When I introduce second-year students to the basics of writing academic papers and they submit their first paper proposal (title, 100-abstract, 3-item valid academic bibliography) I warn them to use only post-1995 bibliography (perhaps I should update that to 21st century bibliography?). As I explain, even though in the paper they can use older sources, they need to show that they are conversant with the most recent developments in their chosen topic. I feel that about thirty years is a generous time span in that sense, speaking of course as a humanist, not a scientist.
Although by this point students are familiar with bibliography as a concept, and have used the library resources, what is new to them is the idea of engaging as rookie authors of academic papers with the secondary sources. What they discover every year, and so do I, is that a classic may have generated hundreds, even thousands, of academic works but this does not mean that the specific topic they have chosen has been covered in the last twenty-five years or three decades. This happens all the time because literary research follows, as we know, fashions. Besides, from the 1990s onward it has been dominated by theory, which has almost managed to kill actual criticism based on close reading and textual evidence—what we teach students to produce at this stage.
I’m thinking of my second-year students because I have started research for a paper on Great Expectations, the novel on which they have written their papers in the last ten years or so, as long as I’ve teaching it. My topic is the lawyer Jaggers and his decision to rob his client Molly, a woman he frees from execution for murder, of his two-year old daughter and then place her in Miss Havisham’s home as her adoptive daughter. I’m interested in how this decision is not only the fulcrum on which the whole plot hinges but also an essential element to characterize Jaggers as a hard man with an unexpected vulnerable spot. Jaggers is not a major character but the scene of Chapter LI in which he acknowledges to Pip how he intervened to find a better home for the little girl who Miss Havisham re-named Estella is crucial. I have found, therefore, sufficient bibliography, though the question is that most of it is pre-1995. I seem to be contradicting my own instructions to students.
Note that I have written the ‘question’, not the ‘problem’ since I have managed to find enough relevant 21st century bibliography to complete a list of 25 items, an average amount in current articles for journals (my own record are 50 entries, but I grant that was a bit over the top). My works cited list has ten 21st-century sources but also four 1990s sources, four 1980s sources, four 1970s sources, one from the 1960s, and one from the 1920s (E.M. Forster’s classic Aspects from the Novel). In fact, I refer to another 1960s source, quoted in a later article. I could find all the sources online in databases, which is both convenient and lovely, except the 1960s source, Andrew Gordon’s “Jaggers and the Moral Scheme of Great Expectations” (The Dickensian, no. 65, 1969, pp. 3–11), though UAB’s library found it for me in a database we don’t subscribe. I was told initially that this service would cost me 18 euros, though I was happy to finally pay 4’84 euros. Yes, out of my own pocket.
Gordon’s article is the inspiration for this post because usually I would have discarded such an old secondary source. Jaggers, however, has not been the object of many academic works (I only found other three articles focused on him), which means that I could not ignore Gordon’s essay. Once I read it, however, I became aware of a singular problem: he cites older sources in which Jaggers is mentioned, but it’s been a long time since I last saw 1950s sources quoted, and I drew the line at Gordon himself. Incidentally, Gordon’s article quotes just from one collective volume and one article, apart from referencing a monograph, which shows how much things have changed regarding the use of secondary sources. My second-year students may use just three sources, but there is no way at all a postgrad or professional researcher can get an article published with even ten sources. Twenty to thirty are expected as a matter of fact.
It would have been lovely to follow the thread, read Gordon’s sources and their own sources until reaching the first instance of Jaggers’s appearance in a piece of academic literary criticism, but that would be archaeology of a kind nobody practices. This leads me to the question of academic obsolescence but also to the suspicion of whether we researchers might be rediscovering topics already dealt with in much older publications we know nothing about. I assumed from the beginning that Jaggers could have been the object of interest in the remote pre-1990s past because he is the kind of controversial secondary character that attracts attention. I was worried indeed that the ideas I want to develop have been already developed by others and done to death. This is partially the case, as I have found out, but at the time the flow of new research on plot and characterization gives me some leeway to approach Jaggers differently from the most recent author who has discussed him (Tritter in 1997). I will also throw some Masculinities Studies into the mix, for good measure, and see how much I can get out of Jaggers’s odd vulnerability before the pretty child Estella was. But, yes, on the whole I am treading old territory as it is almost inevitably the case when dealing with a classic.
At this point, I have no idea about how the peer reviewers will react to what might be read as an old-fashioned bibliography and an old-fashioned approach to Great Expectations. Just for us to understand each other, Dickensian scholar Neil Forsyth has gone from publishing an article containing an extremely detailed chronology of events in this novel (“Wonderful Chains: Dickens and Coincidence”. Modern Philology: Critical and Historical Studies in Literature, Medieval Through Contemporary, vol 83, no. 2, November 1985, pp. 151–165) to pure speculation on “Hands in Dickens: Neuroscience and Interpretation” (Dickens Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 3, September 2015, pp. 211–220). Forsyth’s approach is not as heavy-handedly scientific as the title hints but he ends up declaring that a basic knowledge of neuroscience “will not necessarily change our reaction to such passages as those I have been quoting, but it may well make us a little more conscious of the ways we read and react. The neurologists have added a further, physical layer of explanation for our responses to the hands of a skilful, deliberately sensuous writer like Dickens” (220). Perhaps, or not at all and what we still need is what Forsyth used to offer forty years ago: an explanation of how complex novels like Great Expectations work as narrative constructions.
Reading Gordon’s 1969 article, which is delightful, I find that while we have not really progressed (invoking neuroscience is not progressing), we have lost much in literary research. Many of my peers are telling me they wish they could be more creative, meaning they wish academic literary criticism could shed its robotic pseudo-scientific prose and became more human, more humanistic. I certainly don’t write here as I write in my proper academic publications (in fact I started this blog to write with more freedom about academic matters), and reading Gordon’s article I have been reminded that there used to be a time when it was possible to offer intelligent judgement of literary works without the cumbersome apparatus of multiple quotations, unintelligible jargon and endless works cited list we use now.
That time, however is gone and, what is worse, many of its treasures buried never to be disinterred again. Unless they are unburied out of sheer necessity, or stubbornness, which is always helpful and enriching. Gordon’s writing is certainly illuminated by other much newer sources I am using (Hillary P. Dannenberg’s Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction, University of Nebraska Press, 2008, is just great) but in Wendy Veronica Xin’s “Reading for the Plotter” (New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, vol. 49, no. 1, Winter 2018, pp. 93–118), Jaggers is not even mentioned in the key section on Great Expectations, which would have surprised Gordon since both are more or less saying the same: minor character in whose hands the writer leaves essential plot twists turn out to be the moral centre of novels. Or, perhaps, that’s what I’m saying based on their work.
I can imagine one of my second-year students, or even postgrad tutorees, protesting that I am cheating by quoting from a source as old as Gordon’s article. My defence, of course, is that I’m combining his work with that of Xin (my most recent source). The venerable journal to which I am the article on Jaggers might respect this combination, but I am not 100% sure that it will. I think that MLA’s newer referencing system by which parenthetical references carry no date—(Martín 118) rather than (Martín 2019: 118), for example—helps not to discriminate between old and new secondary sources. Even so, I wonder whether we are committing a certain sin of ageism by considering obsolete the literary criticism published before 1990 (again: blame literary theory for that) by scholars who, poor things, were not aware of postmodern literary criticism.
I’ll let you know how things progress and whether my peer reviewers welcome, ignore or condemn the presence of Gordon’s article in my works cited list. In the meantime, let me encourage you to dig for secondary sources back beyond 1990s. It’s really rewarding.