Anecdote recounted in lieu of getting real writing done
It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m sitting at my office desk working on this article I’ve been writing.* (I can’t seem to make myself work on it at home, and if I need to track down a citation at the last minute, the stacks are a five-second walk away — one of the many advantages to working in a big library.) In the middle of composing one of those inevitable long first footnotes**, I did a quick search of the MLA International Bibliography to make sure that nobody else has published anything major on my topic since I did my dissertation research. When the list of search results popped up, my dissertation was the first. My first thought was "I don’t remember that title, who wrote — wait a minute!"
I am suddenly reminded of the anecdote in Freud’s essay "The Uncanny" where he mistakes his own reflection for another passenger in a train compartment. Hmm, I wonder if there’s a way to work "The Uncanny" into my current project…
Right. Must finish this article in a timely manner. Going to post this and then shut the browser window and quit procrastinating.
* I’m trying to do the independent-scholar thing and write the occasional essay in my spare time. I may blog more about it once the draft I’m wrestling with is done.
** If you’ve ever read or written an academic article, you know the type of footnote I’m talking about: "For a general introduction to Topic X, see [long list of authors]. For an opposing view, see [author I cordially despise]. [Author I agree with] makes a similar argument to mine in his/her seminal work on Topic X, but I focus here on [angle that makes this article original enough to be published, hopefully; oh my God, everyone’s gotten to my topic before I did, there’s nothing new to say at all, AAAACK!]. Oh, and see also [several more sources thrown in for good measure because I don’t think this footnote looks long enough yet]."
Oh, that’s funny! (Both the template for the long first footnote and not recognizing the title of your own diss.) Glad to hear that no one has published anything big on your topic, and that you’re still writing!
A footnote
Amanda posts a helpful template for writing the first long footnote of an academic paper: “For a general introduction to Topic X, see [long list of authors]. For an opposing view, see [author I cordially despise]. [Author I agree with]…
That’s hilarious. At least LibraryThing is down (must be the new server), and so it can’t distract.
Good luck!
The first footnote thing is funny; oddly, a colleague and I recently had a paper rejected from a multidisciplinary journal because we had a footnote in that format (“The standard overviews are X, Y, and Z; important revisions include 1, 2, 3.”). The reviewer, who I believe can’t possibly work in the humanities, claimed that such footnotes were not academic.