Bibliographical Essay: The Interpretive Community
For your bibliographical essay I ask you to survey all articles and books--not theses
or dissertations--printed between 1980 and 1999 on any of the major authors we will read
in English 597. (Minor authors, particular critical problems, or even genres are possible if
you can make a convincing case to do so; include research in languages other than English
if you can read those languages.) Feel free to use the serial bibliographies mentioned in the
general bibliography, but since none of them includes works from the last few years, you
will have to investigate the journals themselves for your primary data. Do not overlook
specialized indexes either, and you will especially want to consider some articles that call themselves
"reviews" or "review articles." The Web itself is critical: please find websites
and other electronic resources.
For your annotations, identify the major point(s) of the article--at the very
least--and the kind of critical discourse it represents. Is the primary function of the article
(1) to provide support for an established position, (2) to provide evidence against
established positions, (3) to provide both evidence and an argument for a new position? In
other words, what kind of contribution is this study trying to make? How does it
CHANGE (or propose to CHANGE) the state of the field? If the article is biographical or
bibliographical, you will have to establish another taxonomy.
Please use the MLA format, and organize your bibliography in any way that seems useful to you. (A chronological listing is perfectly plausible, but it is by no means the
only--or best--way to organize knowledge.)
Having identified and annotated these articles, take a deep breath, step back ten
feet, and write your essay. Describe what "XXX studies" are about in 2000. What are the
major critical disputes? the dominant assumptions? the rival orthodoxies? What major
questions animate the critics, scholars, and historians who are writing about XXX? Second,
what are the methodological strategies used in these studies? What kinds of criticism are
being practiced? To what extent are new critical assumptions, vocabulary, and tactics
affecting the criticism of XXX? What are the dominant modes--or the threatened modes--of critical discourse? In one sentence: what's the state of criticism on your topic?
What is the value of this for you? It will be useful for you to know the "audience"
for your research in this course, in your thesis or dissertation, and in later research. You
will know your professional audience best by seeing what kind of discourse it produces and
how it assesses, responds to, incorporates, or rejects the discourse by which it is itself
constituted. Second, you will become quite informed about topics or areas of research that
will likely lead to publishable work for you: after all, you will be doing original research in
this seminar, and the audience for your research will expect that you have been listening to
the professional conversation that you hope to enter. Third, by the time we have surveyed
the "interpretive community" for eighteenth-century studies, you will have a good sense of
the dynamics of research and publication in the 1990s. The bibliographic essays that you
produce will be distributed to all members of the class, and you will find them useful in
your own research and in preparation for comprehensives.
Since the first step will be to identify the topic and boundaries of your essay, we
need to know by the next class what your first choice is. (It is quite feasible, for instance,
for more than one person to work on such authors as Swift or Johnson.) By the next week,
I want from all of you a reasonably complete list of works that you plan to discuss. (I
would like this list of works in the MLA bibliographical format and in three
formats: a "hard copy," a soft copy in Word or WordPerfect file, and HTML.
For the HTML, you can put the file on your personal web page or email it to me.)
Trust me: invest heavily now (in knowledge and skills) and you'll get it all back by the end of the semester.