English 701 E6M2A -- Registrar’s Code 0839
MA Graduate Methodology
Professor David Richter
Fall 2010
HH 08 (It’s the Smart Classroom, whatever we are) at 6:30-8:00 pm Mondays
Syllabus
Required Texts: James L. Harner, Literary Research Guide: A Guide to Reference Sources for the Study of Literatures in English and Related Topics. 5rd edition, paperback, MLA Press, ISBN# 0873529839 (referred to below as Harner)
Guidelines for the course:
The center of this course is the weekly assignments; the secret is not to get behind in them. The success of each class session depends on your being able to share insights gained from the previous work's week; in many senses, this course is a collective endeavor and we will be posting our work for our fellow students to look at. Even if you miss a class, it's your responsibility to get the next week's assignment and hand it in on time. Please KEEP DUPLICATES OF ALL ASSIGNMENTS.
Learning Goals:
(1) Understanding the current discourse of a research field to which the student wants to contribute through analysis of literary journals.
(2) Learning to read literary criticism with a critical eye to assumptions, warrants, and data.
(3) Amassing a bibliography for the student’s projected research problem.
(4) Developing a prospectus for a master’s thesis or other research paper.
(5) Developing skills using library resources in the following fields: (a) paleography; (b) modern and postmodern editing; (c) history of English word usage through the Oxford English Dictionary; (d) archival materials using the Short Title Catalogue; (e) verification of biographical and bibliographical facts
Readings for this course are on the website, and each of us will be setting up a blog where students can post (1) their assignments, for others to read; (2) questions and problems, for me and other students to help out with; (3) model papers to imitate, but not slavishly, of course.
Instructions for how to use the WordPress blog system will be passed out on the first day, and I’d like you to get set up there ASAP so that it can be used as it’s supposed to be.
David Richter contact information:
Office: Klapper 639
Days in: Mondays and Wednesdays
Office Hours: 4-6 W
Telephone: 718-997-4684 (voicemail does not work)
Email: david.richter@qc.cuny.edu or drichter@nyc.rr.com
Tentative Schedule
August 30: Introduction: joining the critical conversation, finding your own voice
September 6: Labor Day, No Class
September 13: Reading Criticism Critically I: articles on a selected literary field
Readings on The Merchant of Venice:
Read O'Rourke and Newman for this class; read Marchitello and Weisberg for the
next class.
(1) Marchitello, Howard. "(Dis)Embodied Letters and The Merchant of Venice: Writing, Editing, History." ELH, 62:2 (1995 Summer), pp. 237-65.
(2) Newman, Karen. "Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare Quarterly, 38:1 (1987 Spring), pp. 19-33.
(3) Weisberg, Richard H. "Antonio's Legalistic Cruelty: Interdisciplinarity and 'The Merchant of Venice'." College Literature, 25:1 (1998 Winter), pp. 12-20.
(4) James L. O'Rourke - Racism and Homophobia in The Merchant of Venice - ELH 70:2
September 20: The Internet and Library Research.
Scholarly Journals: defining a field of knowledge
Harner, Introduction, K.
Journal assignment due
September 27: Yes, sources are books too. Presentation by Humanities Librarian, and we meet in Rosenthal 225.
Harner: A, B, C, D
First article assignment due
October 4: Developing a literary question
Harner: Q 3710-3850
Second article assignment due
October 11: Columbus Day: No Classes
October 18: Developing a Critical Voice
Harner: E, M 1310-1400
Question assignment due
October 25: Compiling a Bibliography
Handbook 2
Critical voice assignment due
November 1: Writing a Prospectus
Harner: G (read with special care in preparation)
Handbook 4
Bibliographic essay due
November 8: Blogging and Individual Appointments instead of Class
Harner: select the relevant section, from M - T
Working bibiography due
November 15: The Oxford English Dictionary is Your Friend
Harner: M 1410-1420
Draft of Prospectus due
November 22: Seeking Out the Original Sources: The Short Title Catalogue
OED assignment due
November 29: Do Storks Bring Texts? What Editors Do
Harner: M 1990-2005
Short Title Catalogue Assignment Due
December 6: Just the Facts, Ma'am: What Happened?
Editing Assignment due
December 13: Discussion of Prospectus
Factual Evaluation Assignment due
December 20: Final Prospectus Due
Assignment #1
Due: September 20
Journal Assignment
Choose a scholarly journal in the field of "English" that has been publishing for at least fifty years; you may select a generalist journal, such as PMLA or Modern Philology, or a specialized journal in a field of interest to you, for example, American Literature or Shakespeare Quarterly. Trace the history of the way the journal defines its field of knowledge by studying one issue from each decade of the past fifty years plus three issues of the last ten years. The preferred way to do this is to take, for example, the Winter issue of the journal from 2000, 1990, 1980, 1970, 1960 and 1950, plus two other issues from the period 1990-2000, for example, Winter 1998 and Winter 1993.
Read carefully the Table of Contents and any Abstracts in each issue; read fully at least one article and skim the others. How does the journal define what it studies? Has that changed over the past fifty years? Over the past ten? How? How has the focus of the articles changed? Is there any kind of article that appears now and would not have appeared twenty years ago? Any that appeared earlier that could not appear now?
Write a two- to four-page essay that analyzes the changes in the journal you have chosen: how has its definition of its field of knowledge changed historically?
Assignment #2 and #3
Due September 27 and October 4:
This assignment asks you to begin the process of discovering the major works in your field and to start positioning your Prospectus historically and theoretically. It asks you to form a preliminary bibliography with which you'll work as you begin writing; an exhaustive bibliographic search on your subject will come later.
Compile a list of at least ten sources that you will cite in your Prospectus, and include a brief annotation on why you have chosen the work. (Obviously, your Prospectus will change as you work on it; you will be free to alter this list as your project takes shape.) The list must include two works that are not strictly literary criticism--for instance, works of history, theory, social science.
Suggestions for determining the major works in your field.
1) Always begin with your question; look for significant texts which will help you in some way to answer this question.
2) Consider beginning with an important article in the field. Use the MLA Bibliography (either in bound volumes, on CD-ROM, or through Academic Search Premiere), an index such as Contemporary Literary Criticism in the Gale series, or one of the bibliographies in your field described in Harner to generate a list of recent articles in your area. Select one of these articles, judging by title, author, journal in which it appeared, and follow its references. The references in this article will lead you to others, which you can then follow in the same way. (If you don't yet feel you have a sense of which journals and authors are likely to produce important articles, use the Arts and Humanities Citation Index to determine which works are cited most frequently by other critics.)
3) Use the library catalogue (once cards, now the CUNY+ system), or one of the bibliographic sources listed above, to locate a recent book in your field. Study its bibliography, notes and index. Which works are central to the author's argument? Which ones does the author feel she has to take on before she can make her own point? What histories or theories is she relying on? Would these be useful for you? (The reason for stressing recent articles and books, of course, is that they will have the most up-to-date references. An article from 1949, no matter how good it is, will not have references to works published in the 1990s.)
4) Use your expertise in reading scholarly journals. Start with a reliable journal in your field, or perhaps with two journals that take different approaches; read through a year of issues; see what theoretical and critical works emerge as significant. Who are the scholars whose names seem always to be invoked? What work (if any) have these scholars done in your area? What works are they citing in their books?
5) Locate yourself theoretically. Be analytical about the kind of question you are asking in the prospectus, and then work on building up a base of theoretical texts that will underlie your claims or with which you will be in contention. Start with theoretical works that have been important to you so far, with a good anthology of literary theory such as mine, a good introduction to the subject such as Terry Eagleton's, a good specialized collection of articles such as Henry Louis Gates's "Race," Writing, and Difference, or with one of the reference works on theory listed in Harner. Make use of the bibliographies in these works to locate texts that will be important in answering your question.
Part I
A progress report on your efforts to define a preliminary bibliography. List every method you used to identify major works; list in correct MLA form every source you consulted, article you read, leads you pursued even if they turned out not to be helpful. At the end of the narrative of your search, you should have at least four works for your bibliography.
Part II
The preliminary bibliography in finished form, again with an account, as above, of methods you used to locate sources. Remember that each entry should be accompanied by a brief annotation and that the bibliography must include two works that are not primarily literary criticism.
Assignment #4 – Due October 18
“An Overwhelming Question”
With this assignment, you begin to narrow the focus of your work in the course towards your own topic. The goal of the assignment is to develop the question at the center of your prospectus. Thus the assignment is to submit:
1) your question or questions;
2) a paragraph on how you arrived at the question;
3) a paragraph on where you think the question will lead.
Some methods of developing a literary question:
1) "Look into thy heart and write" (or so said Sir Philip Sidney in Astrophel and Stella). This is one time-honored method. This involves examining one's own experiences and the ways those experiences have been shaped by literary and social texts. But one method is to ask the question that moves you most, that is most important to you, no matter how large it seems. Then, if can be answered through a study of literary texts, think about how you can narrow it to make it manageable in a thesis.
2) Make connections and explore them. It is almost always useful to look at literary texts in terms of the historical moment at which they were written and the present historical moment that reads them; to think about how a text works within or against certain literary conventions; to interrogate the critical reception of a text; to explore the connection between the text and others in its literary tradition or in other traditions in which it might be read.
3) Define a field and read around in it to discover your question. If you know you want to write on contemporary African American fiction, steep yourself in it, read as much as you can until certain issues seem to suggest themselves to you. Then (or even first) get a sense of what other readers are currently asking about the field: read a couple of issues of different related journals; try the on-line bibliography and then browsing in the stacks just to see what other people are writing about; ask a specialist in the field how viable your question seems. (Visit or phone QC professors during their office hours.)
4) Don't worry about the field--start instead with current critical questions. Choose a journal, especially a general one that tries to cover the field of "English" as a whole--PMLA, diacritics, Critical Inquiry, Representations, for example--and study the kind of questions currently animating English studies. Or try journals with clear critical or ideological positions if you already know what line of inquiry you want to use. For instance, if you want to write a feminist thesis, read Signs, Women's Studies Quarterly, Feminist Studies and differences; if you are thinking about cultural criticism, try Cultural Critique, Public Culture and Social Text. (The reference librarian will be able to help you in selecting journals.) Are any of the current questions interesting to you? Are there ways you could apply such questions to other texts? How could you go further, either building on or arguing with current scholarship and criticism?
The question you turn in does not have to be the final version of the question for your Prospectus. Part of the work of the course is to learn how to develop and recognize fruitful literary questions, and how to revise and reshape something that can’t work into something that can.
Critical Voice Assignment
Assignment #5:
Due October 25
This assignment constitutes the beginning of your work on creating a bibliography in your field. It is also designed to help you in forming your own way of entering the critical conversation on your question.
Choose two recent articles or chapters of books (by "recent" I mean since 1990) that are relevant to your question. Be inventive: look in the CUNY+ system for titles, comb the relevant periodicals, think about historical or sociological articles that might be important to you. For instance, if you were working on a question about Shakespeare and magic, why not look for the most up-to-date research on Renaissance witchcraft and magic and its significance within that society? Then you might combine this with a more straightforwardly literary article on Shakespeare, or on poetical representations of the supernatural in early modern writers. Or perhaps there is a new critical or biographical book on Shakespeare that looks significant (judge significance by the title, the sound of the Preface or Introduction, the range of references quoted in the notes, even the quality of the press that published it.)
Once you have chosen the two articles, complete the following assignments:
1) Repeat the process we have developed for identifying major critical works in your field. After reading the two articles or chapters, do any critical, theoretical or editorial works emerge as major in the field? If so, what are they? List in correct bibliographic form. (You'll be returning to these works later, when you compile the bibliography.)
2) Pinpoint in each article the moment (there may be more than one) when you feel the author is asserting her or his own critical voice. Where does the writer's own argument emerge? Where do you hear the distinctive voice of the writer? Select one passage from your two articles that you think illustrates most clearly the assertion of an original critical argument and bring at least ten xeroxed copies of this page to class. REMEMBER TO WRITE ON THE COPIES THE FULL BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION ON THE ARTICLE. Be prepared to discuss in class why you chose the passage.
[Note: This is a pre-Blackboard form of the assignment. I'm going to try to figure out how and where we can POST our pages and paragraphs to the website to save all this xeroxing.]
Preliminary Bibliographical Essay
Assignment #6:
Due: November 1
Draft of Bibliographical Essay of the Prospectus
A prospectus is in three parts: a statement of the question and the methodology you are going to use to answer it, a presentation of the current state of that question, and an annotated working bibliography. This assignment is designed to produce a draft of section #2. In the finished prospectus it will come just before the annotated bibliography, introducing the bibliography and making a connection to your opening discussion of question and methodology.
In one or two pages (three would really be a maximum), provide for your readers A SENSE OF THE CURRENT STATE OF SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM ON YOUR SUBJECT. Use your reading of the past eight weeks to construct an ANALYSIS of the work on your topic.
Outline the major developments or currents of thought in your field: what are the central issues in your field today? Are those issues relatively new, related to the advent of "theory" in our discipline, a renewed interest in history, the new insurgencies of feminism, gay and lesbian studies, multiculturalism?
Who are the major figures writing on your topic and why are their contributions important? You won't have room to summarize everything they've said, but a sentence or phrase about each can tell us what positions they take.
Finally, you'll want to survey the work on exactly your topic. For instance, if there is already one book and six articles written on the relation of the plague to the portrayal of death in English tragedy, you should give a full account of each of these works and explain what will be original about your thesis. "Although the works of X, Y and Z have already shown a relation between the plague and Jacobean drama, I plan to complicate their arguments by suggesting that the plague is central to the drama of the period, even though it usually appears in disguised form"--that would be one example of how you might explain your originality. Or, on another topic, "A, B and C have shown that Bakhtin's concept of `dialogics' is enormously fruitful for reading Joyce; D and E have done pioneering work on feminism and Joyce's use of language; my aim is to bring these two topics together in a Bakhtinian analysis of women's discourse in Dubliners."
When you are finished, readers
both inside and outside the field should be able to pick up your bibliographic
essay and come away with a clear sense of the issues in the field and of the
specific work on your question. You need to demonstrate both that you know the
field in general (including relevant literary theory) and that you are in
command of the criticism directly addressing your question.
Draft of Annotated Working Bibliography
Assignment #7:
Due November 8:
Draft of Annotated Working Bibliography of the Prospectus
To repeat: A prospectus is in three parts: a statement of the question and the methodology you are going to use to answer it, a presentation of the current state of that question, and an annotated working bibliography.
This assignment is designed to produce a draft of section #3. Here you will present what you have found so far: some of the sources that will be used in the thesis. The entries will be in alphabetical order, and the bibliographical form will be, needless to say, impeccable.
The annotations should be as concise and pointed as possible. Ideally they will be neither purely objective (a mere statement of what the source is about) nor purely subjective (a statement of what value the sources is likely to be for your thesis) but a combination of the two.
For example, if you were writing about the Concubine of Gibeah in Judges 19 (as I have done, you can read it on my web page if you want), an anthropological article on bina (matrilocal) marriage in the ancient near east might be annotated as follows:
Grossman suggests on the basis of both Biblical texts and archeological research that two forms of marriage coexisted uneasily in the ancient near east: "normal" patrilocal marriage, where wives joined the husband's family, and bina marriage, where husbands worked for their fathers-in-law. If true, then the word for "concubine" in some biblical texts, including mine, may actually mean "bina wife," which might help explain the bizarre behavior of the Levite and his father-in-law.
Obviously not every annotation would have to be as complicated as that one to make its relevance to your project clear. If you are writing on Fielding, you might annotate the Martin and Ruthe Battestin biography as follows:
Massive, up-to-date biography of Henry Fielding, entirely indispensable on Fielding's life and times.
BTW: You annotate ONLY what
you were able to look at, not what you couldn't find. So not all works are
going to be annotated at this stage.
First Draft of Prospectus
Assignment #8:
First Draft of Full Prospectus
Due November 15
This is your first attempt, but not your last, to pull the prospectus together, and it means revising and updating all three parts up to the point you have reached. Revising means that everything should hang together: if you have shifted your question a bit, that may change the focus of the bibliographical essay and may alter what texts will go into the working bibliography. Ideally, changes in what you are doing should be kept to a minimum after this stage: it should be improved, and extended if you were unable to look at important sources, but not radically altered unless you (or I) discover some flaw in your plan. A final draft will come in at the very end of term, that is, by May 24, although you can turn in your final draft any time it is ready and I encourage you to do that.
(In the meanwhile we will be engaging in a variety of
other scholarly activities.)
Oxford English
Dictionary Assignment
Assignment No. 9
Due November 22:
Select one of the underlined words from the following obscure literary text:
HAMLET: To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep -- [60]
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep --
To sleep, perchance to dream -- ay, there's the rub, [65]
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, [70]
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make [75]
With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will, [80]
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, [85]
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. -- Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia. Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.
1) Using your selected word, determine its history, its different historical forms, the development of its meanings. Can you explain the transition from one meaning to another? Start with the Oxford English Dictionary, but do not use that as your only source. Consult at least one other historical dictionary (for suggestions, see Harner). Explain how you feel that word should be read in Hamlet's soliloquy, given what you know of its history and context.
2) Using a concordance to the
works of either Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser or Milton, select at least one
further passage in which your word appears. Find the passage in the original
and exactly how you feel that word should be read. Feel free to look up the
word in several of these authors, or to comment on the use of the word in
several different instances.
Short Title Catalogue Assignment
Assignment No. 10
The Short-Title Catalogue
Due November 29:
The purpose of this assignment is to find materials available in archival microfilm at the Rosenthal Library. The process has a number of steps but should not take very long.
(1) Look up any one of the books from the STC on my suggestion list, OR any of the other books in the STC that you have interest in. Take note of the STC number.
(2) Look up the STC number in the Crossindex file located near the STC in the reference section of Rosenthal, and read across to the microfilm reel number.
(3) Down on the first floor of Rosenthal, in the Microform Area, find the appropriate reel (they are in drawers to the left of the librarian's desk), find the right document on your reel, and browse through it. When you're done, xerox the title page and any other page that you find of interest.
(For example, the Francis Meres Palladis Tamia volume contains several contemporary references to Shakespeare as a playwright.)
Then briefly write up any problems you had with the process.
If you are more interested in early American literature than English literature, you may want to adapt this assignment to use the Early American microform series against the back wall of the Microform Area.
In terms of the mechanics, you're on your own---I don't know exactly what we have and how you go about finding out what microfilm reel contains the book you're interested in.
Note that the people who work down there are often NOT professional librarians, just aides who may not know much about the collection.
Again, briefly write up your adventure.
Editing Assignment
Assignment #11
Due December 6th
Look, Mom, I Can Edit Shakespeare
Choose ONE of the following editorial cruces [the key word is in brackets] and write a brief (1-2 page) account of how you would handle the problem if you were editing the play. In each case, I give The Riverside Shakespeare text of the lines; your job is to investigate the variant readings of the line and evaluate their opposing claims.
Become an expert on your line. Start with the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, edited by Horace Howard Furness; then consult other editions such as the Arden Shakespeare, the Oxford Shakespeare, the facsimile edition of the First Folio. You may use and refer to other editors' notes on the line, but make your own decision.
Explain 1) the nature of the crux; 2) which reading you would select; and 3) the basis for your decision. Do not consider the line in isolation either from the rest of the play or from a theory of editing. What approach to editing have you taken? How does that approach motivate your choice for this line?
Crux #1: Henry V. II.iii.16-17.
". . . for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a [babbl'd] of green
fields . . ."
Crux #2: Hamlet. I.i.66.
. . . He smote the sledded [Polacks] on the ice.
Crux #3: Hamlet. I.iv.36-38
. . . the dram of [ev'l]
Doth all the noble substance of a doubt
To his own scandal.
Crux #4: King Lear. IV.iii.
[the entire scene is a crux]
Crux #5: Romeo and Juliet.
I.iv.58-62
...Over men's noses as they lie asleep.
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old Grub,
Time out of mind the fairies' coachmakers.
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs....
Facts, Pseudo-Facts, and Damned Lies Assignment
Assignment #12
"Just the Facts, Ma'am": Evaluating Source Materials
Due December 13:
Penultimate assignment! Facts are stubborn things, but sometimes they aren't clear, or obvious, or uncontested. You will often find that two different sources of "objective" scholarly information will come up with two different stories. Sometimes this is the result of pure inadvertent error -- a mistyped date, an understandable confusion about the order of two events. Other times it can be the result of different weights being given to two sources of information: Biographer A trusts Source X, while Biographer B trusts Source Y. Sometimes new sources of information are found that make the earlier factual narrative obsolete. And at times biographers suppress information they have about their subject for ideological reasons. (For examples, encyclopedias from before around 1960 seldom mentioned why Oscar Wilde was imprisoned.)
Your assignment is to FIND a factual disparity between two biographies of the same author and -- if possible --to explain and/or resolve it. The biographies can be as large as multivolume scholarly monographs, or as small as encyclopedia articles or the little biographical introductions you find in paperback editions of standard authors, and it may be more convenient for you to use the latter. You may think this is going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it's actually hard to find two brief biographies of an author that agree in all details. Taking down two editions of James Hogg's novel, The Private Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner from my office, just now, I find that the introduction to the first says he was born in November of 1770, the other that he was born in December of that year, the first says he published a book in 1807 called The Shepherd's Guide and the other says he published one called On the Diseases of Sheep.
Once you have found a genuine disparity (not just a piece of information that one has and the other one doesn't) do whatever you can to check out which (if either) source is correct. In my example, I might look to see if there were a recent biography of Hogg that could enlighten me about the actual date of his birth, or explain if the November/December discrepancy might have had to do with the calendar shift from Julian to Gregorian in Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century. Or I might consult the Library of Congress or British Library catalogues to discover what Hogg's book was actually called, whether it might have been a book on the diseases of sheep rather than a book entitled On the Diseases of Sheep.
Try to do an author you're already working on, or at least remotely interested in, but for those who need assistance finding a juicy topic, you can have fun trying to figure out how, when and where Edgar Allan Poe died, or how and why Christopher Marlowe was killed, or where and when Aphra Behn was born.
Write up your experience concisely (1-2 pages could do it, but you could go double that if you had an interesting time).
Final Draft of the Prospectus
Just the revised, improved version of the draft I have already seen.
Due: December 20th -- although I will accept it any time before then.
As far as AFTER then, I will check with the registrar about when the grades need to come in and then figure out how late these can come in without getting INC grades.