ENG 444 - Professor Sarkar

This guide will help students gather sources to cite in their Senior Project assignments for Professor Sreyoshi Sarkar's ENG 444 course. It provides links to resources that contain encyclopedias and similar content, literary criticism, scholarly sources related to education, history, and the social sciences, and primary sources. The resources were chosen ensure the guide will be useful to students no matter which type of project they have chosen. 

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. 

It is often useful, before you begin 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 often suffice. 

Searching for information about a literary genre, movement, or motif; or a specific aspect of a text; or about historical events, social conditions, or cultural milieus depicted in a text, requires formulating a research question and thinking about its main ideas. The main ideas you will identify will become your search terms. You can then think of synonyms for those main ideas, so that you will be prepared with alternate search terms. 

Imagine a researcher interested in how natural settings are variously depicted as idyllic - as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - or sinister  - as in "The Devil and Tom Walker" or The Scarlet Letter - in American literature. They might articulate a question like this one: 

• What moral or intellectual characteristics are associated with natural settings in American literature? 

The researcher might even break the topic into several questions: 

• In what ways do Hawthorne and Irving depict the wilderness of New England as a place of moral peril? 
• What did Thoreau learn about life and human nature while living in the wilderness in Walden? 
• In what ways does Mark Twain depict the Mississippi River as a place of goodness and shelter in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
• What does Jack Kerouac conclude about nature as a place for meditation and reflection in The Dharma Bums? 

If your research topic involves two or more questions, you should not attempt to search for answers to multiple questions at the same time. Rather, you should handle your research questions separately, one question at at time.

Imagine again the researcher taking up the first question on the above pair. They might identify the author's names, "wilderness," "New England," and "moral peril" as the question's main ideas. They could then list groups of synonyms and other terms they associate with those ideas. For example: 

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, romanticists
• Wilderness, forest, woods, nature
• New England, Colonial America, Colonial Massachusetts
• Moral peril, morality, temptation, sin

Alternate search terms do not need to be one-to-one interchangeable with your initial main ideas. They can be more specific, less specific, or just related terms. Thinking of these words ahead of time will let you focus on your searches once you're working in a database, and prevent you from having to pause to think of additional terms.