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Browsing by call number
Books in Valley Library are arranged by call numbers that represent subject areas.
Language & Literature: P (4th floor)
Social Sciences/Women: HQ 1101-2030.7 (5th floor)
Since a book can only be shelved in 1 place, you will miss books that may be very relevant by browsing. For example, where would you expect to find a book that examines the work of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Toni Morrison?
Subject headings
Books are assigned multiple subject headings which describe the conent. if you know the exact subject heading, you can search by subject. If you don't know the exact subject heading, search by keyword and look at the subjects assigned to books that are relevant. Show me how!
The question of form:
Women's writing often makes us question the boundaries and assumptions of traditional forms--the novel, autobiography, essay. The relationship between genre and gender breeds dislocations--and doubly so when the writers in question come from diverse cultures. In this course, we will look at the ways women writers have interrogated form as they struggle to express their worlds and understand those of others.
The question of gender:
In what ways might we see individual voices as linked to a collective past? How does that collective, social, gendered past shape one's individual identity? Does gender cross cultural boundaries in such a way that "gender" is a viable category--despite its ambiguous nature? The texts we will be reading juxtapose the voices of women writing from a variety of geographic and ethnic backgrounds. These authors struggle with the issue of identity for women, but in vastly different contexts; the common thread among these texts is that they were all written as responses to women's condition in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as globalization began to dominate international relations. We will look at texts from the 1960s to the present.
Research Databases
If the database doesn't include the full text of an article you need, use the "360 Link to Full Text" to find it. Show me how
MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) The major source for the study of language and literature. Includes books, journal articles, and parts of books.
Women's Studies International Interdisciplinary; articles in women's studies, sociology, arts and humanities, education and more.
Academic Search Premier A very good source for journal articles in all subject areas, but not nearly as comprehensive as MLAIB for literature or Women's Studies International for women's studies. Limit to scholarly academic journals.
Full Text Collections
Project Muse Scholarly, peer-reviwed journals in the humanities & social sciences. Search JSTOR archival collection simultaneouly by selecting "Include JSTOR back issues." Show me how.
JSTOR An archival collection of journal articles in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. It does not provide access to the most current issues.
Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass
Mohja Kahf, E-mails from Scheherazad
Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, The Present Moment
Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of the Homelands
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargossa Sea
Husain Haddaway's translation of the "Prologue" to Arabian Nights (on Reserve in Valley Library)
General
By region
Grove Art Online Online version of Grove Dictionary of Art. Includes Oxford Companion to Western Art. Online and N31.D5 1996 (Valley, 5th floor)
Oxford Reference Online Includes Oxford Companion to Western Art and Oxford Dictionary of Art. Also at N31.E53 (Valley, 5th floor)
Voices from the Gaps: Women, Artists and Writers of Color. Biographies, critiques, and more.
African & Caribbean Literature in French (Howard University)
African Writers: Voices of Change Brief biographica information on major writers, including Ama Ata Aidoo, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head. Links to other sties on African writers.
Feminist and Womanist Criticism of African Literature: A Bibliography Created in 1997; not updated so does not include more recent criticism. MA Thesis in Comparative Literature, Indiana University.
"The accuracy of quotations in research writing is extremely important. They must reproduce the original sources exactly. . . . You must construct a clear grammatically correct sentence that allows you to introduce or incorporate a quotation with complete accuracy" (Gibaldi 109).
Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. NY: Modern Language Association of America, 2003.
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Click here for examples of parenthetical citations in short and long quotations.
For more information on quoting and citing sources, see
Citation Machine : an online bibliography maker that formats citations in MLA and other styles.
See Keeping Current with Research for information about search alerts, RSS feeds, bibliography manager, and more.