English 102 Process Guide
Step 3
The Literature Notebooks:
A Special Way to Find Literary Criticism
The Good News
- The TCTC Library has acquired a large number of reference sets, totalling hundreds of volumes, that provide wonderful analytical essays on individual literary works. The great thing about most of these sets, which have names like Literature and Its Times and World Literature and Its Times, is that they focus on the historical background and cultural context of the works they discuss. Since they are concentrating on the times of the literary works, they are doing pretty much what you are doing in your paper! So these are likely to be among your most useful sources.
- We maintain a unique finding guide to these sets, called Literature in Context, which is kept in three large notebooks on the top shelf of the literature section in the reference area. (Just ask someone at the circulation desk to point you to the Literature Notebooks.) You can do lookups by author, title, or nationality/ethnic group. So it's easy to determine whether your work is covered in one of the sets. Here are some entries from the Author notebook (the double arrows preceding the title of the reference set indicate that an electronic version of the article is available electronically) :
You can see here that Laura Esquivel's popular novel, Like Water for Chocolate, has numerous essays dispersed throughout the various reference sets. The title, volume number, page number, and call number of the set are all given in each entry, so it is an easy matter to find your essays. If you're doing Like Water for Chocolate, you're sitting pretty.
The Even Better News
We have now produced an electronic version of the finding guide, which we are calling the Literature Notebooks Online. While formatted differently from the print version (shown above), it allows you to browse either Titles or Authors. For those critical analyses and interpretations for which we have electronic access, you can click on the View link and bring up the full text of the essay. For those items lacking electronic access, you will be given the necessary information (name of reference set, volume number, page number, and call number) to find the cited item on the shelf in the Reference Section of the library.
We're hoping that you will find this new service easy to use and helpful. So give it a try!
What's Next?
The next step in the research process will be to determine whether the TCTC Library has any books on your author that might be helpful. So let's move on to a discussion of the library catalog.