The footnote, in theory

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 208-225

  Stevens, Anne H ^a   Williams, Jay ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA   (United States)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949262787     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3651460     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. Wayne Booth, Robert E. Streeter, and W. J. T. Mitchell, "Sheldon Sacks: 1930-1979," Critical Inquiry 5 (Spring 1979): i. This mesh of inquiry and idiosyncrasy may also describe Mitchell, only the second editor of the journal
2. [Mitchell], editorial letter, Critical Inquiry 16 (Autumn 1989): 203-4
3. See "An Exchange on Edward Said and Difference," Critical Inquiry 15 (Spring 1989): 611-46, which includes essays by Robert J. Griffin, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, and Edward Said
4. Joyce Carol Oates, "Response to Richard Stern," Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 195
5. See Susan Gubar, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" Critical Inquiry 24 (Summer 1998): 878-902
6. the critical responses to and rejoinder by Gubar in Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999): 362-401
7. Jane Gallop, "Resisting Reasonableness," Critical Inquiry 25 (Spring 1999): 599-609
8. the critical responses to Gallop, who declined with pique to write a rejoinder, by Tania Modeleski, Lisa Ruddick, Terry Caesar, James R. Kincaid, and Ann Pellegrini in Critical Inquiry 26 (Spring 2000): 591-626
9. Jacques Derrida, "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War," Critical Inquiry 14 (Spring 1988): 590-652
10. and the responses and rejoinder from Derrida, Critical Inquiry 15 (Summer 1989): 704-873
11. See Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)
12. See Geoffrey Galt Harpham, "Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Žižek and the End of Knowledge," Critical Inquiry 29 (Spring 2003): 453-85
13. See Eugene Garfield, "The 250 Most-Cited Authors in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, 1976-1983," Current Comments 48 (Dec. 1986): 3-10
14. See Allan Megill, "The Reception of Foucault by Historians," Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (Jan.-March 1987): 117-41
15. An example of a similar project being attempted for very different ideological purposes is Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball's "Farewell to the MLA," New Criterion 13 (1 Feb.1995), http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/ People/Kimball/mla.html. Here Kramer and Kimball compile anecdotal information on what is being cited at the Modern Language Association convention: Meanwhile, as one of us listened to these assaults on Conrad and Cather, the other chose to visit the session on "Feminist Perspectives on the Frankfurt School," which drew a standing-room-only crowd and turned out to offer a little of everything - except, of course, literature. No sooner had we seated ourselves and unpacked the trusty tape recorder than we heard the familiar whine of the dentist's drill - no, sorry, our mistake: it was only the sound of the first speaker, who had come to "clarify the function of femininity in Frankfurt School thought, with an emphasis on re-reading the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the context of gender." Ah, yes, we knew it well: the "critique of patriarchy and logocentricsm," old friends such as the feminist icons Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, not to mention Judith Butler, the young philosopher of queer theory who our rough tabulation identified as the second most frequently referred to person at the convention. The most frequently cited figure was undoubtedly Walter Benjamin, the hapless Marxist critic and protege of Adorno who committed suicide while fleeing from the Nazis in 1940. Our data also indicates that Butler's and Benjamin's popularity surged around this time. But while Kramer and Kimball see this as a sign of the decline of the academy, we are not nearly so pessimistic
16. Lawrence Lipking, "The Marginal Gloss," Critical Inquiry 3 (Summer 1977): 639. We tend to think, as others have before us, that Gérard Genette's Paratexts, with its laying out of the concepts of text and paratext especially, will prove fruitful for further exploration into the theoretical nature of the footnote as long as those concepts are rethought in terms of new media, especially in terms of the internet. For example, we would want to critically examine the similarities between the footnote and the hyperlink. The latter certainly does not merely replace the former
17. See Georg Stanitzek, Texts and Paratexts in Media, Critical Inquiry 32 (Autumn 2005): 27-42
18. And here recall a young Leopold von Ranke's letter to his publisher, quoted in Grafton, The Footnote, p. 64: "I felt citation was indispensable in the work of a beginner who has to make his way and earn confidence."
19. Martin's essay is actually a critical response to Geoffrey Hartman, "Literary Criticism and Its Discontents," Critical Inquiry 3 (Winter 1976): 203-20
20. See Wallace Martin, "Literary Critics and Their Discontents: A Response to Geoffrey Hartman," Critical Inquiry 4 (Winter 1977): 397-406, where he cites Miller and Krieger
21. This move from citation to assumption parallels Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's taxonomy of scientific statements: "type 5 statements represented the most fact-like entities and type 1 the most speculative assertions." When an assertion becomes a fact, it ceases to be footnoted: "a fact is nothing but a statement with no modality ... and no trace of authorship ... something so obvious that it does not even have to be said" (Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts [1979; Princeton, N.J., 1986], pp. 79, 82)
22. See David Richter, "Pandora's Box Revisited: A Review Article," Critical Inquiry 1 (Dec. 1974): 453-78, whose first line is a quotation from Aristotle, unfootnoted
23. On the supplanting of the New Critics, see also Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, 1987)
24. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, 1993), pp. xii-xiii, 171
25. Pierre Bourdieu provides a rudimentary taxonomy of how footnotes indicate how an author is being read: "Citatology" nearly always ignores this question, implicitly treating references to an author as an index of recognition (of indebtedness or legitimacy). In point of fact this apparent function may nearly always be associated with such diverse functions as the manifestation of relations of allegiance or dependence, of strategies of affiliation, of annexation or of defence (this is the role, for example, of guarantee references, ostentatious references or alibi-references). (Pierre Bourdieu, "The Market of Symbolic Goods," The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson [New York, 1993], p. 138)
26. Mitchell, "Critical Inquiry and the Ideology of Pluralism," Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982): 613