User talk:Aellingboe

Welcome!

Hello Aellingboe, welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Our intro page contains a lot of helpful material for new users—please check it out! If you need help, visit Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on this page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. NW (Talk) 02:02, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Bibliography assignment

Hi, here are the details of the MRR annotated bibliography assignment...

Good Wikipedia articles are built on a foundation of good sources. In this respect, Wikipedia articles are not much different from academic essays. In fact, if anything a good Wikipedia article is more reliant on good sources than are other academic or scholarly texts. The whole notion of verifiability, which is the first of the encyclopedia's five pillars, depends upon reliable sources.

The aim of this bibliography assignment, then, is to identify, read, and comment on the most important and reliable sources that relate to the topic of your chosen article.

In coordination with your group, you need to do the following:

• Identify the most important sources for your topic. These will be both books and articles. They will vary depending upon the kind of topic you have chosen, but to give a couple of examples this book is a key one for the general topic of magic realism, while this biography would be essential for the article on Gabriel García Márquez.
• Use databases and the Koerner library catalogue to identify these sources. Look for as many as possible in the first instance; you will later choose between them. On the whole, they will not be online sources (though of course many articles are now available online thanks to JSTOR and other services).
• Aim to come up with a long list of, say, 5-20 books and perhaps 15-40 articles. Obviously, for some topics there will be more material than for others. So for some topics you will need to do more searching; for other topics, you will need to be more careful and discerning as you choose between sources. Look far and wide and be inventive in thinking about good sources.
• In some cases, the article may already have a number of references, either in the article itself, or perhaps somewhere in its talkpage archives. You should take account of these, but you should still undertake your own search, not least to find new material that has not been considered before.
• To figure out what you need, you will also have to look at your article and consider what it is missing, what needs to be improved, where it could do with better sources, etc. In other words, you will have to start planning how you are going to work on and rewrite the article.
• Come up with a final short list of c. 2-4 books and perhaps 6-24 articles.
• Put the long list (of all the sources you have found) as well as the short list (of the sources you have decided are the most important) on your article's talk page by Wednesday, January 20.
• Distribute the sources among the members of your group. Each person should be reading the equivalent of one full book or six articles. Exceptionally long books may be divided up between group members.
• Read the sources, bearing in mind the information that is going to be useful as you work on the article. Think about what it covers and take a note of particular page numbers.
• Produce an annotated bibliography of the sources you have read. This will consist of a summary or précis of the most important aspects of the texts, which should be at least 150 words long for each article read; 600 words for each book. You should put this on your user page by Monday, February 8.

To coordinate with the other members of your group (whose names you can find here), use their talk pages. Each time that you log in to Wikipedia, you will notice that if you have a message waiting for you, there will be a yellow banner at the top of the page.

Good luck! --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 23:00, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Magical Realism Reconsidered

I'm looking forward to working with your class during the semester - if you have any questions about the project or Wikipedia in general, please feel free to leave me a note at User talk:Awadewit. Wikipedians are here to help you! Awadewit (talk) 23:23, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

heads up

Heya, just to point out that if you look here you'll see that User:Awadewit has volunteered to give special help to your article, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Of course, you guys are to take the lead, and above all do the research required to improve the article. But you should definitely feel free to contact Awadewit on her talk page. You'll find she's very friendly and knowledgeable about writing for Wikipedia, and will give you as much help as she can.

Incidentally, you should also (as I mentioned before) be putting our project page on your watchlist, so you can see changes like this one. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 23:24, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Annotated Bibliography

Alex Ellingboe 43298074 Annotated Bibliography for Cien años de soledad

1. Echevarría, Roberto González. “Cien años de soledad: The Novel as Myth and Archive”. MLN. Vol. 99, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1984), pp. 358-380. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2906193.

In this article, Echevarría argues that there is an overall pattern of Latin American history lurking in the background of Cien años de soledad that seem to refer to real people and happenings. For instance, the city of Macondo in the novel is ruled by a de jure aristocracy that is much like the ruling classes of many Latin American countries. He cites numerous other examples from the novel in order to argue that Cien años de soledad is one of a number of texts that “Latin American culture has created to understand itself”. I plan on using this aspect of the article to contribute to the section of the wikipedia page regarding the novel’s importance or impact on the Latin American community. Another interesting aspect of this article is Echevarría’s discussion of time, and it’s seemingly discontinuous, irregular, and yet, cyclical nature. His points regarding this subject will also be beneficial to the time section of the wikipedia article.

2. McMurray, George. “Reality and Myth in Garcia Marquez’ ‘Cien años de soledad’”. The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1969), pp. 175-181. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1346518.

In this article, McMurray argues that Marquez’ Colombian roots influenced his writing of Cien años de soledad, and that this is evident in the different myths found throughout the book. Furthermore, there is a fusion of Colombian and Latin American reality with regional myths. The differences between the carefree culture of the Coastal region of Colombia and the conservative sentiments of the interior are displayed many times, and the fantastic aspects of the novel are derived from myths prevalent in the coastal region to which he is native. McMurray also deals with the issue of time in the novel and argues that the “cien años” represents several centuries of Latin American history compressed into a more manageable text. McMurray’s first point will be helpful in contributing to the influences behind Marquez’ work, while his discussion of time will provide helpful insight into the importance of the novel in the Latin American community and the temporal issues that abound in the book itself.

3. Gullon, Ricardo. “Review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez & the Lost Art of Storytelling”. Diacritics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 27-32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/464556

In this article, Gullon deals with the issues of tone and time in Cien años de soledad. He argues that by maintaining the same tone throughout the novel, Marquez makes the extraordinary blend with the ordinary, and that his condensation of and lackadaisical manner of describing events causes the extraordinary to seem less remarkable than it actually is, thereby creating perfectly blending the real with the magical. He also argues that maintaining the same narrator throughout the novel familiarizes the reader with his voice and causes he or she to become accustomed to the extraordinary events, which he is describing. His arguments on these topics will be useful in contributing to the sections on time and perhaps a new one on the tone of the book.

4. Wood, Michael. Garcia Marquez 100 Years of Solitude. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

This book deals with a wide range of topics concerning Cien años de soledad. First and foremost Michael Wood discusses the historical context leading up to the novel and the aspects of Colombian culture that are incorporated subtly in the text. He states that a large amount of Colombian history and political strife found its way into the novel, undoubtedly because of Marquez’ Colombian heritage. For instance, Wood writes that “the arguments over reform in the nineteenth century, the arrival of the railway, the War of the Thousand Days, the American fruit company, the cinema, the automobile, and the massacre of striking plantation workers” are all incorporated in the novel at one point or another (9). Furthermore, these real events are blended with others that are all, according to Marquez, based on actual events (although they are undoubtedly embellished by the use of hyperbole), but this combination of real events and exaggerated accounts of extraordinary tales combines so that “the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain” (57-58). His discussion of these topics will be useful when contributing to the section discussing the influences in Marquez’ life that contributed to his writing.

One of Wood’s most interesting arguments is that Marquez’ work concentrates on the way people interact with each other and the way in which they perceive the world around them. He says that “the characters themselves in One Hundred Years of Solitude offer many readings of history, although…the readings are usually ignorant or deluded” (11). Furthermore, Macondo’s isolation from the outside world adds to the innocence and/or ignorance of its inhabitants (30). However, “there is no hiding from history for long” (30), especially the brutal history of Latin America, and this fact affects the characters’ interpretations of the world, which is why the novel can seem hopeless or pessimistic to some readers. This theory of each character interpreting the world on his or her own could contribute to the section discussing the overall meaning of the book.

Following this section, Wood delves into a deep analysis of the style in which the book is written. Citing a few passages, he argues that the book is written in a conventional manner, causing it to sound like “the linguistic custom of the community” (17). This combined with the recurring theme of solitude causes the book to have an unusual appeal. In Wood’s words, “it beautifully pictures the charm of what we are not ordinarily supposed to find charming” (34). The simplicity and oddity (and perhaps stupidity) of the characters in the novel, combined with their ignorance due to their solitude causes the reader to relate to them in a strange way, not typical of a usual connection between a reader and a fictional character, according to Wood.

Like many other authors, Wood spends a great deal of time discussing the “unastonished tone” in which the book is written, which causes the real to blend effortlessly with the magical or extraordinary. Furthermore, Wood states that the author is present everywhere in his work, and that in this case, by using this unquestioning tone, Marquez wants the reader to question the limits of reality. This is an interesting point, and has the potential to contribute a great deal to the Wikipedia section dealing with the meaning or message of the book. After this section of Wood’s book he deals with the diction and narrative direction of Cien años de soledad. While his arguments on these topics and other smaller topics in the book are sound, they are not as intriguing or compelling as the ones previously listed. Also, they do not contain the same potential to contribute to the betterment of the Wikipedia article on Cien años de soledad.

P.S. I put this up on our group's project page on Monday, but it seems that everyone else put it on their individual pages, so I guess that's what we were supposed to do. I also put my short and long lists up there and not on here, because I wasn't sure where I should put it. --Aellingboe (talk) 03:24, 10 February 2010 (UTC)