In-Class Research Worksheets
Links to the Google Doc worksheets we will use during the library session.
Research Librarian for English
Possible Journal of Interest
- Life WritingLife Writing is one of the leading journals in the field of biography and autobiography, and publishes scholarly articles, critically informed creative personal essays, and book reviews.
Possible Print Books of Interest
Request print books using the Request Item feature in Virgo (if you want the whole book). When the book is on hold for you and ready to be picked up, you will receive an email letting you know it is available. If you only need a couple of chapters of a book or an essay or two from a collection, you might also use the Request a scan feature in Virgo to ask for just the sections you need to be scanned for you (the scan limit is usually 20% of the book or less).
Class Definitions: On the Lives and Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison by Call Number: Clemons PS228 .L33 T65 2008ISBN: 9781575911212Publication Date: 2008Includes analysis of the writings of Dorothy Allison and Maxine Hong Kingston, along with interviews with both authors (as well as Cisneros).
The Digital Banal: New Media in American Literature and Culture by Call Number: Clemons PS169 .T4 D56 2018ISBN: 9780231184281Publication Date: 2018Discusses Jennifer Egan's works, among many others.
Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography by Call Number: Clemons P93.5 .E565 2014ISBN: 9781442616097Publication Date: 2014From reality television to film, performance, and video art, autobiography is everywhere in today's image-obsessed age. With contributions by both artists and scholars, Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography is a unique examination of visual autobiography's involvement in the global cultural politics of health, disability, and the body. This provocative collection looks at images of selfhood and embodiment in a variety of media and with a particular focus on bodily identities and practices that challenge the norm: a pregnant man in cyberspace, a fat activist performance troupe, indigenous artists intervening in museums, transnational selves who connect disability to war, and many more.
Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family by Call Number: Clemons CT25 .F36 2013ISBN: 9780803246928Publication Date: 2013Whenever a memoirist gives a reading, someone in the audience is sure to ask: How did your family react? Revisiting our pasts and exploring our experiences, we often reveal more of our nearest and dearest than they might prefer. This volume navigates the emotional and literary minefields that any writer of family stories or secrets must travel when depicting private lives for public consumption. Essays by twenty-five memoirists explore the fraught territory of family history told from one perspective, which, from another angle in the family drama, might appear quite different indeed. In her introduction to this book,
Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature by Call Number: Clemons PS3613.A8488 R43 2016ISBN: 9781625342355Publication Date: 2016Includes chapter, "Confronting Difference, Confronting Difficulty: Culture Wars, Canon Wars, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior"
The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Call Number: Clemons PN45.5 .F37 2015ISBN: 9780062999719Publication Date: 2020Free speech has long been one of American's most revered freedoms. Yet now, more than ever, free speech is reshaping America's social and political landscape even as it is coming under attack. Bestselling author and critically acclaimed journalist Ellis Cose wades into the debate to reveal how this Constitutional right has been coopted by the wealthy and politically corrupt. It is no coincidence that historically huge disparities in income have occurred at times when moneyed interests increasingly control political dialogue. Over the past four years, Donald Trump's accusations of "fake news," the free use of negative language against minority groups, "cancel culture," and blatant xenophobia have caused Americans to question how far First Amendment protections can--and should--go. Cose offers an eye-opening wholly original examination of the state of free speech in America today, litigating ideas that touch on every American's life.
Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition in Life Writing by Call Number: Clemons HQ798 .G52 2019ISBN: 9780823285495Publication Date: 2019When more than 150 women testified in 2018 to the sexual abuse inflicted on them by Dr. Larry Nassar when they were young, competitive gymnasts, they exposed and transformed the conditions that shielded their violation, including the testimonial disadvantages that cluster at the site of gender, youth, and race. In Witnessing Girlhood, Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall argue that they also joined a long tradition of autobiographical writing led by women of color in which adults use the figure and narrative of child witness to expose harm and seek justice. Witnessing Girlhood charts a history of how women use life narrative to transform conditions of suffering, silencing, and injustice into accounts that enjoin ethical response. Drawing on a deep and diverse archive of self-representational forms--slave narratives, testimonio, memoir, comics, and picture books--Gilmore and Marshall attend to how authors return to a narrative of traumatized and silenced girlhood and the figure of the child witness in order to offer public testimony.
Helpful URLs
- Ask a LibrarianQuestions? Ask us! Chat, call, text, or email anytime.
- Purchase RecommendationsIs there an ebook you think the UVA Library should own but doesn't? Make a purchase recommendation.
- Using Databases Off GroundsHave questions about accessing databases from off-grounds? Find more information here.
Preparing for Research
This guide was created to help you prepare for research for your push project essay assignment and as a general guide to resources for researching life writing in its various forms and contexts.
In preparation for your assignment, you should think some about possible questions/topics of interest to start your research. You will also want to spend some time thinking about how you will conduct your research.
- Fine-tune your searches.
Think broadly when brainstorming search terms. What synonyms or related terms could stand in for your key search terms?
You can combine search terms using AND ("life writing" AND visuals) and OR ("life writing" OR autobiography OR memoir OR blog). Place terms you want to be searched as a phrase in quotation marks " ".
In many databases, the asterisk (*) is a truncation or "wildcard" symbol that will match all possible endings for a word stem. For example, autobio* will match autobiography, autobiographer, autobiographic, autobiographical, etc.
Most databases have filters or facets that allow you to narrow your results by subject, date range, etc. Limit your searches to help you find the sources you need.
- Think about where you might find the type of information you are seeking.
Will you find the research you need in a book or e-book? An article? A newspaper? A documentary? An interview? Depending on the requirements of your assignment, you may be looking for scholarly journal articles and/or essays/chapters from books, or you may look more broadly for credible information to meet your research need. In general, when conducting research cast a wide net when looking for the types of resources that could help answer your research question or support an argument you are making.
- Know the difference between academic and non-academic sources, and when it's appropriate to use them.
Most databases allow you to limit results to academic/scholarly/peer-reviewed sources. Be mindful of your assignment and what you're being asked to provide. Need a refresher? Watch the short video Peer Review in 3 Minutes.
- When you find a good source, use it to find other good sources.
Use the subject terms and keywords associated with an item to find other items on similar topics. Scholarly books and articles will have works cited, bibliographies, or footnotes you can mine for additional resources.
Need help? Ask a librarian.
Finding articles
Databases for Researching Literature
MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) indexes the broadest range of resources about literature in all languages, as well as film, television, and popular culture, including over 4,000 journals as well as books and dissertations. For articles not available full-text in MLA, click on “Find@UVA,” or look up the journal title in Virgo, the library catalog.
ProQuest One Literature is for scholars who want to engage with an exhaustive and diverse set of scholarly resources around a given literary topic for research. It contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theater performances, and author readings.
Literature Resource Center includes up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on nearly 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world. Also may include multimedia content - podcasts, images, etc.
Databases for Researching Communication, Social Media, and Psychology
Communication & Mass Media Complete provides coverage of journals in communication, mass media, and other closely-related fields of study. It provides indexing and abstracts for more than 570 journals, and selected coverage of nearly 200 more, for a combined coverage of more than 770 titles.
Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection includes abstracts and full-text of almost 600 journals in psychology and related fields.
Databases for searching a wide range of humanities & multidisciplinary topics
Academic Search Complete is a large general database of articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers on many topics. Updated daily, it can be the best source for resources about very current topics.
JSTOR includes older issues of scholarly journals in many disciplines including literature, from the start to 3-5 years ago.
Project Muse offers searchable full text of nearly 600 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics, mostly from North American university presses. Older volumes are often available from JSTOR.
The Social Science and Humanities Library provides online access to a broad range of journal content across 14 disciplines related to social sciences and humanities, including media and communication studies, library and information science, security and defense studies, business, management and economics, and education. Includes many journals published on behalf of associations, organizations, and societies related to these disciplines.
See an A-Z list of all databases
Finding books & articles using Virgo
Virgo, the UVA Library’s primary search tool, contains catalog records for books, print journals, DVDs, maps, and digitized materials, as well as links to online articles from our rich array of subscription journals. You can search catalog materials and articles together - a regular search will provide tabs for books, articles, and other materials. You can also use the Filter tools on the left to limit your results by author, language, publication date, and more. To find ebooks and other materials available online, set the Availability filter to Online to limit your catalog search results.
Example E-Books of Possible Interest
Adolescents and Their Social Media Narratives: A Digital Coming of Age by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781138679818Publication Date: 2017Adolescents are forging a new path to self-development, taking advantage of the technology at their fingertips to produce desired results. In Adolescents and Their Social Media Narratives, Walsh specifically explores how social media impacts teenagers' personal development. Indeed, through unique empirical data, Walsh presents an aspect of teen media use that is not often documented in the press--the seemingly deep and meaningful process of evaluating the self visually in an attempt to reconcile their presentation with their internal "self-story." Nevertheless, as Walsh outlines, this is not a process without its challenges.
Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo.ISBN: 9781617036132Publication Date: 2012Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth. In Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this fascinating genre. The book considers eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different artistic styles. Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields--including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history, and psychology--El Refaie shows that the traditions and formal features of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling. For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one's self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image. The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the authentic nature of their stories. Includes discussion of Bechdel's Fun Home and Satrapi's Persepolis.
The Comics of Alison Bechdel by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in Virgo.ISBN: 9781496825827Publication Date: 2019Alison Bechdel is both a driver and beneficiary of the welcoming of comics into the mainstream. Indeed, the seemingly simple binary of outside/inside seems perpetually troubled throughout the career of this important comics artist, known for Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and Dykes to Watch Out For. This volume extends the body of scholarship on her work from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Scholars cover the span of Bechdel's career, placing her groundbreaking early work within the context of her more well-known recent projects. The contributors provide new insights on major themes in Bechdel's work, such as gender performativity, masculinity, lesbian politics and representation, trauma, life writing, and queer theory. Situating Bechdel among other comics artists, this book charts possible influences on her work, probes the experimental traits of her comics in their representations of kinship and trauma, combs archival materials to gain insight into Bechdel's creative process, and analyzes her work in community building and space making through the comics form.
Life Writing and Space by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781317105220Publication Date: 2017How does our ability, desire or failure to locate ourselves within space, and with respect to certain places, effect the construction and narration of our identities? Approaching recordings and interpretations of selves, memories and experiences through the lens of theories of space and place, this book brings the recent spatial turn in the Humanities to bear upon the work of life writing. It shows how concepts of subjectivity draw on spatial ideas and metaphors, and how the grounding and uprooting of the self is understood in terms of place. The different chapters investigate ways in which selves are reimagined through relocation and the traversing of spaces and texts. Many are concerned with the politics of space: how racial, social and sexual topographies are navigated in life writing. Some examine how focusing on space, rather than time, impacts upon auto/biographical form.
Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781351606790Publication Date: 2017The argument has been made that memoir reflects and augments the narcissistic tendencies of our neo-liberal age. Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir challenges and dismantles that assumption. Focusing on the history, theory and practice of memoir writing, editors Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph provide a thorough and cutting-edge examination of memoir through the lenses of ethics, practice and innovation. By investigating memoir across cultural boundaries, in its various guises, and tracing its limits, the editors convincingly demonstrate the plurality of ways in which memoir is helping us make sense of who we are, who we were and the influences that shape us along the way. Possible essays of interest include: "Memoir for Your Ears: The Podcast Life," "The 'I' and the 'Eye': Mediated Perspective in the Documemoir," "'Stories': Social Media and Ephemeral Narratives as Memoir," and "Memoir 2.0: The Writing of the Self as Brand."
Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781496805973Publication Date: 2018Never before have comics seemed so popular or diversified, proliferating across a broad spectrum of genres, experimenting with a variety of techniques, and gaining recognition as a legitimate, rich form of art. Maaheen Ahmed examines this trend by taking up philosopher Umberto Eco's notion of the open work of art, whereby the reader--or listener or viewer, as the case may be--is offered several possibilities of interpretation in a cohesive narrative and aesthetic structure. Ahmed delineates the visual, literary, and other medium-specific features used by comics to form open rather than closed works, methods by which comics generate or limit meaning as well as increase and structure the scope of reading into a work. Ahmed analyzes a diverse group of British, American, and European (Franco-Belgian, German, Finnish) comics. She treats examples from the key genre categories of fictionalized memoirs and biographies, adventure and superhero, noir, black comedy and crime, science fiction and fantasy. Her analyses demonstrate the ways in which comics generate openness by concentrating on the gaps essential to the very medium of comics, the range of meaning ensconced within words and images as well as their interaction with each other.
Oversharing: Presentations of Self in the Internet Age by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781317554523Publication Date: 2015People 'overshare' when they interact with others through the screens of computers and smartphones. Oversharing means to divulge more of their inner feelings, opinions and sexuality than they would in person, or even over the phone. Text messaging, Facebooking, tweeting, camming, blogging, online dating, and internet porn are vehicles of this oversharing, which blurs the boundary between public and private life. This book examines these 'presentations of self', acknowledging that we are now much more public about what used to be private. With this second edition, Agger adds a new chapter on whether privacy is possible that addresses selfies, job loss due to oversharing, the surveillance state, and examples of when the private should go public.
The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780262346252Publication Date: 2018Social critiques argue that social media have made us narcissistic, that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are all vehicles for me-promotion. In this book, Lee Humphreys offers a different view. She shows that sharing the mundane details of our lives - what we ate for lunch, where we went on vacation, who dropped in for a visit - didn't begin with mobile devices and social media. People have used media to catalog and share their lives for several centuries. Pocket diaries, photo albums, and baby books are the predigital precursors of today's digital and mobile platforms for posting text and images. The ability to take selfies has not turned us into needy narcissists; it's part of a longer story about how people account for everyday life.
Reading Junot Diaz by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780822963950Publication Date: 2015Dominican American author and Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz has gained international fame for his blended, cross-cultural fiction. Reading Junot Díaz focuses on his complete body of published works. It explores the totality of his work and provides a concise view of the interconnected and multilayered narrative that weaves throughout Díaz's writings. Christopher González analyzes both the formal and thematic features and discusses the work in the context of speculative and global fiction as well as Caribbean and Latino/a culture and language. Topics such as race, masculinity, migration, and Afro-Latinidad are examined in depth. González provides a synthesis of the prevailing critical studies of Díaz and offers many new insights into his work.
Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9781472481566Publication Date: 2019This book analyses the relationship between comics and cultural memory. By focussing on a range of landmark comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the discussion draws attention to the ongoing role of visual culture in framing testimony, particularly in relation to underprivileged subjects such as migrants and refugees, individuals dealing with war and oppressive regimes and individuals living with particular health conditions. The discussion is influenced by literary and cultural debates on the intersections between ethics, testimony, trauma, and human rights, reflected in its three overarching questions: 'How do comics usually complicate the production of cultural memory in local contents and global mediascapes?', 'How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address?', and 'How do the comics function as mnemonic structures?' The author highlights that the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression - at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international - in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics. g power of violence and oppression - at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international - in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media.
Rough South, Rural South: Region and Class in Recent Southern Literature by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to access (sign in to Hathi for access)ISBN: 9781496802330Publication Date: 2016Includes essay "Dorothy Allison: Revising the 'White Trash' Narrative."
Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780415889810Publication Date: 2011This book examines everyday stories of personal experience that are published online in contemporary forms of social media. Taking examples from discussion boards, blogs, social network sites, microblogging sites, wikis, collaborative and participatory storytelling projects, Ruth Page explores how new and existing narrative genres are being (re)shaped in different online contexts. The book shows how the characteristics of social media, which emphasize recency, interpersonal connection and mobile distribution, amplify or reverse different aspects of canonical storytelling. The new storytelling patterns which emerge provide a fresh perspective on some of the key concepts in narrative research: structure, evaluation and the location of speaker and audience in time and space. The online stories are profoundly social in nature, and perform important identity work for their tellers as they interact with their audiences - identities which range from celebrities in Twitter, cancer survivors in the blogosphere to creative writers convening storytelling projects or local histories.
Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9780748675555Publication Date: 2014Argues that literary deceptions and false memoirs have particular cultural value and significance Textual Deceptions considers a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first century literary works in which the relationship between text and author is not what it seems. By exploring a variety of examples of false or embellished memoirs, purportedly autobiographical novels that are in fact thoroughly fictional, as well as bogus authorial personae, Sue Vice discusses whether it is possible to judge veracity by means of textual clues alone. The accounts featured range from 'misery memoirs' to Holocaust testimony, poetry purportedly by a Hiroshima survivor, short stories by an Albanian civil servant, fiction by an Aboriginal woman and by a former male prostitute. The book explores both why such texts arise, including consideration of writers' motives as well as pressures from the publishing industry, readers' tastes and contemporary social issues, and also how such texts are constructed, concluding with an assessment of their literary merit.
Tobias Wolff: A Study of the Short Fiction by Call Number: Ebook - Access online using link in VirgoISBN: 9780805708646Publication Date: 1996Includes interview by Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver with Tobias Wolff about his writing of This Boy's Life.
Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Autobiography by Call Number: E-book: Use link in Virgo record to accessISBN: 9781000088083Publication Date: 2020Why do we endlessly tell the stories of our lives? And why do others pay attention when we do? The essays collected here address these questions, focusing on three different but interrelated dimensions of life writing. The first section, "Narrative," argues that narrative is not only a literary form but also a social and cultural practice, and finally a mode of cognition and an expression of our most basic physiology. The next section, "Life Writing: Historical Forms," makes the case for the historical value of the subjectivity recorded in ego-documents. The essays in the final section, "Autobiography Now," identify primary motives for engaging in self-narration in an age characterized by digital media and quantum cosmology.
