The Annotated Bibliography

For this 10-12 page essay, you are required to use at least THREE STORIES and THREE OUTSIDE/SECONDARY SOURCES.  That is, I expect at least SIX citations to underpin your analysis.  As I suggest in the assignment sheet, your supportive research should be of a historical nature and/or autobiographical or biographical explorations of the author’s historical and cultural moment.  You are also free to employ sources that lay out literary analysis of the stories you are discussing, but don’t let these texts do your arguing for you.  It is the goal of this annotated bibliography first to establish your control over the sources and then to show me (and yourself) how you intend to employ their information.  A good annotation provides a succinct summary of the article, and it should give some insight into the article’s relevance to your own agenda.  This is first step in establishing the “because” explanation (the warrant) upon which the Toulmin supportive approach turns.  Please note that the more relevant information you pack into the annotation, the more your own argument is going to take form before you start writing.  You will also find that beyond helping to sculpt the contours of your own analysis and approach, the annotated bibliography easily becomes your works cited page (bonus!).

Example:

Grant, Barry Keith (1996).  Rich and Strange: The Yuppie Horror Film [Electronic

Version].  Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 48, No. ½ (Spring-Summer 1996): pp. 4-16. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20688090

Grant examines a subgenre of the contemporary horror film, the “Yuppie Horror film,” focusing on the way that this subgenre employs the same elements of traditional horror films but shifted to exploit the 1980’s-early-1990’s social and cultural preoccupation with material success.  Using a wide variety of films as his support, Grant demonstrates the way that Yuppie horror replaces monsters and the supernatural with financial horrors such as losing one’s livelihood, social standing and/or material possessions.  This essay will provide material for my analysis of the salient economic anxieties and cultural tropes that motivate the affluent villains in Bret Easton Ellis’ short stories, the Devil Wears Prada (1989) and Let Them Eat Stake (1990).