What is a Literature Review?
"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form p. 110-111 http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/2.1/features/brent/burke.htm |
Resources for Composing Your Literature Review
Text analysis:
http://tagcrowd.com/ Highlighters/Color code Mind-Mapping: https://coggle.it/ Good old-fashioned drawing |
The Annotated Bibliography vs. the Literature Review
In an annotated bibliography, our purpose is to collect research sources, and summarize and evaluate them individually.
By contrast, in a literature review our purpose is to synthesize those sources (and our summaries of them) in order to evaluate not only the individual sources but the larger conversation that they constitute when read together. That means highlighting the ways they relate to each other (compare, contrast, etc.) and drawing out the key questions/problems that seem to occupy the various participants in the conversation and the common vocabulary they use to discuss those questions/problems. Formally, a literature review is an essay, not a list like your annotated bibliographies. As an essay, the literature review should have a thesis (most often, one concerning the general shape of/trends in the conversation) and should then have paragraphs organized according to some logic that is meaningful to the evaluation of the conversation you are presenting to us (chronological, topical, methodological, etc.), NOT according to the alphabetical order of the last names of the authors.Moreover, you might deal with sources in more than one place if it makes sense to do so. |
STRUCTURE:
INTRODUCTION
In your introduction, you want to give your reader a sense of the scope of the literature review (define the subject you are dealing with and set out whatever other parameters [ie. disciplinary] that you think would be useful context in order to manage your reader's expectations). Early on in your introduction you also want to provide a brief explanation of why this subject matters enough that we should review the literature on it. Having established the scope and rationale for the lit. review, you then need to offer a thesis statement in the form of a claim about the conversation you have researched (eg. designate the key debate/describe the trajectory of the conversation over time/posit a lack of research on this specific subject that forces you to bring two fields of research together and explain how they might be put into dialogue). Finally, give the reader some idea of the organization of the essay to follow (roadmap).
BODY
A few ways to organize your paragraphs:
Chronologically (creates a narrative of the development of the conversation over time)
Thematically (how does the conversation break into thematic subsets of the main topic)
Methodologically (illuminates different approaches taken to answering the same question/confront the same problem)
Materially (did some of them come out of the same site/institution such as journal, book, organization, research center?)
Each paragraph should then give a sense of the individual works (summarize) and their worth (evaluate) while establishing how they relate to each other of a debate (are they on the same side of a debate? Do they come from the same historical moment? Do they share a methodology? Do they confront the same question/sub-question in this research discourse?). Further the various body paragraphs should relate to each other in an explicitly logical way and have easily recognizable and logically sound transitions between them.
CONCLUSION
The conclusion of your literature review should re-articulate your larger point and then posit where you think it might be fruitful for to intervene in this conversation. You don't need to know what you want to add to the conversation just yet, but you need to find the space where you might be able to do so.
STYLE
Like the annotated bibliography, pay careful attention to the language you use to summarize and evaluate. Since you only have 500 words to work with, make each word count and try to use the most specific and constructive adjectives and verbs possible. On this page are some words/phrases that should prove particularly useful for articulating how texts/ideas relate to each other. Finally, you want to use your own words as much as possible, so paraphrase and cite appropriately (MLA style), quoting very sparsely and only when the precise language feels necessary to discussing someone's argument.
INTRODUCTION
In your introduction, you want to give your reader a sense of the scope of the literature review (define the subject you are dealing with and set out whatever other parameters [ie. disciplinary] that you think would be useful context in order to manage your reader's expectations). Early on in your introduction you also want to provide a brief explanation of why this subject matters enough that we should review the literature on it. Having established the scope and rationale for the lit. review, you then need to offer a thesis statement in the form of a claim about the conversation you have researched (eg. designate the key debate/describe the trajectory of the conversation over time/posit a lack of research on this specific subject that forces you to bring two fields of research together and explain how they might be put into dialogue). Finally, give the reader some idea of the organization of the essay to follow (roadmap).
BODY
A few ways to organize your paragraphs:
Chronologically (creates a narrative of the development of the conversation over time)
Thematically (how does the conversation break into thematic subsets of the main topic)
Methodologically (illuminates different approaches taken to answering the same question/confront the same problem)
Materially (did some of them come out of the same site/institution such as journal, book, organization, research center?)
Each paragraph should then give a sense of the individual works (summarize) and their worth (evaluate) while establishing how they relate to each other of a debate (are they on the same side of a debate? Do they come from the same historical moment? Do they share a methodology? Do they confront the same question/sub-question in this research discourse?). Further the various body paragraphs should relate to each other in an explicitly logical way and have easily recognizable and logically sound transitions between them.
CONCLUSION
The conclusion of your literature review should re-articulate your larger point and then posit where you think it might be fruitful for to intervene in this conversation. You don't need to know what you want to add to the conversation just yet, but you need to find the space where you might be able to do so.
STYLE
Like the annotated bibliography, pay careful attention to the language you use to summarize and evaluate. Since you only have 500 words to work with, make each word count and try to use the most specific and constructive adjectives and verbs possible. On this page are some words/phrases that should prove particularly useful for articulating how texts/ideas relate to each other. Finally, you want to use your own words as much as possible, so paraphrase and cite appropriately (MLA style), quoting very sparsely and only when the precise language feels necessary to discussing someone's argument.