5 Article Annotated Bibliography
Read at least five scholarly articles about a similar topic (e.g., the characterization of Hamlet, the historical context of Shakespearean stage, the influences on a particular work, etc.). Create bibliographic information for each article and beneath each entry, write a 1-2 paragraph summary of the article. Be sure to state if and how each article could be useful for your research paper - this could be something you strongly agree with or strongly disagree with and wish to challenge in your paper. Due 2 weeks before the research paper (which is two weeks before the last day of class).
Note that the five articles you select for your bibliography must be related in some way. Do not just pick the first three articles you find on Shakespeare. I will not accept that. This does not mean that you have to know what you will write for your research paper before you write it, but you must settle upon a general topic at this time. That means skimming MORE than five articles to find a topic that interests you. That also means using abstracts to decide if the material in a particular article is worth reading.
At least three of the five entries in your bibliography must be from scholarly journals. Chapters from books or whole books are acceptable for the remaining two entries. Note that you do not have to limit yourself to five entries. If you find six or seven sources that apply very well to your chosen topic, then use them by all means. However, the bare minimum is five, and at least three of those five must be from scholarly journals.
Bibliographic entries must be in MLA format! YOU are responsible for learning this format. A representative from the Writing Center will come in for one class sometime during the middle of the semester to teach the basics of MLA formatting and answer any questions you may have. That day will be the only class time dedicated to teaching MLA.
Sample Entries
Gernet, Louis. "Anthropology in Greek Religion." The Anthropology of Ancient Greece. Trans. John Hamilton, S. J. and Blaise Nagy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1981. 1-13.
The basic question anthropology attempts to answer is what was the relationship of the human to the divine and vice versa - it's easy to see Whitman's analysis of Sophocles in Gernet: "Where among all of this am I?" The choral Ode to Man in Antigone is ambiguous or ambivalent toward the nature of man - Vernant's argument. Poetry was "a kind of popular philosophy" (4). The worlds of gods and men were always separate, always distanced; Pindar's poetry supports this as well as the obvious epic and tragic examples. Cult worship and the Eleusian Mysteries were about bridging two worlds: in the worship of Dionysus, through celebration of the human spirit; in the Eleusian Mysteries, through an act of communion and the promise of immortality. The concept of the soul had no part in Eleusian Mysteries or the worship of Dionysus. Death is represented in terms of a separation of the 'body' from the 'soul' in the poetry of Greece.
"Heroes are members of a separate race that lies halfway between gods and men" (6). They begin as human but transcend humanity after death. The idea of the heroic was closely connected to religious thought - obviously, if it's a bridge between the human and divine. "The idea of daimon gravitates toward a very distinctive concept of divinity: the divinity dwelling in man which is reveled after his death and sometimes even during his lifetime" (11).
Gernet, Louis. "Forms of Mythical Thought: The Mythical Idea of Value in Greece." The Anthropology of Ancient Greece. Trans. John Hamilton, S. J. and Blaise Nagy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1981. 71-111.
The basis for "value" is given a thorough analysis in this section. It analyzes value in terms of legendary and mythological backgrounds (including tragedy) as well as they ways it in which value manifests itself in the everyday lives of Athens (tragedy is, itself, an example of this). One of the more important points for the purposes of classical literature analysis is Gernet's work on Aeschylus' Agamemnon. Clytemnestra invites Agamemnon to walk on the purple carpet. "He hesitates and is afraid, but finally he gives in. As the door of the palace closes behind him, we know that he is as good as dead" (82). For more examples of how/why we know, in accordance with the socioreligious values of the times, that Agamemnon seals his own fate, see Le G�ni grec dans la relgion by L. Gernet and A. Boulanger, p. 84.
Loraux, Nicole. "V: Funeral Oration as Political Genre." The Invention of Athens: The funeral Oration in the Classical City. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Cambridge: Harvard University. 1986. 221-262.
Funeral oration was already a fixed genre by the time of Pericles' famous speech as depicted by Thucydides. It was a form of political maneuvering before the preeminence of rhetoric in the late fifth and fourth centuries based on highly structured rhetorical techniques. Funerary orators constantly competed with the orations of the past - a show of one-up-manship? Although the formal, state-run funeral orations professed to celebrate the demos in terms of the individual lives being celebrated, the orations tended to be a ritualized mask for the aristocracy to promulgate their conservative philosophy.
Loraux, Nicole. "VI: Under the Spell of Ideality." The Invention of Athens: The funeral Oration in the Classical City. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Cambridge: Harvard University. 1986. 263-327.
Funeral orations were use as "a patriotic discourse powerful enough to impose a certain idea of the city" (264). It created an imaginary Athens, an ideal, though foreigners were just as easily enthralled by the orations as native Athenians. Orations paradoxically shifted focus from the subject (individual) to the state, particularly through references to military exploits - this seems to be where Tyrell & Bennett draw their analysis of Pericles' oration and apply it to the Antigone. The comedies of Aristophanes and the usages in Plato and Aristotle are some of the primary sources from which Loraux infers on the practices of the past.
Loraux, Nicole. Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman. Trans. Anthony Forster. Cambridge: Harvard University. 1987.
Men and women died differently in ancient Greece: men in the civic realm of war, women in the private sphere, in bed. The Athenian state remembered the dead man. It was left to the family to remember the dead woman. Of course, not all men must have died serving their polis in battle just as not every woman died in her bed behind closed doors. Tragedy was a civic institution that "delighted" in blurring the formal gender expectations between male & female - gender expectations being an alien term, Loraux simply relates them as the male and the female. "Women in tragedy died violently" (3). Loraux is concerned with the nature of the female's violent death in tragedy. It was a way that the woman "mastered her death" (3). There is a difference between the violent deaths of women and those of men: men are murdered in tragedy, but women usually commit suicide or are sacrificed.