Dr. Patrick Ryan

Critical Literature Review Instructions

CYS 3313G - Critical Literature Review - Due February 29, 2024 (25%)

Using the works approved by the instructor from your annotated bibliography, write a 2,500 word critical literature review. 

A critical literature review is an essay that provides an analysis of a set of scholarly works that deal with a common subject matter. An essay is not a report. It must make a claim about its object, rather than merely describing what it is. An analysis is not a summary. An analysis explains how/why something is structured or operates, or what it means or does or why it matters, or where it fails (etc.)

When you are asked to write a critical review of one book or article this analytic task is easier. Here, you must make a claim or claims about the group of works you've assembled to represent a literature. These claim(s) must help us understand the debate or inquiry they represent. Of course, your claims must be logical, clearly presented, supported by examples, and persuasive. 

Your review must connect what you are doing to the discursive structure of modern childhood. No matter what your topic of interest is, for the purposes of this course it must engage with or explore the discourses of childhood. For the pursposes of this class, the discourses of childhood are defined by the Landscape of Modern Childhood diagram presented in week one. You are to utilize it.

Ideally your claim will identify a questionable category, narrative, assumption, or procedure within some or all of the works you review. You may also locate a disagreement in the works your read, and hopeful have something to say about its sources. Review the string in the first sentence of this paragraph: category, narrative, assumption, procedure. Many of the conceptual tools of a critical literature review came from discourse analysis. You could say that a critical literature review is an abbreviated application of discourse analysis. If you can do one, you can do the other. 

Here is a link to the style I would like you to use and the marking rubric we will use.