Sample Annotations

Sample Annotation I

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Wheeler, Bonnie, Ed. The Malory Debate. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000.

This collection of essays by a range of Malory scholars addresses the complex issue of the textual relation of the Winchester manuscript and Caxton edition. While many of the essay writers are well-known Malory scholars, such as P. J. C. Field, who argues for an author-centered view of editing, the collection also includes relatively new scholars, such as Takako Cato, who argues for a historical, materially-based approach to editing medieval texts. As Bonnie Wheeler states in her introduction, because “Malory’s Le Morte D’arthur is an extreme case of discourse on the edge of culturally constructed boundaries and fissures (from script to print, from the Middle Ages to modernity, etc.); it is not surprising that the work provokes anxiety among editors and readers” (xii). Thus, this work is relevant to our current project because it looks at textual relationships in the period and addresses many of the ways the questions of textual studies help us better understand the period.

Sample Annotation II

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Chute, Hilary. “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in Maus.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 52, no. 2, 2006, pp. 199-230.

Chute examines how Maus’s comics form enables Spiegelman to negotiate the challenges of representing history, both aesthetically and ethically. Her analysis demonstrates how the text interweaves past and present time and space to represent “the accreted, shifting ‘layers’ of historical apprehension not only through language but also through the literal, spatial layering of comics, enabling the presence of the past to become radically legible on the page” (212). These moves, she argues, reflect the dialogic nature of comics, which demand the active participation of readers in collaborative meaning-making. The graphic form thereby enables “ethical representation without problematic closure” (214). Chute credits Maus with bringing comics onto the radar of literary studies; this analysis both illuminates that primary texts and demonstrates the value of comics studies within English.