Describing Research

It has become increasingly clear that some parts of my research are more difficult than others. In particular, one difficulty has surprised me, mostly because it is something that I never anticipated would be hard: describing my project. 

Not what I'm doing

I think what makes describing this research difficult is that people don't understand what it means to be a humanities researcher. In imaginations influenced by popular culture, research is something that happens in a lab with complicated equipment at specific times of the day. This idea of research is just not how things work for us humanities folks. Our version of research mostly involves reading, thinking, and writing, and it can be done anywhere at nearly any time. 

Even people that understand literary research frequently forget that literary criticism involves multiple forms of analysis. When I tell my friends that I'm researching gay British writers in floruit at the height of the British Empire, they almost always come back with the same questions: Who? How many gay writers were there? How can there be that much available for study?

I think this confusion is partly my own fault. I articulate my research project somewhat poorly in the form of a convenient one liner instead of a detailed summary. But I also think this confusion is the result of a lack of knowledge about literary criticism. As I see it, literary criticism has two main strains. The first strain involves detailed analysis of a work's meaning. It would be like telling you what Hamlet means when he gives his famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy. The second strain involves an analysis of a work's sources. It would be like if I told you that large chunks of Hamlet's soliloquy are actually are actually from a famous speech, made by a Danish king, that predates Hamlet (for the record, it doesn't as far as I know). My explanations are super brief and general, but they represent the main differences I see in the scholarship I read and emulate.

My research is a mixture of these two strains, and right now I'm putting heavy emphasis on the second strain by researching what went into the creation of a work instead of just looking at what a work means. What this means is that even though there were not a ton of gay writers writing in the British Empire, I am not at a want for research material because I am looking at the sources that influenced a writer's work instead of only their work. So, I'm not just analyzing what E.M. Forster wrote, I'm reading about what his contemporaries said and thought about topics like homosexuality and colonization, and I'm finding ways that this thinking manifests itself in Forster's writing. In this reading, works like Forster's aren't just artistic creations, they are literary artifacts of a previous era that express how people at that time thought. 

Words like "artifact" may make this project seem stuffy and boring, but when you think about it this assumption is part of a pretty bold thesis that contradicts popular notions of the Artist. In this idea, Artists are not creative, ahistorical people with a higher calling to produce art. Rather, they are deeply indebted to their histories and cultures, so much so that cultural traces and influences can be read in their oeuvre, despite an artist's attempts to exclude them. I am certainly not the first to argue this point, but that does not mean that it is not a point worth arguing. 

Hopefully this post makes humanities research a little clearer. If nothing else, I hope it's clear just how much work I have before me!