ENGL2035: Modernism
A guide to
critical reading

What counts? Scholarly resources of the type you should be consulting for your research essay include books and articles with bearing on the topic, other than material included with the set texts (critical introductions, for example).

Articles should be from refereed journals: that is, journals in which the decision to publish any particular article is made by an editorial panel of scholars in the relevant field. In order to make the decision to publish a book, publishers will call in scholars in the field to give their opinion on the merits of the manuscript, and may ask the author to make certain revisions; this is the way in which scholarly books are refereed.

How do you tell if a journal is refereed? If it's a print journal, it will generally say so on the title page or its obverse, and carry a list of members of the editorial board. Most refereed electronic journals (and electronic versions of print journals) will have this information somewhere on the home page of that journal. You can generally assume that the scholarly journals to which the library subscribes (that is, which are listed as holdings in the catalogue) are refereed.

Why bother with refereeing? Because it gives you the minimal guarantee that a number of people with some claim to knowledge in the area have previously read that text and thought it factually correct, interesting, and worth publishing.

What doesn't count? You'll note that this immediately cuts out a lot of material you'll find on the Web.

• The critical material included in your edition of the set text. That is, the criterion isn't met by the critical Introduction to your edition of a novel, or the essays that come with it as a dossier, or the commentaries and introductions to the Norton Anthology. Not that there's anything wrong with it: it's often excellent, valuable, and completely scholarly, and you are welcome to cite it in your essay, but it does not count towards that criterion for further critical reading. The aim of the exercise is to get you to go further afield.
  
• Articles from non-refereed journals. Time magazine might have a very good and interesting story on a writer, but it's not a refereed scholarly journal. (That's not a value judgement, it's just a generic distinction.)
  
• Cribs. Cribs are elementary explanatory notes summarizing plot, character, themes, and the like. They include SparkNotes, GradeSaver, Penguin-Putnam Notes and Chadwyck's Knowledge Notes, among others. These can be useful for basics (if you want to check on what happens when, for example), but you should keep in mind that their brief is simply that: to be basic. They're aimed at the younger college and high-school market rather than at universities, and within that group their main target is those who are having difficulties simply finding their way in to the text. As a result, cribs rarely deal with the texts on the level of sophistication we expect of you in an advanced university course. Very often, they simply smooth out and eradicate the very complexities we want you to look at. To use them as if they were scholarly critical material is to suggest either that you need them (and thus that your level of comprehension of the text is far from firm), or that you simply can't tell the difference between scholarly work and beginners' guides (and thus that your level of comprehension of critical material is far from firm). Cribs can not only be oversimplifications, they can sometimes be quite imperceptive, or even simply and demonstrably wrong--every lecturer and tutor has stories of howlers they've found in cribs.
  
• Annotations. The annotations an editor offers in an edition of a text are generally completely scholarly and may be quite invaluable in understanding the text, but they are not in themselves enough to satisfy that criterion of further critical reading. Their aim is to be an explanation of a difficult or non-obvious part of the text (such as an allusion or a bit of contextual information), not an argument about the text. Use them as a vital part of your research, but be aware that they do not in themselves meet the criterion for further critical reading.
  
• Online lecture notes. Lecture notes written by academics for their classes are not refereed, but self-published. They may indeed be very scholarly, but without that refereeing process, do you have any guarantees of that?
  
• Student essays. Not refereed, obviously. And of enormously variable quality.
• Resource portals such as What You Need to Know About will often have literature sections which offer online resources for students and teachers. Material on these portals is generally not refereed (and keep in mind, that means review by peer panel, not just selection by an editor), and often quite indiscriminate: things that are simply wrong get by because there's no one there to check.
• Buyer reviews on Amazon.com and other bookshop sites, and exchanges from email or news groups, are generally neither scholarly nor refereed. That may seem obvious. I mention them only because I've actually been offered them as critical reading. Honest.

None of this is to imply that sources which aren't scholarly or refereed ones are of no use. On the contrary, they can be invaluable. As you've no doubt noticed, I've included many non-refereed, non-scholarly resources in the resource site for this course. Photos of writers and their surroundings, information about contexts, audio files, and so on, can be invaluable in getting a feel for the writing and what it's doing. But unrefereed texts will not in themselves satisfy the criterion for further critical reading. That can be met only by scholarly, refereed material.

Don't just cite, use. Don't just cite something and drop it: develop it.

Here's an example of a weak use of citation, from an essay on Heartbreak House:

The characters of the play are not only from the same class as the audience, they also seem to have seen all the current plays the audience might have seen. When Ellie tells Hesione about the romantic Marcus Darnley and his claim to have been found in an antique chest, the joke is that, unlike Hesione and the audience, Ellie doesn't seem to have seen The Importance of Being Earnest. As Burnett says, "Hector Hushabye's Marcus Darnley story is drawn straight from Oscar Wilde" (34).

But a love of art and playacting can hardly save England. …

Good point, weak citation. It's weak because the citation does nothing more than repeat what's already been said, this time with the proper name of a critic attached. The only thing new it tells us is that Burnett said it. So what? Nothing follows from the citation. Cut it from the essay, and you'd never know it had been there. What it says is simply dropped immediately, and the essay moves on to something else altogether. It's as if the purpose of the citation is simply to say, "See, I've done my duty, I've read some criticism." In doing no more than that, though, it suggests pretty clearly that the essay is not at all sure what to do with its critical materials, or how to use them to develop its own analyses and argument. This is why an essay which uses its criticism only in this way throughout cannot get more than a grade of 4 for the critical reading criterion.

Use criticism critically. Don't treat critics simply as authorities who are telling you the final truth about a text, but as readers who are making an argument about it, and in the process sometimes debating other arguments which have been made about it. Good criticism will be an argument made out of a detailed familiarity with the text, but that alone does not mean it is right. Place yourself in the debate. Don't feel you have to agree with any particular critic, but do observe all the usual scholarly courtesies: make sure the argument you're disagreeing with is actually the one the critic's making and not a straw figure; and make sure you bear out carefully whatever you say in your turn.

Criticism changes. Just as literature itself changes with time, so does criticism. This is not to say that older criticism is necessarily dated and of little use, but just that criticism does not always concern itself with the same issues. For example, postcolonial criticism first makes itself felt quite widely in the 1980s. Because of its influence, Conrad criticism after that point much more frequently discusses the implications of colonialism in his novels; even aspects which many earlier critics didn't connect with colonialism get re-examined in its light. After this point, critics are less likely to talk of Marlow's characterization of Jim as "one of us" as implying that he was after all only human, and more likely to see it as meaning that he was "one of us Europeans."

It can be quite illuminating to track these changes for particular texts. There are a number of critical series which specifically help you do that, by reprinting some of the earlier criticism on specific texts. The Critical Heritage series is perhaps the best-known of these, with volumes devoted to all of the writers on this course. Another is Gale's Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism series, available online through the Gale Literature Resource Center.

Don't assume that just because a critical text is available online, it's thoroughly up-to-date. Gale's Literature Resource Center, for example, has online versions of the entire Twayne's US Authors series, of which the Library has many in the original hard copy. These are introductory texts from the 1960s and 1970s, long since out of print. We can suspect they are being made available not because they are timeless criticism, but simply because they were a cheap job-lot.

Don't cite a critic to make a perfectly obvious point. For example:

According to Roberts, "all the action of The Age of Innocence is seen as if through the eyes of one character" (Roberts 57). This character is Newland Archer.

or

Deckard characterises the narrative of Lord Jim as "complex and far from chronological" (Deckard 218).

Well, duhhh. Did you really need a critic's help to know that, or think that those points were really the important aspects of the critics' arguments? This sort of use signals clearly one of two things:

(a) even though the point you're making is obvious, you had to go to some other source to find it out. This suggests you have at best a very limited grasp of the principal text, and that your essay is likely to be at best a 4;

or

(b) you're just citing this passage to show that you've read something critical, rather than to find critical material you can work with and build on. This suggests that your ability to use critical material is very limited, and again, that your essay is likely to be at best a 4.

The standard form of referencing online scholarly material is:

This combines the details of the print version with the URL of the site at which you found it. Both components are needed. So too are the page numbers.

If you are using an online version of an article, wherever possible you should always choose a version which includes page numbers. Without them, you cannot produce accurate documentation. PDF files will retain the exact pagination of the original, but HTML files will not, unless they have page indications inserted [end of page 36] in the text, like this one. Some delivery systems such as InfoTrac tend on the whole not to have pagination, and should therefore be used only if the document is not available on some other system such as Literature Online, Academic Research Library, or Project Muse.

Why? Online scholarly publishing takes print as its model. Most of the scholarly journals you'll find online are digital versions of the print version. They make use of the web as a delivery system, but what they deliver through the web is essentially the print product. In many cases, the file you download is a PDF, which retains the formatting and pagination of the print version. In effect, they aren't so much web journals as print-it-yourself versions of print journals. Lots of the most venerable print journals are doing things this way, delivering what's essentially print to you online, and not bothering with the bells and whistles of multimedia simply because in most cases they just don't have need of it. Even those scholarly journals which are purely digital, without any print counterpart (such as Postmodern Culture) model themselves on the structure of print journals: they have volume and issue numbers, with one volume every year and a fixed number of issues to each of those volumes.

This means that articles from online scholarly journals should be documented primarily as if they were print. The primary locator is the information about the journal's name, volume, number and pages. That lets you find the journal both in print and online. URLs are secondary locators, and are considerably less useful. The URL for the Miller article doesn't work seamlessly if you try to use it on a computer outside the UQ firewall. If you do that, you'll be asked to log on as a registered user, so you'll have to know institutional passwords to make the URL work--and it won't work at all if you're not a member of a subscribing institution. Some URLs are generated by a database for the current session only, and can't be used again if bookmarked. Referring to the print source is simply much more flexible, and thus much more useful.