Secondary Sources:
-Bagnoli, Carla. “The Authority of Reflection.” Theoria: Revista De Teoria, Historia Y Fundamentos De La Ciencia, vol. 22:1, no. 58, 01 Jan. 2007, pp. 43-52. PDF File, Accessed: 24 Sept. 2017.
-Bayard, Pierre. How to Talk about Books you Haven’t Read. New York, Bloomsbury USA, 2009. Print.
-Hansen, Hans V. “Whately on Arguments Involving Authority.” Informal Logic, vol. 26, no. 3, 01 Sept. 2006, pp. 319-340. PDF File, Accessed: 24 Sept. 2017.
-Hilgartner, Stephen. “The Sokal Affair in Context.” Science, Technology, and Human Values, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 506-522. PDF File, Accessed: 24 Sept. 2017.
-Fish, Stanley. “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One”
-Nelson, Cary. “Reading Criticism.”
-Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Truth. Web, Accessed 10-22-17
-Walton, Douglas. “The Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority.”
Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, vol. 74, no. 289, 01 July 1999, pp. 454-457. PDF File, Accessed: 24 Sept. 2017.
-Wimsatt/Beardsly. “The Intentional Fallacy”
Journal:
Likely the Review of English Studies — for both primary and secondary sources.
Narrative (Ohio State)
Key Terms:
Citations, Argument from Authority, Intentional Fallacy
Primary Sources:
-Bayard, Pierre. How to Talk about Books you Haven’t Read. Les Editions de Minuit. New York, Bloomsbury USA, 2009. Print. (Using it as both)
-Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Print.
-Borges, Jorge Luis. “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain.” Print.\
-Gladwell, Malcolm. “Blink”
-King, Lovalerie. “Property and American Identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”
-O’Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman. Flamingo Press. London. Print.
-Sokal, Alan. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Social Text, vol. 46/47, pp. 217-252. Web. Accessed: 10-22-17.
-Wallace, David. Infinite Jest. Back Bay Books, New York, NY. 2016. Print.
Overview:
In the past week, I’ve taken more and more to the idea of writing about the validity of citations in critical writing. To summarize, I think I want to write about how literary critics will cite something in lieu of making an argument, which is known as an argument from authority. This sort of argument is flawed in two huge ways. First off, it presupposes that the writer has understood exactly what the person he or she is citing wrote. This is hazy territory, but it’s possible that this in itself is a violation of the intentional fallacy, depending on your viewpoint. So, I’m going to have to ask whether the author’s intention can ever be understood, then move on from there. The argument from authority is also problematic because there really isn’t any authority in literary studies. To make this claim, I’m going to have to come up with a working definition of truth to rely on which stipulates that there isn’t an actual authority on literary or philosophical matters. This is going to require me to cite something as part of my argument and therefore violate one of the premises on which it is based, so that should be interesting. I’ll also talk about people will oftentimes lazily cite things just as a way of passing the actual work of argumentation onto someone else, often without having really read and/or fully understood that person’s writing. That should sort of segue into the way that literary writing is done and the sense in the current form of practice, which I’m pretty eager to start just throwing garbage and screaming at (it’s so unnecessarily tedious and has all these fake authority complexes built into it to give it the illusion of thoroughness and technicality).
In preparation for compiling this list, I talked to Professor Maher and Steirer. I asked Professor Maher about where I could look for a definition of truth and papers on philosophy, and he directed me to great sources on that front. I then asked Professor Steirer about specific instances of lazy citations in literary writing and fictional accounts of same, and he came through with a ton of fantastic stuff, most of which I didn’t have occasion to put here, but will definitely read and (I’m sure) put in the paper.
Update:
I chose Narrative as my journal rather than the one I had previously because I first made my choice pretty arbitrarily and Narrative actually includes a lot of discussion about the ways in which stories are told, which could be useful to me.
I’m starting to think more about the relation between novels and criticism and the difficulty in understanding criticism at all. I think I’ll use the possible argument from authority inherent in citations to highlight a broader problem with the overall intelligibility of any writing. Essentially, my original point was that some authors rely on sources to make, rather than support, their arguments, which is an appeal to authority. However, I’m now more interested in the fact that the author always assumes that the reader isn’t familiar with the sources they’re citing and so the act of citing is essentially just a reference to that author’s reading of the text, which they slot in as support for their argument. It’s possible that the author could either be misappropriating the source’s argument (whether intentionally or not) or just fabricating an argument and bolstering it with a tangentially related source. Since the reader is obliged to believe the author’s reading of their sources since it’s unreasonable to expect the reader to have either read all those sources beforehand or to go read them afterwards, they’re relying on the author’s professed interpretation of their sources. However, for mere evidence the source exists as this infallible authority which authors are almost encouraged to exploit by the difficulty of doing the work required to use them properly and the improbability that someone will refute what is ultimately a reading (both a reading of the author’s use of the source and the author’s reading of that source).
So, I’ve added some sources to contrast the way in which novels and criticism are read and some other secondary sources needed to establish the position my essay will assume on truth, readership, the intentional fallacy, and knowability.
In my primary sources, …Books You Haven’t Read makes an argument about unintelligibility that I’m both going to use and push back against (I plan to argue that criticism is ultimately comprehensible despite the problems my analysis of citations points out) which also slots in nicely with “The Library of Babel.” My other primary sources complicate the ways in which citations are used, either by using them inappropriately (in the cases of Gladwell, Wallace, and Sokal) or by using them subversively (as Borges and O’Brien do). I’ll also discuss the ways in which Bayard and King (she talks about both primary and secondary sources and I figured that since I already did a pretty in-depth reading of the article, “why not use her?”) read novels and criticism to compare and contrast the two styles of reading with respect to my essay’s previous assertions about the limits of understanding written text.
