Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
I checked out this book a few months ago and am finally being forced to read it (someone has a hold on it). I never took a real literature course in college, and 10 pages in, I’m already in over my head.
But my mind is also blowed, by a statement that Wood makes in a note on the text that he is going to skip fully citing his sources.
…in [footnotes], I give the date of first publication but not the location or publisher (these facts being nowadays much more easily attainable than they used to be).
Yes. Libraries have solved this problem. A title and author is usually enough to hold someone accountable for a citation. In the case of articles, journal titles, issues, and years of publications are helpful too.
So why do we support academic (or scholastic) demands that citations follow strict styles that include this information?
Perhaps, when futuristic archaeologists visit the earth to study its lost civilizations, if all they find are someone’s senior thesis, these citations may correctly lead to the conclusion that New York was a center for publishing.
For sure, in the absence of the actual data, collections of metadata can help fill a desperate gap. I once heard a talk (by Signe Jantson) on the history of the book trade in Estonia that made all sorts of good use of bibliographic data.
But Wood is right - in general discussions of the structure of literature, there is little to gain by discussing where it was published and by whom. I bet the same is true of a great many college papers, and it is certainly so for 6th-graders’ 5-paragraph essays.
It is a pointless exercise, except when done by librarians hell bent on collecting and preserving as much as our collective cultural output as possible. And when it is impossible, I have to believe that collecting metadata about that output is noble work. People thank us for it. But it is our job, not students’.
About the only place that really heavy citations make sense to me is with internet sources, where the work’s author, title, date of publication and date of access are not apparent from the main access point, the URL. By including additional metadata, you often add information to the original work.
And by all means, let us share this opportunity for nobility. There is plenty to go around. Stop citing books, and start citing the internet, because we’ve got a pretty big gap in our knowledge about who is creating it, and where, and when.
but doesn’t knowing who published something give you one more useful bit of evaluative criteria? if the author you are reading is using another author’s work to support his argument, doesn’t it help us to know if that author’s work was published by Oregon State University Press or Random House or Regnery Press or Soft Skull or whatever. i take your point that we can generally go and look that up for ourselves if we have the date, author, and title but why make me read with my computer next to me so i can look up all the sources as i go?
i agree that the publisher location is probably rarely a useful bit of info in these days, though i can still see an argument for it for some smaller publishers.
Maybe it matters - why do we cite things?
My only assumption in the post above is that you use the citation to find the source, but challenged, I see it is more than that (and please add):
It is to show that our discussions are based on established (ie published) ideas.
It is so that we give credit to the creators of what we borrowed.
It is to say, ‘I have evaluated this work, and it is good’.
I am thinking that all of these are reasons to cite, at any level, but it is only at the farthest reaches of academic discourse that we should have to talk about who published something and where.
How am I supposed to judge the credibility of Oregon State University Press? If I’m not conversant in one of the fields they publish in, the only way to judge them, based on a citation, is on the reputation of the university, which is not the same thing as the reputation of the press. In this case, the agricultural and natural science work being done at OSU does not seem to be a focus of the press.
Getting published by Random House tells me only that you have some connection to the New York publishing world, and that you have probably been published somewhere else before. The other two I had to look up.
I actually learned a bunch from browsing OSU Press’s catalog, but I can’t imagine that evaluating a citation is any substitute for evaluating a source.
I’m mostly concerned that we encourage citation behavior for reasons that no longer make sense.
agreed, on all fronts really. I hope i never implied that evaluating a citation was a substitute for evaluating a source, it’s just a little tidbit of info. And, indeed, it’s only a tidbit of info if you know a little something about the publishing industry — who the different publishers are and how people go about getting published by them, etc. I had some bracing and, really, surprising conversations with my students at WSU about citing works. Several of them were really agitated about being forced to conform to a citation format. i really went into the conversation thinking they were probably just peeved because formal citations made their lives more difficult. But in talking with them they made a lot of compelling arguments about the outdatedness of the citation formats they had to use. I then brought in a bunch of published papers that had incorrect and incomplete citations in them and talked about the treasure hunt we had to go through in the library in order to track down the source and there was some general consensus that standard formats make people’s lives easier and that having lots of info in the citation helps you out when one bit of info in the citation is wrong. Oh, also, I just helped a student this week who needed a book that had had two (very different) editions published in the same year. I was pretty happy to have the publisher listed in her citation, let me tell you!
i’m confused that i find myself arguing for more detailed citations as i myself tend to be a sloppy and lazy citer.
Ok, that makes sense. I hope you get to keep having those conversations with students.
Also, comments were requiring a login. I dunno why it was that way, but I turned it back.