Your first step will be to conduct research and create an Annotated Bibliography with five sources.

Goal

• Conduct research on Parable of the Sower and write an Annotated Bibliography in preparation for the research pa.per

Assignment

A research pa.per on Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower will be due on Sunday, December 12. You can choose a particular topic to explore in the novel, and then you will need to find at least five secondary sources that can help you to develop and support a specific thesis about the primary text.

Your first step will be to conduct research and create an Annotated Bibliography with five sources.

Research

First, look through the following resources to get an idea of a topic in Parable of the Sower you would like to research and to pick at least five sources for your Annotated Bibliography:

• Academic articles related to Parable of the Sower available through the PCC Library catalog (Links to an external site.)
• Academic book chapters related to Parable of the Sower available through the PCC Library catalog (Links to an external site.)
• Academic articles and book chapters related to Parable of the Sower available through the JSTOR databaseLinks to an external site.
• A list of academic texts on Octavia E. Butler: “An Octavia E. Butler Bibliography (1976-2008)” (Links to an external site.) by Ritch Calvin, specifically the sections entitled “Secondary Texts” and “Books/Chapters” (If you chose one of the sources from Calvin’s bibliography to include in your Annotated Bibliography, you will need to look for it in the PCC Library. Chat 24/7 with a PCC librarianLinks to an external site. for help finding a source.)

For example, if someone wanted to research the influence of the history and geography of Pasadena on Parable of the Sower, they could chose “Pasadena on Her Mind: Exploring Roots of Octavia E. Butler’s Fiction” by Carl Abbott as one of their five sources. Or if someone wanted to research utopian and dystopian societies, they could chose the book chapter entitled “Octavia Butler’s ParablesLinks to an external site.” by Tom Moylan.

Annotated Bibliography

• Use the format of the following sample Annotated Bibliography  Download Annotated Bibliographypage. (You can download this Word document, and edit it to include your own name and your five chosen secondary sources and annotations.)
• The Annotated Bibliography should include . . .
  • MLA (Work Cited styled) citations for the five secondary sources you decide to include, which can be cut and pasted from . . .
    • PCC Catalog: The image below shows how to access and copy the MLA citation for a specific source from the PCC catalog. (Note: This is just an image; the links to the actual PCC catalog are above under Research. Also, I’m just using this source by Tom Moylan as an example; you do not need to read it for this assignment.)

• JSTOR Database: The image below shows how to access and copy the MLA citation for a specific source from the JSTOR database. (Note: This is just an image; the link to the actual JSTOR database is above under Research. Also, I’m just using this source by Octavia Butler et al. as an example; you do not need to read it for this assignment.)

• A short paragraph for each secondary source in the Annotated Bibliography, describing . . .
  1. The thesis of the article
  2. The types of evidence used by the author(s) to support the thesis
  3. How you plan to use the source in your research pap.er

MLA

• Remember that you must correctly cite any print or web source that you quote or paraphrase. Submitting the words or ideas of someone else without proper citation is considered plagiarism.
• To cite a quotation in the body of your pap.er, include the author’s last name (if not obvious from the context) and page number(s) (if any) in parentheses at the end of the quotation. For specific rules for quoting and citing sources, see the PCC library’s “MLA Style Quick Guide”Links to an external site. and/or Purdue OWL’s online MLA Formatting and Style Guide (Links to an external site.).