An Example Annotated Bibliography Entry

Dear All,

This week, your blog assignment is to lay the groundwork for your final paper by doing research. By assessing and summarizing research, you prepare yourself to use it in your paper. This is what an annotated bibliography entry looks like (you will be doing two of these):

Topic: The use of dialect for humorous and moral commentary in nineteenth-century literature.

Cox, James M. “Toward Vernacular Humor.” Critical Essays on American Humor. Ed. William Bedford Clark and W. Craig Turner. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1984, 107-120. Print.

James Cox analyzes the humorous projection of Huck Finn's voice, asserting that Huck’s illiterate writing of the book is another element of the inversion that leads to the climactic statement of “All right, then, I’ll go to hell!” Cox links the ability to discover the right moral choice (to steal Jim out of slavery) with the lack of rationalizing education which is reflected in Huck's ungrammatical speech. Cox also traces Holden Caulfield's (from J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye) improvement of grammar as he matures and learns. However, Holden is not a typical bildingsroman because of his sexualized humor and his “protective” swearing. Cox's article offers nuanced arguments for the use of dialect in the nineteenth century (and the twentieth) as a way of establishing the “natural” morality of a character. I would use Cox’s article to suggest that one can romanticize a non-standard dialect to the point that it achieves a form of elitism – it is viewed as more natural, and therefore more moral. However, I want to argue that while this sort of romanticizing can do positive work on people’s language ideologies, I believe that the work of linguists to prove the equal validity of all dialects to be more important.