Group Assignment

I want you to divide up into three groups:

• Feminism
• Literary Criticism
• Feminist Literary Criticism

Each group will spend the next week doing research in both print and internet sources on their topic and will report their initial findings back in class next Wednesday, August 27th.

Then (after sufficient instruction in HTML) each group will combine forces to produce a web page on their topic (to be presented in-class on Friday, Sept. 19th).

Each group should compile the following information about their topic:

• Definition -- what is it?
  You should formulate your own defintion, but can/should also collect short quotations from other sources that you can also include
• Classification -- what kinds or varieties of it are there? Are there historical movements or factions who are fighting one another?
  Make a list of different kinds or schools or movements -- with brief explanations
• Personnel -- who are some important figures in it? What are they famous for?
  For now you can just list these, but this part of the assignment is meant to get you started thinking about subjects for your research paper.

Web Presence -- what's available on the web about this topic?

Resources: Where to Look in Print

I have given you two lists of books which will get you well started on your exploration of your topic. Look through the list of reference works and the list of books on reserve to see which might prove most useful for you. Start with glossaries and encyclopedias. M.H. Abrams'Glossary of Literary Terms has excellent entries on literary criticism and on feminist literary criticism. There are several dictionaries of feminist terms which should also be of help. Then look in the introductions and indexes of books on your topic. And don't forget to use Stienman and Loeb's excellent bibliographies.

Where to Look on the Web

If you don't yet know how to surf the net, I will teach you in the lab on Friday. I have already done some of the initial work for you in the lists of links I have compiled for various websites I have built. Go to my homepage at: http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~sparks and click on the link leading to "My Favorite Links." You will find the links for Women's Studies and English to be the most useful.

Bring a computer disk to class on Friday so you can start to save bits of text and links that you find. And, as you take notes or xerox pages from print sources, be sure always to note full bibliographic information (author, title, publisher, place of publication, date of publication and page number). Fair use laws only allow us to quote about 50 words of an author's text without official permission, so look for short, succient explanations. And be careful to indicate what is quote and what is paraphrase.