Related Resources

Resources

MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States)
Links to journals, materials, and the 2017 conference at MIT (April 27–30)

Oxford English Dictionary

MLA Formatting and Style Guide. Purdue Online Writing Lab.

Perelman, Leslie C., James Paradis, and Edward Barrett. The Mayfield Handbook of Technical & Scientific Writing. The McGraw-Hill Companies, 2001.

MLA Documentation Guide. The Writing Center. University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Spotlight on Grammar and Style

Writing FAQs

Corbett, Philip B."Begging the Question, Again." The New York Times. September 25, 2008.

Mayfield Manual Usage Glossary

Fowler, H. W. “The King’s English.” Clarendon Press, 1919.

Renaissance Humanism

Diminishing power of church
Expanded global exploration and markets
Increased literacy, cosmopolitanism, discovery of ancient world literatures
Emerging notions of character as agency within an ethical and political sphere

Enlightenment and Romanticism

Rise of capitalism, industrialization, and urban concentration
Age of revolution—overthrow of monarchy, church, class elites
Re-centering of self in an age of increasingly empirical science and materialism
Focus on character as democratic, alternative (to rational systems, including markets), entrepreneurial, or transcendental (a new religion of the self)

Modernism

End of global empire, beginning of global warfare
Skepticism about human agency
Concern with systems—political, economic, ideological, linguistic—that render older concepts of character untenable
Distrust of totalitarian regimes of thought or action

Postmodernism (posthumanism) and the Information Age

Breakdown of national boundaries and controlled systems of information—rise of global markets and societies
Rejection of authorship as privilege—recovery of forgotten or oppressed voices
Rethinking of identity as a nexus of markers—race, religion, nationality or ethnicity, gender, sexuality—that compete with older concepts of character

Literary Foci in an Ethnic Context

Questions (from syllabus): How has ethnic writing changed American culture and renovated forms of literary expression? What are the varieties and nuances of what we might call an ethnic subjectivity? What could it mean to harbor fugitives within the self: transgressive thoughts or a “foreign” identity? And what is the future of “ethnic” literature in a global space?

Literary Evidence

Character –how do these authors imagine “character” in new ethnic literary forms?
Plot—how do traditional plots from the Western canon—the quest (migration), bildungsroman (coming of age), and odyssey (return home)—serve new ethnic narratives?
Narrator, Point of View—Who has authority to tell the story? How is that authority defined?
Language—What are the tongues, idioms, and accents of an ethnic sensibility?

Books

Basic Format

The author’s name or a book with a single author’s name appears in last name, first name format. The basic form for a book citation is:

Lastname, Firstname. Title of Book. City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.

Book with One Author

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin, 1987. Print.

A Work Prepared by an Editor

Cite the book as you normally would, but add the editor after the title.

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Margaret Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.

An Introduction, Preface, Foreword, or Afterword

When citing an introduction, a preface, a foreword, or an afterword, write the name of the author(s) of the piece you are citing. Then give the name of the part being cited, which should not be italicized or enclosed in quotation marks.

Farrell, Thomas B. Introduction. Norms of Rhetorical Culture. By Farrell. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. 1-13. Print.

A Work in an Anthology, Reference, or Collection

Works may include an essay in an edited collection or anthology, or a chapter of a book. The basic form is for this sort of citation is as follows:

Lastname, First name. “Title of Essay.” Title of Collection. Ed. Editor’s Name(s). City of Publication: Publisher, Year. Page range of entry. Medium of Publication.

Swanson, Gunnar. “Graphic Design Education as a Liberal Art: Design and Knowledge in the University and The ‘Real World.’” The Education of a Graphic Designer. Ed. Steven Heller. New York: Allworth Press, 1998. 13-24. Print.

Periodicals

An Article in a Scholarly Journal

Author(s). “Title of Article.” Title of Journal Volume.Issue (Year): pages. Medium of publication.

Bagchi, Alaknanda. “Conflicting Nationalisms: The Voice of the Subaltern in Mahasweta Devi’s Bashai Tudu.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15.1 (1996): 41-50. Print.

Electronic Sources

Citing an Entire Web Site

It is necessary to list your date of access because web postings are often updated, and information available on one date may no longer be available later. If a URL is required or you chose to include one, be sure to include the complete address for the site. (Note: The following examples do not include a URL because MLA no longer requires a URL to be included.)

Remember to use n.p. if no publisher name is available and n.d. if no publishing date is given.

Editor, author, or compiler name (if available). Name of Site. Version number. Name of institution/organization affiliated with the site (sponsor or publisher), date of resource creation (if available). Medium of publication. Date of access.

The Purdue OWL Family of Sites. The Writing Lab and OWL at Purdue and Purdue U, 2008. Web. 23 Apr. 2008.

Felluga, Dino. Guide to Literary and Critical Theory. Purdue U, 28 Nov. 2003. Web. 10 May 2006.

A Page on a Web Site

For an individual page on a Web site, list the author or alias if known, followed by the information covered above for entire Web sites. Remember to use n.p. if no publisher name is available and n.d. if no publishing date is given.

“How to Make Vegetarian Chili.” eHow. Demand Media, Inc., n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2009.

An Image (Including a Painting, Sculpture, or Photograph)

Provide the artist’s name, the work of art italicized, the date of creation, the institution and city where the work is housed. Follow this initial entry with the name of the Website in italics, the medium of publication, and the date of access.

Goya, Francisco. The Family of Charles IV. 1800. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Museo National del Prado. Web. 22 May 2006.

An Article from an Online Database (or Other Electronic Subscription Service)

Cite articles from online databases (e.g. LexisNexis, ProQuest, JSTOR, ScienceDirect) and other subscription services just as you would print sources. Since these articles usually come from periodicals, be sure to consult the appropriate sections of the Works Cited: Periodicals page, which you can access via its link at the bottom of this page. In addition to this information, provide the title of the database italicized, the medium of publication, and the date of access.

Langhamer, Claire. “Love and Courtship in Mid-Twentieth-Century England.” Historical Journal 50.1 (2007): 173-96. ProQuest. Web. 27 May 2009.

Titles
1. Give your paper a title that conveys its content (“Spiegelman’s Use of Masking in Maus”), rather than the assignment (“Morrison Essay”).
2. Italicize or underline titles of books, novels, plays, or other complete works. Place the titles of shorter pieces like poems, articles, stories or essays in quotation marks.
Verbs
1. Use present-tense verbs in literary analysis. Reserve past-tense verbs for events that took place in the past; and also recognize that when you do, you run the risk of narrating what has happened (re-telling the plot or paraphrasing the language) rather then analyzing the text (showing how the language produces a certain effect or outcome).
2. Avoid passive verbs, which can lend themselves to wordy or vague language. Avoid over-use of the verb “to be,” which can produce static sentences. Look for active, vigorous verbs.
Dangling modifiers and phrases:
1. “ . . . simply by examining his choice of words, it is quite clear that the feeling remains.”
2. Correct so that the phrase modifies the appropriate noun: “simply by examining [who’s examining?] we see that the feeling remains’: “His word choice emphasizes the feeling.”
Pronoun agreement: Make sure pronouns agree in number and gender with the nouns they refer to. “The diction is very lofty throughout this passage—almost as if each speaker is flaunting their knowledge.” “Each speaker” is singular. Hence: “each speaker is flaunting his knowledge.” If the gender is unknown use his or her or change the number of the noun: “the speakers are flaunting their knowledge.”
Faulty pronoun reference: Make sure that pronouns like “which,” “this,” or “that” have nouns to refer to. See this page on Using Pronouns Clearly at OWL (Online Writing Lab at Purdue).
Punctuation in a compound sentence: A compound sentence links two or more main clauses with a comma and coordinating conjunction (and, but, or), or a semicolon.
1. Conjunction and no comma makes a _run-o_n (error). “I collected bananas, yoghurt, and frozen berries and I made a smoothie.”
2. Comma and no conjunction makes a comma splice (error). “I collected bananas, yoghurt, and frozen berries, I made a smoothie.”
3. Comma and conjunction makes it just right. “I collected bananas, yoghurt, and frozen berries, and I made a smoothie.” OR “I collected bananas, yoghurt, and frozen berries; I made a smoothie.”
Sentence structure:
1. A simple sentence has one main clause (a subject-verb unit that can stand alone): “My dog eats bats.” It can have a compound subject—“My dog and my cat eat bats”—or a compound verb—“My dog eviscerates and then eats bats”—or both. But it cannot have more than one clause. It can have multiple phrases (groups of words missing a subject or verb or both): “My dog, spotted all over, eats bats.” “Running after bats, my dog trips over rats.” “My dog eats bats, not rats.” It can be a long sentence (lots of phrases). It is still a simple sentence.
2. A compound sentence has more than one main clause linked by semicolon(s) or coordinating conjunctions and correct punctuation (see above). “My dog eats bats, and my cat eats rats.”
3. A complex sentence has one or more main clauses and one or more dependent clauses (subject-verb units that cannot stand alone). “Although my cat prefers rats, my dog eats bats.” “My dog eats bats, which are found under mats.” “When my dog learns to eat cats, I will lose my favorite pet.”
4. You can probably guess what a compound-complex sentence looks like: “I am finding out a great deal about the dietary habits of cats; and as I progress in my studies, I have also learned that dogs eat bats, a discovery that fills me with delight and awe.” How many clauses and what kind do you find here?
5. A group of words missing a subject and/or verb is a phrase. When it stands alone with an opening capital letter and a closing period, it is a sentence fragment (generally an error, though writers sometimes use it for effect).
Citations and quotations:
1. Supply a “Works Cited” list at the end of your paper. Cite the text you are quoting from, as well as the Oxford English Dictionary or anything other work you cite. If a text appears in “Works Cited,” you should cite it in the essay, that is, refer to or quote from it, supplying a page number within parentheses after the reference or quotation (21). You do not need to use the author’s last name in the parentheses unless there’s any doubt about which source you’re referring to. Use MLA format for the “Works Cited” list. If you used a source that you do not refer to or quote in your essay, you can supply a list of “Works Consulted” and add it to that.
2. When quoting material from a text, set off longer passages with indented margins. You do not need to use a different size font or italics, nor do you need to use quotation marks unless they appear in the quoted material. Place the page number in parentheses after the quotation and final punctuation.
Generalizations: Try to avoid basing your argument on what a “reader” must do to understand the text. This approach leads to generalizations you cannot support (do you really know how all readers see the book?). Focus rather on what you can substantiate with concrete evidence, that is, what the text reveals, what you can see and demonstrate on the page. We do not know what readers think or even what the author thought; we can discuss what the text shows.
Process language: Get right to your ideas. Avoid language that announces your methods (“This essay will examine certain images,” “In order to understand this idea, we need to look at this passage”) and set up your argument directly instead (“As the author’s use of imagery suggests, this passage is significant because . . . ”).

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Ethnic Literature in America