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As you know, by “literature” we mean the body of writing that represents current knowledge on a particular subject. This usually means looking for the most current or recent achievements in a field, and moving into past work as directed by your interests and by which previous scholarship seems most important to the field.
The literature review is a scholarly exercise that gives you the best sense of how, as a graduate student, you can develop your ability to perform as a professional in your field. Use the literature review to make it clear how you are entering the ongoing conversation on your subject. In fact, reviewers will say that graduate students often submit the freshest insights to PMLA because they can assess what is going on in a field with fresh eyes.
What you will need to do is (1) conduct a review of the scholarly literature pertaining to one topic in your field, (2) write up your findings, and (3) discuss and refine your findings with your fellow students and with your instructor.

Selecting and Reviewing a Subject Area:
The subject area you pick needs to be of strong interest to you.

* If you can foresee a possible master’s thesis or starred paper topic, consider using this course to make headway towards completing your master’s degree. Alternatively, if you are currently taking a course for another instructor, consider developing a strong scholarly base for the seminar paper for that course.
The “seminar paper” as a genre comes out of the German research university tradition. A seminar is a small class oriented toward intensive discussion. On the graduate level, it was designed to place students on the cutting edge of the advancement of the field, and to create a collaborative research environment where students would be bolstered by the group effort to write a paper that would actually make a publishable contribution to the field. For SCSU purposes, that means an article-length paper (15-20 pgs) that demonstrates awareness of contributing to advancing knowledge, usually by putting forward a thesis insight of your own that deals with current scholarship. Any number of publishable seminar papers have been written in this department. No paper will be required for 606, but the course would benefit if, as graduate students, the class had a sense of collaborating to advance everyone’s individual endeavors with writing projects.

* You will probably want to consult with the instructor about the viability of your proposed subject area (i.e. that there is an easily accessible body of material, that the scope is not too large to cover, nor too small to make it work).
* Once you have selected an area, you will read a wide range of sources in that area. The principal sources will be monographs and scholarly articles. For our purposes, you will not need to read any of these sources in their entirety. You are mainly trying to figure out (1) the argument of each work, (2) how the position of the book or article differs from other writings in the same subject area, and (3) what methodological approach defines each piece of writing (what is meant by methodology should be developed all term in our seminar discussions).
*For books, you will avail yourself of the book reviews that are readily available on-line [at JSTOR, at Project Muse]. All of these reviews are also available in print in journals available at both SCSU and the UM.
* Archival and journalistic sources would be included if relevant to the topic.
* While it is not expected that you read or write about every single source out there (in most cases, this would be unrealistic for the time you have available), you do need to (a) survey 10-15 pieces of scholarship, and (b) make sure that these represent the range of available viewpoints in your subject area. You should avoid reviewing any two pieces that have substantially the same view on a topic or subject area.

* To demonstrate your coverage of sources beyond those in your literature review, append your complete annotated bibliography of your research this term. For works you examined but chose not to include in your review, it would be extremely effective if you stated in a sentence or two why you excluded them.
The Annotated Bibliography will be submitted as a preliminary stage in the research process. The Harner Literary Research Guide is one model of effective annotation. Your task will be to assist your future self, or fellow researchers, by describing each source in your bibliography in order to make it clear how the source could be used. Describe the source’s contents, its scope, its method(s), its argument; provide some evaluation. Think of the bibliography as cuing your memory. Web sources will need to be scrutinized according to standard ways of evaluating online sources. By the time you finish preparing the bibliography, the literature review may almost "write itself" as a synthesis of what you have observed.

The bibliography may be submitted in electronic form, such as over e-mail.
Collect and annotate as many relevant sources as possible. The aim here is to show, in our current information age, that you have that crucial ability to survey the vastness of what is out there and develop your own line of inquiry into it all.

* Literature review. In terms of actually writing the essay that gives an overview of the current work in the subject area you selected, you will have quite a bit of flexibility in how you do this. A good idea would be to look at a review from a top-level journal in which a major scholar reviews the most important recent works on a particular topic. This is called a “review essay.” The final choice of style and structure, though, is yours.
* While there is no strict page limit or requirement, your essay will probably be some 8 – 10 pages in length. The key is that you clearly and succinctly represent the perspective both of the individual works under review and of the field in general. By the time readers finish your essay, they should have a sense of the arguments, methods, debates, and stakes of the subject area you selected.
* Ideally, a literature review should take an opportunity to point out promising avenues for scholarship—projects that could or should be done; issues not adequately covered. The literature review would then set out ideas for you to pursue in future work.

NOTE (1): Of critical importance in creating responsible scholarship is your ability to show awareness of chronology. Show awareness of which sources are long-standing authorities and which attempt to place us on the cutting edge of the present, and in general show awareness of how sources influence or respond to one another. If you find yourself using all recent materials or all sources from before 1980, make sure to adjust. Remember that JSTOR and Project Muse still do not have the right to publish materials from the last few years. Use the MLA bibliography and periodical stacks to track down the most current work, which may be accessible in print form.

NOTE (2): In the social sciences, it is customary for a master’s thesis or dissertation to include an entire, separate chapter called the Literature Review. In the Humanities, that is considered rather wooden, and most humanist mentors prefer scholarship that pursues an insight more directly, while turning aside to hold conversations and debates with other sources where they naturally arise. You may of course choose to emulate social-science writing in your thesis if you wish, and so simply consider your literature review a completed chapter. But it is more likely that you will absorb sections of the literature review into relevant sections of your final thesis, and in its footnotes.

Presentation to the class, last two evenings:
1. Each participant should aim to present for no more than 15 minutes. Presentations will need to be of substantive length, and so will take up nearly that amount of time.
2. Prepare a brief outline or some other relevant handout (not the entire paper) to enable the class to follow along. The classroom electronic technology could be very helpful with this.
3. The presentation may consist of work-in-progress, but I will need the completed projects by the middle of finals week in order to give a grade other than Incomplete.
4.                Describe your topic and your interest in it.
            Provide a general assessment of current knowledge in this area. Who are the major players? What are the issues? Where do you stand on those issues? Is there any drama or conflict here?
            Sketch some of the problems that you encountered in making your search, including problems of access or availability of source materials. Could you get everything you needed? Which databases were most helpful? Which resources?
            Anything else to convey to us about this project? Remember that the ultimate purpose of this project is to practice creating academic community. Academics are, perhaps touchingly, fascinated by their own projects and seize on any peculiarities in other people’s work that they can connect to their own interests. By hearing about others’ work, everyone should feel an expansion of their motivations and their understanding of what is out there, and how to see their own interests in a larger context.

To help hone the significance of your work, what is AT STAKE in your question?
* You need to develop a LINE OF INQUIRY-- a sort of method. Start a PREWRITING stage of research:

What is it that you already know, and what knowledge are you missing? What research question(s) are you trying to answer? What kinds of sources will you need in order to answer those research questions?
What follow-up questions will you need to cover? "what history do I need to know? Where would I be most likely to find reliable historical info on that? [Note that SCSU has a Historical Abstracts database and an extensive Reference collection]"

"what is AT STAKE in my topic? For whom?"; "Is there a current state of debate on this subject? What are the various sides on the topic?"

"What KIND of explanation am I going to use? psychological? cultural? historical? literary? biographical? economic? relating to self-interest? scientific? philosophical? ethical? What writers or theorists will help give you concepts that you can refer to as authorities in making your explanations? )

Here’s a simple way of brainstorming to make sure that you consider alternative approaches to your topic. Consider all the departments and programs at the university:
e.g.,

History                                          Education
Philosophy/religious studies (ethics, morality)
Business/economics                        Criminal justice
Sociology                                    Sports/recreation
Psychology                                    Communication studies
Anthropology
Political science                              Mass Communications &
Literature /poetics                                          media
Myth, folklore
visual arts                                    geography
film studies, theater, dance
Popular culture
Math/statistics
Hard sciences – physics, chemistry, biology

Choose as many as can seem relevant to your project and ask yourself about each one– what questions would this department ask about my topic?

Consider:
Poetics, rhetoric, literary categories (plot, narrative, character, aesthetic dimensions, themes/motifs)
“Culture” / cultural and social history
“history of ideas”
“ideology” “subject position and performance”
“deconstruction”

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Note – “paste special” function – select “unformatted text” in order to save source references without excess coding.

* Look for “metasites” – websites specifically for your key field, linking vast amounts of information, interactive websites, and texts relating specifically to your subject.

* Pay attention to DATES. For books especially: notice that our library has many outdated books whose information is often no longer useful. Always watch for whether articles have been published before or after other articles, so you know which is more likely to be current (unless an article is less knowledgeable than some older materials).

***Review Articles. If you can find something called a "review article" or "review essay" relating somehow to your subject; these are extremely valuable because they sum up where the field is most currently and really place books in relation to one another. Often, these are written by authoritative scholars who have been commissioned to create a synthesis. You can tell a review article because it is about a large number of books. In fact, a "review article" is a nice model for writing your literature review itself.
Example:

* Don’t overlook basic reference works – Get knowledgeable overviews fast through handbooks, encyclopedia entries, and specific "subject bibliographies".

* Dictionaries and glossaries specific to a field will allow you to work with technical terms with precision. Dictionaries of Philosophy (there is one online from STanford) and of Psychology can often be helpful with English projects using terms from those fields.

* The Oxford English Dictionary – to know what the meanings of a word could have been at a specific time. This is an etymylogical dictionary, and is available online via the library homepage.

* Something to know if you want to move to the Ph.D. level of research. For archival work: The National Union Catalog, which also has a Manuscript version
Massive reference work that synthesizes library collections.

* Google Book – Massive amounts of information, all fields, added to constantly. Note that you can search by dates.

Fulltext databases for English:
CHECK JOURNAL TITLES (Note – NOT YET up to date):
-JSTOR
-Project Muse

For oral histories -
The Story Project: provides guidelines for types of interview questions to use.

For oral history study, it is a good idea to take courses in Public History over in the Department of History.