Today in class you will use the HPU Libraries website and Google Scholar to locate, read, and annotate aditional sources for your final essay and annotated bibliography. The work that you submit at the end of class today should include at least one MLA-style annotated bibliographic entry. The sample entry that I composed as a model for you appears below.
Cardell, Kylie, and Victoria Kuttainen. “The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and Humour Memoir.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 45, no. 3, 2012, pp. 99-114. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44030697.
“The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and Humour Memoir” explores the implications of the blending of truth and artifice in David Sedaris’s writing. In the words of the authors, Sedaris’s “memoirs have attracted controversy for their blurring (or, as we argue, contesting) of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction” (Cardell and Kuttainen 100). While some critics, such as journalist Alex Heard, believe that “Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using the non-fiction label” (qtd. in Cardell and Kuttainen 103); Cardell and Kuttainen assert that Sedaris’s use of hyperbole, a staple of his prose style, is ethical in the context of the humor memoir.
Kylie Cardell, Ph.D., author of Dear World: Contemporary Uses of Autobiography, is Associate Professor of Humanities at Flinders University. Her co-author, Victoria Kuttainen, Ph.D., author of Unsettling Stories and The Transported Imagination, is Associate Professor of Art and Creative Media at James Cook University. Cardell’s and Kuttainen’s essay would serve as a useful source for a study of Sedaris’s mingling of the real and what he refers to as the “realish” in his writing (qtd. in Cardell and Kuttainen 99). It could also play a significant role as a source for a comparative study of the writing of Sedaris and other memoirists who blur the line between fiction and nonfiction.
Note that the blog format of the annotated bibliographic entry above is different from MLA format, which features paragraph indentations and double spacing.
The bibliographic entry above and the two paragraphs that follow total 241 words. The minimum word count for the entire assignment (essay and bibliography together) is 1,800 words.
If you compose four annotations of the length of the one above, your bibliography and the essay that introduces may be roughly the same length. If you annotate five or more sources, your bibliography may be longer than your essay.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To up your game and increase your word power, review the tips and tools on the Scrabble website as well as my blog posts devoted to the game.
Jane Lucas 