Writing With a Point—Part 3: Literature Reviews in the Humanities

Word on the street is that your students leave their introductions until the final stage of writing. First, they churn out a few ideas. Then they tie them all together. This gives the illusion that there was some master plan girding their haphazard musings. It’s not the worst strategy for writing a cohesive paper.

But is that what student research should look like?

My problem is not the sequence of events. The word “introduction” connotes a beginning section for a reader, but not necessarily for a writer. What troubles me is that these sort of papers end up reporting what scholars have said. Ironically, the papers conclude with the type of original theses that, if developed, would have made for a much better paper in the first place.

What’s happening is that students are conflating two key research tasks:

1. Framing and assessing the literature around a select topic.
2. Formulating and arguing a thesis about the relationship between a select topic and an unresolved issue treated in the extant literature.

The problem is that students are uncertain about the research question (i.e. topic and unresolved issue) to which they’re responding. Unable to generate a thesis statement to match, they write down everything they know about the topic. By paper’s end, they arrive at some interesting ideas of their own, but with a looming due date, they write a summary introduction and call it a day.

According to John M. Swales  and Christine B. Feak, students need time to “find the gap” in the extant intellectual territory before delving into paper writing.  To facilitate this, I sometimes require students to develop a literature review. The literature review creates a “research space” wherein they can stumble upon, dream up, and discover their “niche” before the business of laying out an original argument.

For some of you, what I’ve been describing may sound like drudgery, but trust me on this. Students are already moving in that direction. They just need room to chase that instinct.  And with elements of storytelling, curating, and improvising, the literature review can be the most artful part of critical thinking.

Storytelling

The consultants at the Claremont Graduate University Writing Center liken the literature review to recounting a dinner party. The thing about dinner parties is that they are intrinsically awkward. Everybody’s tripping over each other to communicate their point while demonstrating erudition. The conversation has winners and losers, enemies and alliances, as well as lulls and tangents. Does this not also describe most academic conferences?

The literature review is not about reporting what happened, but describing the exchange in a way that brings out the drama. Good literature reviews make people wish they were up on the research. In this way, a literature review can be more compelling than the literature itself.

Curating

Literature reviews are a digest of plot points that move the scholarly conversation forward. This progress should not be confused with concurrence. Conflict advances narratives, too. Museums specialize in this. They manage to distill multiple ideas and viewpoints into comprehensible exhibitions—all while leaving patrons’ wanting to know more.

Similarly, literature reviews curate the scholarly conversation in such a way that readers understand the literature while pointing out areas for further exploration. For the writer, this primes the pump for future research questions.

Improvising

Literature reviews offer a chance to experiment with drawing connections. They train students to attentive to what previous research has said. Like a jazz musician, the seasoned learner knows when to hold ponderous silence, when to harmonize, when to bring some dissonance, and when to breakout with a solo. Ultimately, the literature review is an exercise in active listening.

It is in this spirit that I see the literature review and the expository paper complementing each other. The Get to the Point Introduction of each can help us chart this relationship.

In the literature review, a student takes a topic worthy of study, inquires (i.e. research question) about some specific issue that scholars have taken with that topic, and summarizes what he or she knows (i.e. thesis statement) about how scholars have thus far treated said topic and issue.

The expository paper builds upon the above. The literature review’s thesis is now the topic of the paper. The research question is derived from an issue concerning something said or not said by the previous literature. The argument that results from the subsequent research (wherever it may lead) is the new thesis.

Let us not forget how much we ask of our students. They are to survey various works, ask good questions, and make determinations. Can you blame them for trying to cut corners? The literature review is one way to help them stay organized. If you’re students’ papers are coming off rushed, consider how this assignment might work in your classroom. It might help students get to the point of reading and writing well.

One thing I love about the Seminarium community is that we’re comprised of educators in a variety of settings. In the comments section below, please give us a sense of where you’re coming from and how you envision the literature review working for you.

Photo Credit: “More of that Jazz” by Fabio Venni – CC by 2.0

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