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Monday, March 24, 2014

Incommunication

Lorca studies are curiously fragmented. Because of the vast amount of material, most articles, books, etc... won't be cited in most other articles, books. There is no way the average article could have a bibliography of 20 pages to even cover the minimum necessary. So people are free to cite quite selectively or sometimes hardly at all. Take Cifuentes '86 book La norma y la diferencia. It isn't cited much in Soufas's 96 book Audience and Authority, or in Paul Julian's Smith '98 book The Theatre of García Lorca. There are a few citations among these three books, if memory serves me, but there is no real dialogue or exchange of ideas in three excellent books on a similar topic. If a Lorca book is really bad, and I am not kicking its ass just to prove a point, then I won't cite it at all.

But I do think excellent scholars should cite one another.

3 comments:

Vance Maverick said...

So, is the field functioning? When one reads, for instance, that papers on traffic studies break down into two essentially separate networks of citation -- professional planners and scientists from other fields who look in briefly on the problems, apply their favorite tools, and leave -- one can conclude that the purported dialogue isn't working. Here, I wonder if the market is just so flooded that people aren't hearing each other properly.

Jonathan said...

Good question. I'll have to figure that out.

Anonymous said...

I had or have a colleague (other, but related field, at my former, yet neighboring institution, so someone I still see at dinners when we have shared a speaker) who made a comment years ago that I found problematic, yet wondered whether it was true, namely: that this whole thing about citing the whole field and about how only that was scientific was bunk, because there was so much to cite that it was pointless, you might as well just cite what you like y acabemos.

Still do not know what to think about that but the said person has made Full and I have not.

*

On FGL, James Monroe pointed out that during graduate school for random bureaucratic reasons I had written most of a book on FGL and I might as well finish it and get it out. Now THAT was some good academic advice, really.

A book that made an impression on me in its time was http://www.uniliber.com/ficha.php?id=4120139 because it was itself poetic.

(It is in part, although not entirely, because I new EML (Elena D's dissertation director) that I cannot take my current granaíno colleague seriously as granaíno, in the way he wishes.)