SP 362 - Professor Geyer

This guide will help students gather sources to include in their annotated bibliographies and cite in their final essays in Dr. Geyer's SP 362 course. 

Use the links on the left side of the guide to find lists of resources divided into separate pages for different kinds of information. Most of the resources are part of the University Libraries electronic collections; if you are working at a computer off campus, you will likely be prompted to log in them with your Ball State username and password. Other resources in this guide are freely available on the Internet. 

It is often useful, before you being searching for information, to think of potential search terms.

When looking for information about a literary text - a novel, short story, play, etc. - the title of that work and/or the author's name will sometimes suffice. When looking for information about an author - their body of work or the author themselves - you can start with just their name. 

• "El Ahogado Mas Hermoso del Mundo" AND Garcia Marquez 
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If you are researching a particular literary movement, genre, or period, you can use its name. If you are interested in authors of a particular nation, ethnicity, gender, or association with a group, you can use terms that represent those characteristics. 

• Latin American Boom 
• 20th century 
• Colombian authors 
• Nobel Prize winning authors

You can also search for information about the themes, motifs, or tropes depicted in literary texts, using search terms you associate with them. 

• Funerals 
• Grief
• Strangers

These are good tips for generating search terms for literary criticism research. Searching for historical information about events, periods, people, customs, political issues, or social conditions depicted in a literary text will require thinking of terms to represent those things. There might, however, be some overlap between terms you might choose for a literary motif and those for historical concepts. 

• Funerals, funeral customs, burials at sea 
• Coastal villages, rural villages