French Language and Literature 

Example Paper Topic: stage behavior in 18th-century theater

1. Primary Text Collections: Two Examples + Caveats

• Le Corpus de la littérature narrative du Moyen Age au XXe siècle: Romans, Contes, Nouvelles. (via ARTFL)
  • Know what you're looking at! look at table of contents -- publication dates (out of copyright), authors (not included, incomplete works)
  • Know how it works! look at search screen -- caps for accented, how dates work, how does searching work (2 words in same line, graph, page??)
• Gallica
  • Recherche: what's in there? How does it work?
    • e.g. Recherche libre: gestes theatre --> no term highlighting = I'm lost
    • browse by subject
  • Dossiers: Voyages en France
  • Note: you can find full-text resources in Gallica via the Bibliothèque Nationale's catalog BN-OPALE PLUS. e.g. Recherche Combinée for "Rabelais" (auteur) and "Femmes" (titre) --> 5 hits with 1 "document electronique" --> visualiser
• For more links and tips see Bobst Library's "French Literature Primary Text Collections Online"

2. Organizing Your Topic and Preparing for Research

• A. Become More Familiar with your Topic:
  • Browse the print reference collection (1st floor): PQ1 to PQ3999
  • The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. Groden, Kreisworth, Szeman eds. Johns Hopkins U. Press. (try a search for "french theater enlightenment" -- find x-refs to article on "rhetoric")
  • New Oxford Companion to Literature in French Peter France, ed. Oxford University Press. (try a search for "theater gesture eighteenth" --> article on Rhetoric)
  • Note bibliographic suggestions in these reference works.
  
  
  
• B. Break your topic down into its constituent parts -- Identify Key Concepts and Synonyms:
  • Paper topic: stage behavior in 18th-century theater
  • Concept matrix:
    • Theater: theatre, stage, plays, drama, comedy, ...
    • behavior: gestures, action, movement, gesticulation, rhetoric,...
    • 18th century: 18th, eighteenth, enlightenment, classical, ...

3. Discovering Secondary Sources

• A. Finding Books: Library Catalogs
  • Bobcat: Bobst Library's Catalog
    subject heading keyword searchs: (note: use drama, not theater) "french drama gesture" "french drama movement" "movement acting france/french" etc.
    
    
  • Catnyp: New York Public Library Research Branch's Catalog
  • Worldcat: (Inter)National Library Catalog
  
  
  
• B. Finding Articles: Indexes/Databases
  • Complete list of indexes/databases NYU Libraries subscribes to: by title & category.
  • List of NYU Libraries' databases by subject
    
    
  • Modern Language Association International Bibliography of Books and Articles
    keyword searching: (note: use drama, not theater) "french and drama and laughter" "french and drama and emotion" -- look at subjects of first hit
    
    
  • Francis -- multilingual and multidisciplinary bibliographic database covering Humanities, Social Sciences, etc.
  • Digital Dissertations, 1861-present (many available for free download)
    
    
  • Other Databases of Interest
    • Historical Abstracts
    • Film Literature Index
    • Sociological Abstracts
    • Lexis Nexis: click on "Sources" tab then type your news source into the "Find a Source" search bos on the right.

4. Additional Resources

• NYU's French Literature Subject Guide
• Other NYU Subject Web Pages
• NYU Libraries Subject Librarians

Jennifer Vinopal, vinopal@nyu.edu
Librarian for Digital Scholarship Initiatives