RHETOR R1B: Rhetoric of Reason

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About this Guide

To help you write an annotated bibliography for two scholarly articles that you will research in conjunction to your final paper. For your final paper, you are asked to write on only one of the following texts: Plato’s Republic, Books 6 and 7, Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis,” Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Literary Criticism and Resources

MLA International Bibliography
Scholarly articles on literary topics. Use UC-eLinks button to get to the articles themselves.
Literature Resource Center (LRC)
Includes biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of more than 120,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers. Scope is international. Full text.
Project MUSE
Several hundred scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. Topics include literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics and many others.
JSTOR
Easy to use, full text, multi-disciplinary scholarly article database. Note: the most recent 3-5 years of the journals are usually not available through JSTOR.
Academic Search Complete
A multi-disciplinary database that includes both scholarly and popular articles. Most articles have pdfs.
Literature Online
Includes more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 131 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources. Includes reference works on literary criticism and biographical information.

Evaluate what you find

Most books and articles you find through the library website are suitable as sources for your paper - but some are not!

This 5-minute silent video will make it clear.

When you find a source, study it to see whether it's "scholarly". Scholarly publications include footnotes and bibliographies documenting their sources, list the author's credentials, and in most cases have been validated through a peer review process.

For more details, see our Critical Evaluation of Resources page.

If you're using web pages found through Google or other search engines, evaluation is especially important, since these tools have no built-in validation of the content. For help, see our guide to Evaluating Web Pages.

Where's the PDF?

Many article databases contain information about articles (citations or abstracts), not the entire text of the article. Once you've used an article database to find articles on your topic, you may need to use this button: in order to locate and read the full text of the article. The UC-eLinks button appears in nearly all the databases available from the UCB Library website.

UC-eLinks will link you to the online full text of an article if UCB has paid for online access; otherwise, UC-eLinks will help you locate a print copy on the shelf in the library. If UCB doesn't own the article in print or online format, UC-eLinks can also help you order a copy from another library.

For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 4 min.)

You can also set up UC-eLinks to work with Google Scholar. For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 2 min.)

Citing MLA

MLA citation style for poetry

For more examples, link to our e-book, Cite Right: A Quick Guide to Citation Styles, chapter 4 "MLA Style."

Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography lists important works you will use in your research: articles, books, chapter, reports, etc.

Your annotations are not just summaries, but are meant to inform the reader why each work is significant, how it relates to other works on the subject, and how well it succeeds in its task.

Here are a couple of excellent online guides to preparing an annotated bibliography.

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