User talk:Brhoads2

Welcome!

Greetings...

Hello, Brhoads2, and welcome to Wikipedia!

To get started, click on the green welcome.

I hope you like it here and decide to stay!

Happy editing! jbmurray (talk • contribs) 22:28, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

--jbmurray (talk • contribs) 22:28, 17 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) 22:28, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Your username

Hi, you seem to have changed your username from User:Brhoads22 to this one. That's fine, but do try to be consistent. I'm taking it that this is your account now. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 22:28, 17 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) 23:25, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Annotated Bibliography

I thought I did this a long time ago, but can't seem to find it so I'm going to publish it again.

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a scholarly source interested in the influences of Marquez in Cien Anos de Soledad, such as other literary writers and the conquest and the history of Latin America, as well as criticisms of his work such as his use of duality of cultural inheritance and his adherence to marianismo and other post-colonial themes.

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations has been published as a book, but each chapter is written by a different scholar who offers a topic and viewpoint on Cien Anos de Soledad. Each text is focused on a criticism or an interpretation of Marquez’s work. The introduction alone accuses (I use the word accuse because when reading it feels like the author is patronizing Marquez for writing in a style that would, in my experience, be considered high-quality from a literary perspective) Marquez’s style as being too rich because each sentence has meaning and you as a reader must “notice everything at the moment you read it” (2).

The first chapter, by David T. Haberly, is concerned with possible inspiration for Cine Anos de Soledad. Haberly gives an extensive list of authors, such as Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Defoe, and Echeverria as literary influences for Marquez’s work, but the main focus is on Chateaubriand’s Atala. Haberly makes parallels between the towns of Atala and Mocondo as well as with the central themes that both texts have surrounding ideas of incest, and also the fact that both writers were raised in small costal towns of Colombia.

Keith Harrison writes the second chapter of the book: “The Only Mystery” in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is focused on the theme of solitude in terms of the character of Rebecca. He asserts that her character represents the contradictions and dualities present in Latin American culture: she is a contradiction of European and Indigenous cultures which is exemplified through her commitment to Christianity and belief in Indigenous magic. She also speaks both languages, which is a perfect representation of the duality of her character. Harrison also touches upon the subject of why Rebecca, if she loved Arcadio, would kill him. The answer that Harrison comes to is that Rebecca kills him to represent the dichotomies with which the people of Latin America are all too familiar: “conscience against instinct, spirit against flesh, dream against reality” (14). She represents the antithesis of civilized versus primitive- European versus Indigenous.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the parallels that are apparent in Cien Anos de Soledad between the storyline and the conquest of the Americas and the effects of Christianity on Indigenous populations. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria makes sound comparisons between Cien Anos de Soledad and biblical myths. He not only compares, but equates characters of the novel to characters from the bible. He claims that Jose Arcadio Buendia is Moses, Rebecca represents Perseus, and also makes comparisons between Marquez’s work and myths such as the Flood, Paradise, Seven Plagues, and the Apocolypse, all of which brings us back to the idea of Cien Anos de Soledad as a re-telling of the story of the conquest and European influence on Indigenous Latin America.

The book continues and touches on topics such as the potential of Marquez harboring ideals of marianismo and adhering to sexist stereotypes and reinforcing them in Cien Anos de Soledad through his portrayal of female characters as domestic housewives. This potentially sexist view also can be viewed as Marquez’s profound reflection on the social and cultural realities that exist in Latin America in terms of how women were viewed, and in particular, in Colombia, where he is from.

Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Critical Interpretations: Edited and with an Introduction by Harold Bloom: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003.

Good job on The Dragon Can't Dance

Nice to see you carried over some of the expertise you picked up in my class! The article looks grand. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 00:44, 12 July 2011 (UTC)