism, labor, and
religion in "The Rocking Horse Winner" and you can get to the abstract by clicking
on the icon right next to the results on the list. It's not entirely visible here but it's a
picture of a page with a magnifying glass
that allows you to zoom in and look at the abstract before you invest in
reading a 20 page essay that may or may not deal with what you want to write
about. I looked at that abstract and I said "yes, this is a good source." I then
clicked on the PDF full-text so that I could read the entire essay, and as I read
through I found many very interesting things about the role of greed and
capitalism in this story. In particular when I got to page 298 I see
that this author feels that the rocking horse is a symbol of "non-productive
labor, for even while it moves it remains stationary: even while Paul is magically
(humanely) creative, producing untold wealth for his mother, he does not
advance in the least and in fact becomes increasingly isolated and fearful that
even the abilities he now possesses will be taken from him." Well, this is perfect.
This does support my main point that the rocking horse is symbolic of greed
something that moves an moves and moves and never goes anywhere, so I would probably
quote this entire passage or this entire sentence in my paper. This would
help me support my thesis very nicely, so this is something that I would highlight
if I had the hard copy or that I would make notes of if I was looking at it in
electronic format.
One final thing that is extremely useful about using library databases as opposed
to something like Google is that in many of the databases you have this nice
little toolbar on the side. If you click on the yellow page over here it will
give you a list of the format that you can use and it will show you exactly
what this source should look like when you put it on your works cited page so
you don't have to guess. You don't have to go to the MLA handbook and attempt to
figure out how to cite your source, it will tell you and it will tell you in
the most recent
and updated version of MLA format. Now this has been a very brief and general
reminder about ways to conduct literary research. I hope it was helpful and if
you do have any questions about any of the papers that you are writing for any
of my literature classes please come see me during my office hours or send me an
email and let me know how I may assist you. Good luck and happy writing and
researching.
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