Week 5 Discussion Guide: Monday--The Hawthorne Project
We will talk about how to find scholarly printed sources for your Hawthorne paper. Many of you probably will decide to investigate traditional textual analysis problems (e.g., how does Hawthorne's narrator control readers' impressions of one of the protagonists?; how does the setting create readers' expectations that are either confirmed or not?; how does thematic use of a set of words cause readers to interpret the action in a way the author seeks to control?). Others may want to research the historical context of one or more of the stories, or of Hawthorne's own life to look for clues about what led him to write one of the stories. Still others can take advantage of our access to the annual and periodical editions in which the stories were first published to write about how the stories or poems or engravings around them might have shaped contemporary readers' reception of Hawthorne's stories. We also have access to first editions of Hawthorne's own short story collections in which the three main stories we read were first re-published, surrounded by other Hawthorne stories which would affect those later readers' understanding of them. (E.g., should we read Goodman Brown's experiences as symbolic/psychological or real?; should we read Robin as innocent and honest, i.e., good, or is he vain and naive, i.e., not so good?; is Giovanni a man betrayed by his beloved or a man deceived by his own desires and fears until he betrays his beloved?) For a table describing all the ways you might approach writing about one or more of these short stories, see the "Hawthorne Project" web page linked above.
The bibliographic training session's main emphasis will be on using online library and bookstore catalogs, and using the search engines and databases linked to peer-reviewed scholarly articles. You are required to use only scholarly sources for this project, including scholarly journal articles and printed books from university presses. The obvious place to find them is in university press books on the library shelves and by using the scholarly search engines like JSTOR and EbscoHost to locate article-length scholarship on your topics. Do not give in to the temptation to use "Google" as your search engine or it will flood your mind with suspect or simply incorrect information, most of which was copied from someone else. You may use "Google Scholar" or "Google Books," but those searches also may be contaminated with non-scholarly results, and "Google Books" searches usually block out significant portions of books still under copyright (like standard biographies). Also, try to rise above literary dictionaries and encyclopedias except as places to get authoritative background information.
For biographical information about Hawthorne's life and times, you will want the author's standard scholarly biographies, avoiding popular biographies in favor of those whose authors actually read all their subjects' works, correspondence, journals and diaries, and had their work evaluated by peer reviewers who weeded out errors and misinterpretation. If you are interested in writing about Hawthorne's career and publishing history, you can use WorldCat and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Virtual Catalog-English to locate surviving copies of early Hawthorne editions.
This is not the same as 104's library session on general advice about research--the library's research experts will provide instruction in tools explicitly designed to help you complete the group research presentation for Thursday and your first draft of the Hawthorne paper, also due Thursday. After the library's instruction session is over, we will discuss how college-trained scholars' writing differs in process and intention from writing that succeeded in high school. If you did not already read "Making the Transition" before this literary analysis project started, be sure to click here to read some very important preliminary advice that will help you write your rough draft.