Using Literature Online

Literature Online is a very useful resource, incorporating bibliographical and biographical references, and the full texts of both critical articles and literary texts. Like all online resources, it needs to be used with care and intelligently. The two dangers of online resources for students at the beginning of their academic careers are:

• Too much information, encouraging skim-reading, lack of intellectual digestion, and possible plagiarism
• The difficulty of reading online resources slowly and carefully-of becoming an active reader who annotates the text and responds to it critically.

To make use of the advantages given by Literature Online, you need to develop a search strategy for finding a limited amount relevant information which you can digest critically, and avoid suffering from information overload. You'll find that this will often involve obtaining references from Literature Online and then looking up reference material in the library, and then returning to Literature Online and other electronic resources at a later point.

Some Good Strategies

An Individual Author

If you are interested in using Literature Online for a research project on an individual author, I'd first recommend that you do an individual author search. You'll get a result something like this:

Now look at the Biography and Bibliography sections under an individual author. Use these resources to develop a brief bibliography of texts which you might read; these might include introductory studies of the author and also the author's major works, which you should read first. Having done so, do a focused search for critical material both here and in the MLA Biliography. In this way you'll be prepared to enter into dialogue with the critical material, and find yourself able to disagree with it at points. When reading original texts or, later, critical essays you may want to download and print or cut and paste them into MSWord--however you approach them, you need to find a way of reading them slowly and annotating them carefully. Quality here--a few key essays read closely, and discussed thoroughly--is much more important than quantity.

A Critical Concept

For a brief introduction to a critical concept, try the "search criticism" and reference section. It's best to choose "reference" only as a category and then "browse" for subjects.

Some of the coverage here is patchy, and may only give you a basic pointer regarding the concept or theoretical position. You'll then need to follow up with further reading using the references you've discovered.

Some Bad Strategies

Enter a Title or an Author into the Search Engine

This will get you a huge list of documents which you cannot possibly read through, and which you will find difficult to evaluate. Using this strategy, you're well on the way to writing a plagiarized or undigested essay.

Use the "Knowledge Notes"

These may be useful for cramming for "A" level exams, but their general tone is simplistic and level of critical sophistication is abysmally low. You can do much better on your own, aiming for the higher level of intellectual engagement university study demands.

Last updated: September 2, 2002