English 130 Library Tutorial Module 2: Using Sources

How Do Sources Help Your Writing?

Take a moment to think about this question. Your first answer may be something like: “I use sources to back up my arguments,” but how do sources do that? Why is your argument about a literary work stronger when you cite sources?

I’ll refer to some strategies in this module. They’re drawn from Mark Gaipa’s article “Breaking into the Conversation: How Students Can Acquire Authority for Their Writing,” and may already be familiar to you (perhaps from the handout, “8 Strategies for Critically Engaging Secondary Sources”).  I’m also including three images from that same article.

Note that these are just a few examples -- you might see and use strategies other than these! But you should always be aware of what strategies are being used.

Some examples

Let’s look at some examples of how literary critics use sources in their writing.  I’m drawing on an article about Nella Larsen’s novel Passing:

Walker, Rafael. “Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in Quicksand and Passing.” MELUS, vol. 41, no. 2, 2019, pp. 165-192.

In this article, Walker argues that the novel is about the biracial experience and cannot fully be understood through the lenses of either race or sexuality.

Don’t worry too much about the interpretation being advanced here; these examples are meant to illustrate Walker’s use of sources.

Example 1 (Leapfrogging):

Here’s the first quote. For context, Walker has just quoted Hutchinson as one of the few critics calling attention to mixed-race fictions in African-American literature. He goes on to say:

I fully share Hutchinson’s view, which he develops further in his myth-exploding biography of Larsen. However, although I do not dispute that Larsen’s experiences as a biracial woman in early twentieth-century America had a shaping influence on her conception of race, I have chosen not to focus on parallels between her life and work, as Hutchinson does, in order to explore with fewer constraints the complexities of that work. (166, emphasis mine)

Does Walker agree with Hutchinson? (The first sentence suggests he does, but then, what is that “however” doing here?) What rhetorical move is Walker making here? How is Walker positioning his reading, in contrast to Hutchinson?

This is a kind of “leapfrogging.” Walker agrees with Hutchinson, but suggests that his own interpretation will be free to do things that Hutchinson’s cannot. This move is important because it establishes the need for Walker’s interpretation by distinguishing it from Hutchinson’s.

(figure taken from “Breaking into the Conversation: How Students Can Acquire Authority for Their Writing”)

Example 2 (Acting Paranoid):

Walker is more aggressive toward other critics:

More recent studies have maintained this view of Larsen’s fiction, bearing such titles as “Queering Helga Crane: Black Nativism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” (2011) and “The New Negro Flaneuse in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” (2008). I mention but a few of the many examples of the critical tendency to take for granted that Larsen was chiefly concerned with black women, but they suffice to reveal what strikes me as an “elephant in the room” in Larsen studies: that all of her heroines are racially ambiguous, if not explicitly biracial. (165, emphasis mine)

Walker doesn’t seem to agree with these articles.  Why does he bring them up?

One thing you might notice is that he is using them as “examples of a critical tendency.” So he’s showing that this is a common position for critics to hold. But he also argues that all these critics have missed something important – an elephant in the room.

This is what Gaipa calls “acting paranoid” -- arguing against the critical consensus. This can be a really important strategy if, after reading many articles, you find that they don’t address what appears to you to be a really important feature of the text. You can show that while critics may not have paid attention to the aspect of the text you are writing about, this is an oversight on their part.

(figure taken from “Breaking into the Conversation: How Students Can Acquire Authority for Their Writing”)

Example 3 (Cross-Pollination):

Here’s a different kind of example:

As E. Franklin Frazier observes, the black bourgeoisie consumed just as conspicuously as anyone else. Despite their widely noted materialism, however, the black middle class was much less forgiving of the expression of sexual desire, especially in black women. (168)

We don’t have Frazier’s work in front of us, but if we were to look at the Works Cited page to learn more, we’d notice that he is the author of a book titled Black Bourgeoisie. 

The title suggests his work isn’t about Passing or Larsen at all! Instead, his work is used here to provide some historical context about the black middle class in the early twentieth century.

Walker is using Frazier’s work to make a specific point about race and class as reflected in Larsen’s novel. He uses this to situate the novel in its historical context.  This is a good strategy when you are interested in how the novel relates to the society in which it was created.

Gaipa calls this “cross-pollination” – pulling in sources from a different conversation in order to consider a work from another point of view.

(figure taken from “Breaking into the Conversation: How Students Can Acquire Authority for Their Writing”)

Strategies for Using Sources

When you are looking for sources, I want you to keep all these strategies in mind. You do not need to find a source that’s making exactly the same point that you want to make; in fact, that would be a bad thing, since you need to show your argument is new!

Experienced literary critics use sources in a lot of ways:

• To help the reader understand the arguments that they are building on
• To prove that their argument is new and fresh
• To put a work in its proper context
• To show that they’re familiar with the most important critics who are already writing on this work or on this topic

Walker complains that very few other authors are writing about biracial women in Larsen’s fiction. It’s possible you might also find that not many critics are specifically addressing the subject of your paper! Walker dealt with this by finding articles about Larsen’s treatment of race and gender, and a relevant book about the historical period during which she wrote.

These works weren’t making the same point Walker was making, but their analysis was relevant to his work.

Exercise

Pull up a scholarly article you’ve already read (perhaps one you’ve looked at in class?). If you don’t have one in mind, you could look at the article quoted in this module, or find another article about a work with which you’re familiar.

1. Choose a source listed in the bibliography or Works Cited of the article.
2. Use Control-F to find where the source is cited. How often is this source used in the article?
3. Consider the following:

1. Is this source cited a lot of times, or just once or twice? Does the author come back to this source throughout the article, or just refer to it in one section or paragraph?
2. Is the source doing the same kind of analysis as the article in which it’s cited, or something different?
3. How does the author engage with this source, and how can you tell? That is, is the author:

1. Engaging with the source’s argument?
2. Using the source to establish some kind of critical, historical, or theoretical context for the source/their own argument?
3. Using the source for some other purpose, such as mining it for facts?

4. To what extent does the article’s author agree or disagree with this source?
5. How is this source making the article’s argument stronger?

1. If you’re familiar with Gaipa’s strategies, please feel free to think in those terms. For instance, is the author using any of the strategies outlined above?
2. If the author doesn’t appear to be engaging with the source as an argument, what kind of work is the source doing here? In particular, be on the lookout for uses of sources that are being used to provide context for something else the author wants to discuss.