Do We Need New Method Names? Descriptions of Method in Scholarship on Canadian Literature

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Do We Need New Method Names?Descriptions of Method in Scholarship on Canadian Literature Katja Thieme (bio) Maybe there is no point in having a thesis. Maybe it's too partial an experience. Maybe a conclusion is a delusion. Maybe "research" and "support" are themselves chimeras dreamed into being by the questions asked. Tamas Dobozy Literary studies are often seen as a discipline without method. Research articles in literature do not have method sections, nor do they list what type of evidence has been included in a particular project or by what procedures primary material was analyzed. Among literary scholars, there is a powerful assumption that this kind of knowledge—which materials to look at and what to do with them—goes with the territory: it is both too obvious to speak about and too hidden to be fully known (Fahnestock and Secor; MacDonald, Professional; Wilder and Wolfe; Wilder, Rhetorical Strategies; Banting, "Uncomfortable Lessons"; Fee). Because of implicitness of questions of method and research design, writing in literary studies is difficult to teach and often relies on students' abilities to infer their own strategies for reading and writing (Herrington). And yet, like all disciplinary discourses, writing in literary studies does have its own range of analytical approaches, its ways of collecting and analyzing evidence, its sense of the validity of certain research questions over others. [End Page 91] Sarah Banting's research on Canadian literary studies demonstrates how much the field of English studies in Canada favours the values of social justice as it makes decisions about research questions and methods ("If What We Do Matters"). Expanding on Banting's work, this project asks: What are common language practices when presenting methods in Canadian literary scholarship? What difficulties do these practices pose for student writers? And how could literature instructors better guide student writers by teaching current methodological conventions more explicitly? I analyze a textual corpus of recent research articles from Canadian Literature and Studies in Canadian Literature in order to clarify typical discursive patterns that are used when discussing methods of literary scholarship. On the basis of these findings, we can ask: How can teaching in literary studies be adjusted in order to demystify the methodological practices of the discipline? What is method in literary studies? The status of literary studies as being without named methods has been widely discussed; in the tradition of rhetorical and language studies in the United States authors include Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor (1991), Susan Peck MacDonald (1994), and Laura Wilder (2012). From a Canadian perspective, Heather Murray has described the dominant process of becoming a literary scholar as learning to adopt, through mimesis, the appropriate styles of literary analysis through close study of literary texts, a long tradition that relies on instructors repeatedly performing close readings in the hopes that students will not only discern the motivations and techniques underlying this reading but also know how to translate the right elements of this oral performance into their written work ("Close Reading, Closed Writing," "Equal"). More recently, Banting has written about literary scholarship's "elegant silence about its own rules" and likened the teaching of literary scholarship to a game of "I'm going camping" where only the game leader knows by which rules certain items are to be ruled in or out of the game ("Uncomfortable Lessons" 4). In this project, I speak from my perspective as both a teacher of literary courses and a researcher in writing studies. Having a foot in each field allows for productive bridging of discussions which, according to Nancy Chick, have tended in different directions: where pedagogical research in literary studies is primarily concerned with issues of reading and writing and composition studies has its eyes trained on writing (39). While as teachers of literature we might have frequent chats about strategies for classroom discussion, we do not always give equal conversational attention [End Page 92] to the way we guide students through and assess their written assignments. In fact, some of my informal conversations with colleagues indicate that we often expect students to surprise us with their writing, that there is an as-yet-unimagined, illusory quality to what we want in their...