If you compare the primary texts read in our course, books by Gertrude Stein, Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert McAlmon (with Kay Boyle), you might well conclude that there would be a disproportionate amount of secondary material available on these topics. You could fill a truck with the pages and pages critics have devoted to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas since Stein published it to great acclaim in 1933. Hemingway is a popular topic, though there has been less written about A Moveable Feast (1964) than you might imagine. Cowley and McAlmon/Boyle have attracted less, though more specialized, attention.
Students, sometimes likely to assume the worst, believe there could be a test (or even a trick) in this. Choose Gertrude Stein, and you find for your assignments a mountain of books and journal articles ready for "cut and paste"; choose Robert McAlmon, and you are faced with a month of interlibrary loans to meet even the minimum research requirement. Of course, research is not "cut and paste": following the thesis of a critic that closely is likely an academic offense. As I explained to my students again, this week, I am looking for them to apply to the books we read the conclusions of more general research to discover something wholly new. Our library has, or has available through online sources, all manner of research on American literature, autobiography, modernism, and expatriation, and -- having pursued one of these lines -- students can then pass through their assembled matrix of assertions a primary text on which, ideally, few people have worked.
This issue came up in relation to a response paper written by a student who lamented the lack of topics supported by specific readings of the McAlmon and Boyle text. One of the relevant anecdotes illuminated had a passage that no one had quoted, in fact. Kay Boyle, writing her contribution to the "dual autobiography" in the 1960s, claims that, because she had told about her time with Raymond Duncan in a novel she had written thirty years before, she did not need to retell that story again. Are there some stories better told through fiction than autobiography? Having covered ground in fiction, is it then really off limits to autobiography? Is autobiography intended to fill in the gaps?
One of the great things about academic research, seen perhaps only by the person who takes classes through the material again and again and again and again, is that there is always something new. The thrill is not in discovering something that everyone else has done; the thrill is in finding something that has attracted the attention of the few.
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