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ENG 333: American Ethnic Literature

This guide provides library resources and other helpful resources to assist students working on their ENG 333 Wikipedia Assignments.

ASU Library Databases and Tutorials

  • Academic Search Ultimate - This multidisciplinary database gives you access to popular articles, multimedia, and scholarly journal articles on a wide variety of topics. 
  • Library One Search - Appearing on the library homepage, this lets you search across ASU Library's holdings, from books to scholarly journal articles to multimedia. 
  • Search Strategies: Using Keywords and Connectors - This tutorial covers the definition of keywords, how to use keywords and connectors together when searching in databases, and refine topics or searches based on keywords found. 
  • Using Library Research Databases - This tutorial defines multidisciplinary and subject-specific library databases and what they include. This tutorial also describes how to utilize search strategies in library databases. 
  • Introduction to ASU Library - This tutorial is useful if you do not know much about ASU Library or the ASU Library website. Library accounts and library services will be explored in-depth in this tutorial.

ASU Library Search Tips

When searching for sources about speculative fiction, include quotation marks. This makes it so the phrase "speculative fiction" appears across your search results. Excluding quotation marks makes it so "speculative" and "fiction" appear separately across different search results. 

If you're looking at an aspect of speculative fiction, whether that is an overview or a group of writers, you'll also want to include a Boolean operator, or connector word. These operators include AND, OR, NOT. Order of operators does matter, with concepts attached to AND being recognized first. 

  • Using AND looks for resources containing all the terms in your search, narrowing down your total results. While Google automatically puts AND in between your search terms, other academic databases do not.
    • One example of using AND is when you're focusing on a specific author. Doing a search like "speculative fiction" AND "Octavia Butler" will yield results mentioning speculative fiction works by Octavia Butler.
  • Using OR finds resources about two (or more) concepts, broadening your total results by including any of your search terms. 
    • A good way to use OR is if you use synonymous concepts. For example, if you're looking at Japanese speculative fiction, some results may discuss it under the umbrella of Asian speculative fiction. Your search would then look like Japanese speculative fiction OR Asian speculative fiction. 
  • Using NOT excludes terms from your search, narrowing down your total results by ignoring certain concepts related to your search terms.  
    • For instance, if you don't want to examine works by J.R.R. Tolkein, you would write a search like "speculative fiction" NOT J.R.R. Tolkein. Try not to use quotation marks following a NOT operator.

You can also use quotation marks and parentheses for searches with Boolean operators.

  • For instance, doing the search "speculative fiction AND overview" should offer resources that provide a general look at speculative fiction.
  • Likewise, if you want to use a search with AND plus OR, use parentheses to enclose your OR terms. For example, speculative fiction AND (Black OR African-American)

If you're looking for resources about particular authors of speculative fiction works, include that author's name in the search. If you are studying a particular work or series, you can also search the work's title to pull resources relating to it.

Other ASU Resources

The Imagination Desk: This series of audio podcasts from ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination interviews artists, scholars, scientists, and technologists about their inspirations and their uses of imagination in their works. The "Groits and Galaxies" series explores African speculative fiction, featuring authors like Chinelo Onwualu and Kemi Ashing-Giwa. Other single episodes interview authors and explore their works, such as Chinese speculative fiction writer Regina Kanyu Wang. 

The ASU Library acknowledges the twenty-three Native Nations that have inhabited this land for centuries. Arizona State University's four campuses are located in the Salt River Valley on ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples, including the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) Indian Communities, whose care and keeping of these lands allows us to be here today. ASU Library acknowledges the sovereignty of these nations and seeks to foster an environment of success and possibility for Native American students and patrons. We are advocates for the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge systems and research methodologies within contemporary library practice. ASU Library welcomes members of the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh, and all Native nations to the Library.