Skip to Main Content

English 110: Critical Thinking, Reading and Writing Through Literature

Use library resources to locate and evaluate information for your class assignments.

Choosing Topics

decorative image - literature wordcloud

Some recommendations on choosing topics or literary works to help you with the research process are the following:

  1. If possible, choose works of authors from the past rather than works by contemporary authors. Critical writing about an author or literary work may be more prevalent and available from established authors.
  2. Choose well-known authors rather than works by those not as famous.
  3. Be open to changing authors or literary works. Consider two or three works of literature. Performing preliminary searches or locating background research for each title may help you determine the one on which you can find the most information.
  4. Ultimately if you select an obscure work, a contemporary author, or a topic you are very interested in, give yourself time to research!
    1. Consider the themes of the work and search those terms in a relevant database. For example, if you are working on the psychoanalysis of a character in a work, search our psychology database.
    2. Consult with the Reference Librarians. You may need to make plans to visit another library to find information. Plan ahead!

Thinking Outside the Box

Uh oh? Not finding enough?

What to do when you cannot find much written about your story or author:

When you do research on current authors and works, sometimes there has not yet been a lot written about them. That's okay!

Scholarship represents your original thinking about a text or theme in literature. As part of your analysis you can integrate relevant sources, even if they are not about your specific text. Think about:

  • larger themes or issues, such as refugees, terrorism, identity, nation, or colonialism.
  • other works by your author.
  • analysis of the work of another author that you can apply to your interpretation of your short story, novel, poem, or play.
  • a literary movement, genre or body of literature, such as Pakistani literature, Southeast Asian authors, literature of the diaspora, post-colonial literature.
  • a literary theory, such as queer theory, gender theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, psychoanalytic theory, etc.
  • Below is an example of ideas and analysis about Minaret by Leila Aboulela. This would be a source to use if writing about the same ideas in a different work by a different author. 

You may not find a lot written about your text or author. Look for how critics talk about stories with similar issues - and see if an analysis of another novel or short story offers insight into yours:

Leila Aboulela’s novel, Minaret (2005), provides authentic and rich content to explore the Muslim Arab woman’s struggle over creating a modern yet religiously traditional identity. The conceptual framework of Victor Turner’s liminality and Homi Bhabha’s hybridity and the third space are applied in order to frame the analysis of this struggle and to show that the veil is a metaphor for the Arab woman’s positive and negative experiences. In Minaret, the protagonist, Najwa, experiences a sense of in-betweenness or liminality through crises, transitions, and resolutions of secular and religious lives. The different hybrid identities and efforts Najwa makes to come to terms with her developing Muslim identity is discussed, particularly through her and the women around her who choose to wear the veil and modest, rather than revealing, clothing. Together, these form our analysis of the Muslim Arab woman’s struggle to be Muslim through wearing the veil while living in Britain. The veil in this novel is furthermore symbolic of traditional Islamic culture and represents the struggle to be religiously faithful despite being surrounded by non-Muslims or non-practising Muslims. This then provides the means of understanding individual mobility, empowerment, and agency through which liminality is successfully negotiated in order to achieve a hybrid identity of Eastern and Western cultures.

Alkarawi, Susan Taha and Ida Baizura Binti Bahar. “Negotiating the Veil and Identity in Leila Aboulela's Minaret.” GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies 14 (2014): 255-268.

In this example: The highlighted sections of this article abstract (you would then need to read and cite from the whole article) might support analysis of another novel or short story that explores how women navigate different spaces of religion, nation, and identity by claiming the veil as a symbol that both excludes them and allows them to define a new space.

"Thinking outside the box" content adapted courtesy of the Green River College Library guide, ENGL 126 Writing: Humanities.

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License unless noted otherwise.