Citationism
22nd May 2019
ZMam has a bone to pick.
One of the irritating things about reading anything that strives to be academic is the thicket of citations throughout the text. It’s not just the end notes and footnotes, but the constant references to the work of others. Often, the text reads like a summary of the work in the field, rather than something original. Just as often, the text has the feel of a paper turned in by a teenager, trying to prove they did their homework. It is not just bad writing, it is a waste of time. It is disrespectful of the reader.
It’s not just a stylistic thing, but a reflection of something that has happened in the intellectual classes of American society. It used to be that an intellectual mastered a subject in order to build on it. The point of his labor was not to prove he had read everyone in the field. The point was to find the gaps in his field and use the source material as a foundation for filling some of those gaps. In other words, the academic added to his field, rather than maintained it like a curator of a museum.
Try an academic journal. They’re even worse.
May 22nd, 2019 at 16:26
Sometimes the intellectual achievement is relating other people’s ideas into a new idea. Taking somebody else’s ship over new horizons, so to speak. Personally, I appreciate references. I’ve bought books solely for the bibliography.
I guess that makes Zman’s point, though. I bought it for the bibliography rather than the ideas in the book. On the other hand, I’d be enriched if Zman attached a bibliographic reference or two to some of his better writings. He’s created some of the best writing in the Internet, IMHO.
His link to the offending article doesn’t make me squirm for the references but for the fraught and tendentious sentences. (Where’s the German word that means both?) An example:
“While the fetish for hectoring and moral puritanism has become popular in rarefied corners of arts and academia, it is deeply off-putting to voters whose sense of self extends beyond cultish ideological tribalism.”
WTF? Those off-put voters couldn’t even parse that language. They don’t talk like that, in their tribe.