Recently, I was reading a chapter on a specific text by a very famous scholar in my field, and, because I am thinking of writing on the same text, I went to check on some of the endnotes to see if the sources might be worth reading. What I noticed when I flipped to the endnotes in that chapter is that (1) there were in fact amazingly few endnotes for a 40-page chapter, and (2) the scholar cited only a single critical work that was published after 1970 (and nothing published in the previous decade). My initial reaction was confusion--not over how someone of this scholar's caliber could get away with so little engagement with recent scholarship (I know perfectly well how a famous scholar can get away with this kind of thing), but over whether I should think that this scholar was derelict in his scholarly responsibilities, or whether I should think that this was completely awesome. The more I've reflected on it, the more I'm coming down on the side of "completely awesome."
As a junior scholar, I have routinely had the experience of sending work out for review and being told, whether the review was positive or not, that I need to engage with this scholar or that kind of criticism before the work could be published. The best of these reviews are specific ("the author should look into the work of X, Y, and Z") and the worst are dismissive and unhelpful ("this author has a light grasp of the large body of criticism on X," without providing any specifics on where to look to find this supposedly "large body of criticism" that I had in fact already looked for and been unable to find before submitting the work). But in all cases, the demand is the same: I am supposed to show wide-ranging engagement with the relevant bodies of criticism throughout my work. Speaking anecdotally, this has also been the experience of many of my junior colleagues. I understand the utility of the demand for wide citation. Certainly, as scholars, it's important to do due diligence in assuring that we're not simply making arguments that have already been made, wasting paper and other people's time by creating an echo-chamber: and the best way to assure this is to make sure that we're well-acquainted with what others have had to say on the subject about which we're writing.
But there's a difference between doing due diligence and showing it. Famous Scholar X can get away with not showing all the research that may have been done before writing because there's an assumption that she knows her stuff already and doesn't need to prove herself anymore. The rest of us, it seems to me, seem to operate under a cloud of suspicion, wherein if we don't show all the research we've done, there's an assumption that we simply didn't do it. This would make sense, I suppose, if the reviewers of our work weren't experts in the field about which we were writing--they'd need to see the research to be sure that we weren't just recycling old ideas. But that's not how journals and book publishers operate: the people reading our work are people who also work in the field--are also published in the field--which means that they've done the research for themselves. Which should also mean that they know, looking at an essay in their field, whether an author has also done his research, without needing a bibliography the length of my arm.
Beyond due diligence, the other (good) reason for citing is to show how our work speaks to the work of others--that is, to help foster dialogue, rather than each of us writing as if we're the only ones in the conversation. This is a very important aspect of scholarly work, which, as I've said before, tends to feel too insular. But if this is a good reason to cite, it's also a good reason not to cite too much. In one essay I sent off for review, I had spent a large part of the opening of the essay situating my ideas in relation to what other scholars had said; I did this largely because I was aware that other work I had sent out had received the criticism that it was not citing enough. But the reviewers came back saying that my attempts to engage with all of these scholars were dragging my argument astray--and the reviewers were right. I was engaging with handfuls of critics to show that I'd done my due diligence, and the result was something disorganized. What I needed to do with the essay was to compose my argument and engage with other works of criticism when they were relevant to what I had to say, rather than scrambling to construct my argument around what everyone else had to say. This effectively means, however, that I needed to cite less.
Ultimately, the demands of scholarly publishing create a double-bind. On the one hand, my reviewers (rightly) want to see a direct, clear, comprehensible argument; on the other, reviewers (perhaps, as I'm suggesting, not so rightly) want me to engage with a very broad array of other critics, a practice that can get in the way of writing direct, clear arguments. Sacrificing the quality of the essay as an argument to critical engagements that don't clearly advance the argument seems to me like a poor trade-off for our profession, particularly since, as I've been suggesting, there isn't clearly a good reason for this citational demand. There are, of course, bad reasons for it. Scholarly egos and the critical biases we all develop might account for some requests for wider critical engagement in work (I once witnessed someone on a search committee argue against a candidate on the grounds that the candidate's published writing sample didn't cite an article that this committee member was particularly fond of). Tenure requirements, which often require us to document the "impact" of our scholarship--which often means how frequently we've been cited--also potentially drive an unhealthy attachment to footnotes. But these kinds of considerations are not good for us as critics, and are not good for literary study on the whole, insofar as they make it harder to construct lucid, clear essays. Furthermore, it introduces a level of conformity--everyone writing on the same topic must bend their arguments so that they engage with the same set of authorities at all times--that can lead (some might argue has led) to stagnation in our fields. It seems to me that there's nothing to be gained by lists of endnotes that extend page counts by 15-20%.
The book chapter that precipitated this reflection is really, really good: it could perhaps have been trimmed down a bit, but on the whole it makes a powerful, persuasive argument full of insights and amazing readings of the text under discussion. It is not, I don't believe, an essay that would be improved by adding a bunch of citations, or by more direct engagement with other critics. This isn't to say that the chapter never engages with what others have said: it simply draws on earlier work when it is directly relevant to the argument at hand. Ultimately, I'm jealous of the freedom this scholar's fame has bought him--the freedom to write his argument as he sees best, without worrying about "proving" his scholarly chops in the bibliography. This freedom is not, I'd argue, something that should be relegated to the very famous (or the very connected), and we should perhaps recognize that, if great scholars can do great work without lengthy lists of notes, perhaps the rest of us can, too.
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