ENG 473
Professor: Churchill
Assignment: Scholarship Review Essay
Due:
Monday, 9/17, posted to M3 Commons before class.
Electronically submit a scholarship review essay (5 pages) that surveys the most
important secondary sources related to your topic (no less than 3, no more than 10).
Remember that scholars need not have dealt extensively—or even explicitly—with your
topic to merit inclusion in your essays. Analyze the most important ways in which
particular scholars (perhaps bunched into groups or “schools”) have researched and
written about your subject. Pay special attention to scholarly debates, their shifts over
time, and the deeper issues that might be at stake in these debates. Finally, briefly
consider how you, in your group project, might contribute to the ongoing scholarly
conversation(s) that your essay has identified.
Question from a student:
In looking over this assignment, I am still a little confused. I am not sure how to structure this essay. I
have read my other group members’ secondary source notes but I still feel as if the only way to really
understand a source is to read it. Should I read their sources as well? Let me know if you have any
advice on how to proceed.
Answer from a professor:
You may not have time to read everyone else’s sources, though if you think one is particularly pertinent,
you would certainly benefit from reading it. If your group members have done their jobs well, they
should have summarized their sources and communicated a sense of their usefulness. Think of a
scholarship review essay as your chance to identify which sources you think are most useful to your
project (and the direction in which YOU want to take it). Your goal is to try to give a sense of the current
state of scholarly conversation(s) relevant to your project (e.g., discussions of particular magazine(s) or
author(s), definitions of modernism or magazines, or the rise of periodical studies). Then situate your
project within that conversation. Will you continue it? Build on findings? Redirect it? Issue a corrective?
Which scholars will you be talking to? Who might be interested in reading what you have to say? How
might your findings alter their understanding of the field in which they’ve been working and publishing?
(Note: you don’t have to answer every one of these questions—they are prods to your thinking.)
Part of the difficulty here is that you may never have been asked to write this kind of essay. It’s not your
typical literary analysis. For models, look to literary journals, which routinely publish scholarship review
essays. Usually the review section of Modernism/Modernity begins with a review essay that discusses
several recent works (I’ve posted two examples in Readings). This is the kind of review essay I want you
to write: situate the secondary sources in a narrative that explains the origins and development of the
critical conversation(s) you want to enter. You may be bringing together strands from several different
conversations, in which case you may want to comment on the value of such crossovers.
The whole point here is for you to recognize that you are writing to a specific group of scholars that are
already in conversation. You’re not just writing to a single professor, but to a group of people that
already have an interest and stake in your subject. You effectively say: “We’ve read what you’ve had to
say; now look at what we’ve found out and see how it changes your understanding.”