I’ve run into a few issues while researching, both for the annotated bibliography and as I attempt to find additional sources of information. First is finding criticism relevant to what I’m discussing. Much of what has been written critiquing The Blithedale Romance is not concerned with the specific aspects of the novel that I’m interested in (how the novel provides commentary on issues related to utopian socialism), or they are buried within a larger criticism which is mostly irrelevant. Obviously this made the research process very laborious, and I’m not entirely satisfied with the sources I’ve found. It’s possible that there are sources out there which discuss the issues I’m concerned with in greater depth, but finding them via a search engine is a non-trivial task considering how much has to be sorted through.
Also, I’m not entirely sure how I should go about addressing discrepancies in the criticisms I’ve come across. I’m going to need to use the criticisms of The Blithedale Romance to help establish a connection between the text and the ideological movements associated with utopian socialism. It’s not clear to me at this point how I should deal with the different perceptions of novel themes. It seems somewhat disingenuous to simply look for sources which support the argument I’m inclined to make, but on the other hand it seems like it’ll be much harder to advance the thesis while acknowledging the variation in opinions. Obviously to a certain extent it makes the argument stronger to acknowledge differences in opinion and to argue against those contradicting your argument while at the same time advancing your own thesis. The issue, I think, is that some of the disagreement comes down to a basic subjective difference between the authors. One could make a compelling base for both views, and it’s hard to resolve the difference without admitting some of the differences are, to a certain degree, arbitrary. I’m sure I’ll come up with some solution in presenting the different views while putting forth my argument, but at this point in time it’s not entirely clear to me how to go about it best.
2 comments:
I also ran into this problem. There is a lot of information out there and some of the information is very subjective. I would try to focus on the more objective information first and work form there. For the criticisms I would focus on the sources that seemed the least bias, the more credible and relevant sources. I'm not sure what your research is about specifically but I have found letters that Hawthorne has wrote and those have come in pretty useful and those should be pretty credible since he wrote them himself.
Let's be careful with "subjective," because all too often it's used to mean "arbitrary." What you're running into is different critics advancing different arguments for different reasons; what you need to do is evaluate their premises and their reasoning to see which is the most sound. We'll talk about this more in class.
Post a Comment