Literary Studies

• Voice of the Shuttle: Literature in English (Alan Liu, UCSB)
• A Literary Index: Internet Resources in Literature (Chris Flack, Vanderbilt U)
• Gale Literary Databases (HSU users only): search the online editions of Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography
• The Literary Encyclopedia: an online reference work-in-progress for literary scholars with entries on people, works, terms and topics
• Bedford/St. Martin's Press Literature and Linguistics site (see the righthand column, "Resources for the Classroom")
• Glossary of Poetic Terms

Identity, Representation

• Race: The Power of an Illusion (PBS.org)
• Is Race "Real"? (Social Science Research Council)
• Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies (The Imperial Archive)

• Voice of the Shuttle: Cultural Studies | Gender and Sexuality Studies | Literary Theory | Media Studies | Minority Studies
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (HSU users only)
• k.i.s.s. of the panopticon (Dougie Birket's famously cheeky guide to post-structuralist theory at SUNY Geneseo)
• Dino Felluga's Introductory Guide to Critical Theory at Purdue University
• "Critical Reading: A Guide" (John Lye, Brock U)
• "The Problem of Meaning in Literature" (John Lye, Brock U)
• English 420 Critical Theory Resources (Michael Eldridge, HSU)

Critical Writing

• Getting an "A" on an English Paper (Jack Lynch, Rutgers University - Newark).  Neither I nor your other professors will necessarily agree with everything you'll find here; nevertheless, Lynch passes along some sound general principles. See also the somewhat stodgier Papers: Expectations, Guidelines, Advice, and Grading by Jeannine de Lombard and Dan White of the University of Toronto, and Lynch's own carefully hidden section on Grades.
• The Bedford Researcher (Mike Palmquist, Bedford/St. Martin's Press). This site includes advice on the research process, model research papers on various topics, and links to writers' resources and Online Writing Centers at universities around the country. See also Bedford's Composition site (esp. the righthand column, "Resources for the Classroom").
• The Companion Website for Sylvan Barnet and William Cain's A Short Guide to Writing About Literature features an online guide to Writing About Film (navigation is in the lefthand column) and other Student Resources, including checklists, exercises, and weblinks of varying usefulness and quality, and a 44-page downloadable handbook entitled "Analyzing Literature: A Guide for Students"
• The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing (Michael Harvey, Washington College) is a very good basic handbook. (Navigation is in the lefthand column.)
• Avoiding plagiarism:
  • HSU Library
  • HSU Learning Center
  • HSU Composition Director Tracy Duckart's Instructional Website

Style and Mechanics

• Research and Documentation Online (Diana Hacker, Bedford/St. Martin's Press). Finding and documenting sources in the Humanities and other disciplines, with a sample paper in MLA format.
• MLA (Modern Language Association) Documentation Format (Capital Community College, Hartford CT). (A more concise guide to MLA Style can be found at Michael Harvey's Nuts and Bolts of College Writing; another is at Seattle Central Community College.)
• The Q & A page of the website for the Chicago Manual of Style is hugely entertaining, in a witty, nerdy, English-major sort of way. (Take care, though: while Chicago style is standard in publishing and some academic disciplines, we follow MLA style in English.)
• Grammar and Style Notes (Jack Lynch, Rutgers University - Newark)
• Strunk's Elements of Style (1918 edition, Bartleby.com)
• Louis Menand, "The End Matter: The Nightmare of Citation" (The New Yorker 6 October 2003). Ostensibly a review of the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, this is an entertaining essay on the maddeningly arbitrary nature of proper citation.
• Louis Menand, "Bad Comma: Lynne Truss's Strange Grammar" (The New Yorker 28 June 2004). What begins as a somewhat querulous review of the best-seller Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation settles down into an essay about the intangibility of writerly "voice."

General Reference

• Voice of the Shuttle General Reference Page (Alan Liu, UCSB) includes links to online dictionaries & thesauri, grammar & style guides, scholarly reference guides, and guides to critical thinking.
• Bartleby.com gives you access to a whole slew of indispensable reference books, including the American Heritage Dictionary (and Book of English Usage), Roget's Thesaurus, Bartlett's Quotations, the King James Bible, a complete Shakespeare, and the CIA World Factbook.
• Oxford English Dictionary on-line (HSU users only).
• Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus.  An extremely cool site that lets you visualize the shades of meaning among closely related words.
• HSU Library:  from here you can (among other things) search the HSU catalog, the catalogs of other libraries around the world, and dozens of databases indexing articles in journals, magazines and newspapers.  The most useful databases for literary studies are WorldCat (for books in other libraries); Academic Search, ArticleFirst, JSTOR, MLA Bibliography, OmniFile, Oxford Journals, Project Muse and Xtreme Search multi-database search (for articles in journals); and Dow Jones Interactive and LexisNexis (for articles in popular periodicals).
• HSU Library's English Research Guide

Some Interesting Articles

• Adam Gopnik, "The Double Man" (The New Yorker 23 September 2003). What's poetry for? What's it supposed to do? Gopnik ponders that question in the course of considering the work of W. H. Auden.
• Adam Gopnik, "Will Power" (The New Yorker 13 September 2004). Biographical criticism--reading an author's work as the expression of his "individual genius," or as the product of his life and times--is generally regarded as old-fashioned and unsophisticated. But in a review of Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Shakespeare, Gopnik (himself a smart and sensitive critic) outlines a subtler and more useful form of bio-crit informed by New Historicist principles.