Assignment Questions based on Quoted Sources

In the past month, I've noticed that some students have problems with assignments that use quoted sources on a given subject[Finance, Accounting, OB] to sponsor discussion. To help you learn to approach questions that use quotations, I want to begin with a simple example from literature.

Example Question:

Henry James argued in his forward to "The Aspern Papers" that he wanted "to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity." (1888). Discuss.

What is implied here by "discuss"? As I've mentioned in previous posts, the objective of most academic work is to develop critical thinking. In the context of this question, critical thinking means discussion of this point. So, when you examine "The Aspern Papers", is the author brief and lucid. These words conveyed something different for 19th century readers than they do in the present. We, as the media constantly reminds us, live in the age of email and phone texts, blogs, Twitter and Facebook. The Aspern Papers, by comparison with these brief commications, is a book of endless emotional complications and complex language. It is roughly 100 pages of dense text. By our standards, this isn't brief. If you were writing about this question, for an assignment, the discussion would involve a lively exchange of information which would highlight both sides of the debate with fairness and clarity.

When longer quotations are involved, the first challenge facing the student is comprehension. What does the quotation mean? An example of a longer quotation, from Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso, 1991:

"The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the “crisis” of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s."

Quotations such as these require more investigation. Before writing your paper, it's important when you're given lengthy and complicated quotations, that you spend time understanding them. Suggestions by the module tutor, to look at a particular source or writer to assist understanding, should be taken seriously and these other writers will probably be included in your assignment and bibliography. When you have a complex quotation, such as the one above, the temptation is to by-pass it and begin writing your paper without this analysis. This is a serious mistake. Quotations must be dissected and clearly understood before proceeding with discussion and debate. Thus, you can see, these long quotations are used as a method to inspire debate and discussion in your assignments. Understanding them is part and parcel of being a graduate student.

Until next time,

KB