Rough draft

It strikes me that Tuesday's post is actually just an expansion of a series of tweets and retweets. This blog is called Works Cited, so in the interests of citation, here is, as it were, the rough draft:



Semirelatedly, apparently Google has just renamed its search group the "knowledge" group.

This is completely hilarious.

A little linkspam for today, courtesy of Twitter.

1. Here's a hilarious video by Ron Charles on "Booklette," a new online tool that, takes "the flesh-crawling weirdness of Chat Roulette and combine[s] it with the total uselessness of crowdsourced reviewing."

2. Jen Howard's much-tweeted Chronicle article (paywall) on link rot and other perils of postmodern citation.

Links don't last. The "Disappearing Act" authors found that "49.3 percent of the original 2,011 cited resources could not be located at the cited URL," according to the paper's abstract. "The older the article, the more likely that URL's in the reference list of that article were inactive."

As part of her study, Ms. Wagner did a literature review of about 95 other link-rot studies across all disciplines, including a few in the humanities. (If you know of humanities-related work on link rot, please let me hear about it.) The universal conclusion: Too often "the stuff was just not there anymore," she told me. "It is a problem that affects all fields."

3. Kevin Dettmar's lovely post on "the tender-hearted professor":

College professors take a lot of heat from the general public, and we deserve much of what we get; and humanities professors get the worst of it. And arguably, English professors the worst of that: we represent, apparently, the absolute nadir of contemporary culture.

I said that to some degree we deserve it; what I did not say, you’ll notice, is that it’s true. Untrue, but we deserve it? Well, yes: I think that college professors as a group, and English professors as a high-visibility (and high-risibility) subset, have done a terrible job of explaining just what it is that we do, and actively countering the most pernicious caricatures of our work that circulate in the larger culture.

One of the received ideas about profs, of course, is that we’re incurably self-absorbed. It’s hardly convincing for me to argue that I’m not self-absorbed, of course; here I am, sitting at my laptop, writing on my blog, and if I were a world-class narcissist, presumably I’d be the last to know. But I can tell you about my colleagues (by which I mean not just those with whom I work at Pomona, but my professional colleagues nationally and internationally); they sometimes disappoint, but far more often, I’m stunned by their generosity.

On citing fortune cookies

Here's an update on the fortune cookie question, since apparently in addition to devoting myself to the three pillars of research, teaching, and service, I'm also to be the Dear Abby of MLA citation practices. Or maybe the April Winchell of MLA citation practices.

Arrick Underhill writes in to ask:

so, if I want to quote a fortune cookie and put it in my Works Cited, only later discovering that according to Google the quote originated with George Bernard Shaw rather than Ancient Chinese Wisdom, is it acceptable for me to continue with my plan to cite the fortune cookie? Or am I duty-bound by the standards of academic conduct to remedy the plagiarism of others, which seems to be the result of a time warp in which George Bernard Shaw actually made contact with Ancient Chinese Civilization and passed down his quote, in English, which reached me here in the 21st century. Or it might have been the 20th. I can't remember.

Thoughts?

To be honest, the only reason I can imagine for citing a fortune cookie in the first place is to perform some kind of pomo hipster DFW-wannabe crap. In that case, the point is not actually to cite anything, but to parody the practice of citation by way of a crispy take-out treat. In that case, one should take to heart the MLA Handbook's directive to use your wits and adapt the style as necessary to the situation, e.g.:

"Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English Language: I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba." Fortune cookie. Berkeley, CA: Shen Hua, n.d. Eaten 6 October 2010.

Indent appropriately and alphabetize under Y, secure in the knowledge that Susanna Clarke entirely pwned you as early as 2004.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's get serious. It's scholarship time, friends. Citation is about directing readers to your sources, and the truth is that readers are unlikely to reproduce your fortune cookie experience. Forget the cookie and cite Shaw. There should be a parenthetical citation within the main text looking like this:

(Shaw 11)

and a works cited entry looking like this:

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. Print.

Does it sound like I'm squishing fun? Far from it. Scholarship affords something far more fun than the pale pleasures of parody: endnotes. (MLA style calls for endnotes, not footnotes!) This situation is ripe for a lengthy digression on how you arrived at the quotation, the appropriateness of a fake Chinese saying appearing in a fake Chinese dessert, and the Western desire to produce identity through a projection onto a mythic Orient. Ideally the endnote will cite Said and Auerbach, and finish with a lengthy discussion of monstrosity, and The Wonders of the East, and the checkered history of Cotton Vitellius A.xv.

Technically speaking, MLA style frowns on lengthy notes. But scholars love them for the freedom and joy in research that they express. This is what you get when you try to cite a fortune cookie.

[RF's Twitter response.]

You might be thinking, "Hey, Natalia, are you still getting google hits for that Duns Scotus citation thing?"

The answer to that would be yes.

I hope that anonymous grad student has a book contract, is all I'm saying.

This blog gets a lot of google hits from people looking for a Works Cited entry for this or that. Generally, these people fundamentally don't get the concept of a Works Cited list (if that's you: here you go).

But today I got the best search string ever: "fortune cookie works cited."

O grad student (and I have no doubt that you are a grad student), good luck with that. I'm pretty sure the MLA hasn't nailed that one down yet.

On citing works

This post is for the poor lost souls who keep winding up here after googling "works cited for [title]."

I am guessing that you're about fourteen and have only just learned about this whole "citation" thing. So here's the drill.

A works cited list gives people the information necessary to track down a source that you used: author, title, volume, publisher, date, etc.

There are several different citation styles. But if you're looking for "works cited," then chances are you're using MLA (Modern Language Association) format, one of two standard formats in the humanities (the other is Chicago).

In general, you won't have much success googling for the citation of a particular source. But that's okay, because there are standard templates for citing various kinds of sources, and you can easily figure out how to use them.

You'll find a nice summary of MLA style guidelines at Purdue University's inestimable Online Writing Lab (OWL).

Here's an MLA citation for a single-author book:

Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

[Altieri, Charles] is the author. The last name comes first in a works cited list, because you will want to alphabetize your entries. In a footnote (in Chicago style, for instance) you would not invert the name, because there would be no need to alphabetize.


[Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry] is the title.


[Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989] is the publication information: city, name of publisher (the UP stands for University Press; it's a standard abbreviation), year of publication.

Each of these categories is treated like a little sentence and ends with a period.

* * *

The MLA Handbook recently came out in its seventh edition, with a few notable style changes (notable, that is, if you were already using MLA 6). APA usually calls its list of works a "Reference List," while Chicago style has an optional bibliography in addition to footnotes or endnotes.

Here are a few more useful links:

APA (The OWL at Purdue University)

Chicago (there may be a paywall)

And for the benefit of all you "Stephen Crane study guide" googlers out there, here's the OWL's page on avoiding plagiarism. Remember that avoiding plagiarism is your responsibility.

Over and out.

Works cited

I've finally come up with a title for this blog.

Citation, appropriation, and pastiche are the postmodern techniques par excellence, and yet for some reason this seems to go hand in hand with a willful resistance to documentation of any kind. Yesterday I read a review of a book that I respect; the reviewer excoriated the author for being "an appalling writer." The crime? Referring too frequently to her scholarly predecessors and interlocutors! Evidently that's just too boring to be allowed. Heaven forbid that a reader be made to take notice of a heterogeneous intellectual tradition. I've even heard someone complain about an editor noting textual variants in the endnotes. What?

I love citations. They help me do my work, follow up on interests, figure out the terrain. I hate it when books have endnotes but not a comprehensive bibliography. I despise an edition that has no note on the editorial principles. The more apparatus the better.

So here's to works cited in the age of appropriation.

A brief addendum, in case anyone was wondering whether mocking a grad student's diss in the NYT could really be problematic.

In the last two days this (not especially popular) blog has received hits from the following search strings:

medieval theologian Duns Scotu [sic] citations

duns scotus use of citation

Duns Scotus citations thesis

duns scotus colombia [sic] footnotes

duns scotus citations (five times)

how duns scotus used citations

how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations

dissertation medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations

duns scotus citations dissertation (twice)

duns scotus citations taylor "new york times"

duns scotus citation citations

duns scotus citations thesis

duns scotus used citations

duns scotus citation columbia

dissertation duns scotus citations

columbia dissertation Duns Scotus citation ph.d.

So now I'm really curious. How did Duns Scotus use citations? I seriously kind of want to read this dissertation. I hope somebody publishes a monograph on this topic in the near future. Listen up, Oxford UP: there is public interest.

Incidentally, I am currently writing something on how Marianne Moore cites Duns Scotus. No lie.