I had a student once, nearly a decade ago, who asked me why I had made it a requirement to cite at least five sources in his final Film Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the Speculative paper. Why, he wanted to know, was it so important to write about what other people thought? Wasn’t the point of writing a paper to share your own original conclusions?
The question kind of took me aback at the time, but I actually think it’s a good one to consider more carefully, even if just to dislodge our assumptions about what it means to do work in the contemporary humanities. And while I’m no longer employed in academia, I see much of the writing I do outside of it as public humanities work—including this newsletter.
I remember telling this student at the time that the reason we cite other people’s work in our own writing is to highlight the fact that film studies (and every other academic field) is always a shifting conversation, one that builds on prior collective knowledge. I asked him to imagine walking into a 400 level philosophy seminar and demanding that those present engage with him in a debate on whether the sky is really blue. Philosophy, I said at the time, is a discipline with certain conventions and epistemologies, or ways of knowing. To walk in without knowing any of the rules would be to disrespect the field, and furthermore, to fail to contribute to its flourishing.
My student still looked kind of confused and said that was fine, but he really didn’t want to engage with other people’s opinions when he had his own to put forward. He seemed to think that the whole thing was kind of a nuisance. Honestly, at this point, I don’t really fault him. Even at the university level, we mostly don’t teach students the reason behind writing papers. Is it any wonder they see citations as just another requirement to get off their plate?
Today, though, I’m thinking about this question again as I’ve spent the past month reading and rereading Joan Copjec’s eviscerating yet simultaneously quite generous rebuke of film studies as a field circa the early 1990s, in an essay called “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan.” I’ll write more about this essay next time, but today, I think I’d actually have a slightly different answer for my student.
The first thing I’d try to explain is that academic fields aren’t, like, real. By which I mean, they’re not organic formations that spring up from the ground, nor are they handed down fully-formed from a divine presence. A field is a living, breathing, unreality—something shaped entirely by community and scholarship and conversations. It’s important to recognize this unreality because knowing that fields are entirely constructions shifts our understanding of what fields are for and what they do. Which brings me to my second point: no one ever writes or thinks or speaks in isolation.
People generally believe that writers work alone. Many writers probably would say the same. But even if you’re on retreat in a cabin on a lake in rural Maine with no one else around for miles, you’re building on shared ideas that writers have about craft, ideas that you learn from reading what’s already out there. Scholarship is much the same. While most humanities work is still technically done alone—written by a single person rather than co-authored, as is the norm in the STEM fields—academics in fields like film studies need to take care to participate in the conversation as it’s unfolding. That’s why we have to be well-read in our field’s most recent scholarship, so we can actually come in with something original and, ideally, even a little bit groundbreaking, to say.
There’s a name, in the humanities, for this particular gesture of carving out something original to say within the context of a body of literature—it’s called your intervention. Any grad student can tell you that the fastest way to articulating your intervention is to find what’s commonly referred to as “the gap in the literature.” Search for something that other scholars have overlooked; this is what a friend of mine calls the “why is nobody talking about this??” method of framing your analysis. While this is generally great advice, I would add one quick (though sometimes quite challenging) note—in traditional academic scholarship it’s actually not enough to find the gap in the literature. You also have to figure out, and articulate, why it’s important to talk about. This is also sometimes referred to as the “stakes” of the work.
I call this the “so what??” question. So you’ve noticed that no one’s talking about, say, homoeroticism in Sweet Smell of Success (1957). That’s cool, but why does it matter to talk about that? In other words, what might a queer reading of Mackendrick’s film allow/open up/make possible for us as viewers?
Literally, so what?
As a question, it can be aggravating, mind-blowing, and everything in between. I find it an essential anchor for my own writing—I know that I’m not done until I’ve found an answer, and even then, that’s usually just the beginning.
I’d tell my student some version of all this. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked, either, but what if it had opened a space for a little more curiosity?
What if it still can?