The Things you Can Learn in a Book Review

Such a shame 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, I guess my instincts about the Fox book (see my last post) were pretty good.  We have to have at least two book reviews on our bibliography, so after I finished writing about Class Fictions, I went searching for a review.  I was kind of surprised at how many there were, because I only found a couple for my other books.  

It seems that Pamela Fox got a lot of people going besides me, although the others are mostly concerned with the book overall rather than her take on shame theory.  I read a review by Neil Nehring that was in Studies in the Novel in 1998.  Nehring is a cultural studies scholar, not a shame guy, and he found a lot of things in Fox's book to disagree with other than her use of shame.  What I got out of reading his review and my examination of the book is that Fox seems to be just generalizing about shame and assuming that her working-class writers feel it as sort of an ongoing embarrassment about lacking middle- or upper-class advantages.  My final take on it is that she hasn't got enough to go on in terms of a shame approach, so whatever she comes up with from the books she is analyzing is bound to be kind of superficial.  Of course, I don't know that much about it myself -- yet-- but that's my impression.

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A Different Shame Model

Shame (Photo credit: Joe Gatling)

I'm supposed to be describing one of the sources I am using for my bibliography and for my literature review, and I think I'm going to do this as a kind of draft for this book's section of the lit review, just to save some time.  Please bear with me:  I will be taking out most references to myself when I revise it.  And, I apologize for not being able to figure out how to do a hanging indentation.

Fox, Pamela.  Class Fictions:  Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1945.  Durham:  Duke UP, 1994.

I was immediately surprised by this book:  I looked in the index for "script theory" or some variation thereof, but there was nothing about it at all.  There was an entry for shame theory, so I went to that and discovered the reason for the earlier omission, which is that Pamela Fox a. is only interested in people in large numbers (like the working class, for example), and b. does not think that script theory has anything to offer in such cases or does not know it exists, which seems unlikely, as she writes, "[shame theory] has offered little to contemporary scholars searching for nuanced, respectful approaches to class cultural forms.  And in its traditional guises, it has little to offer me here" (10).  Yes, that's right.  She's written a book about shame in literature based entirely on a model that ignores a fairly large body of theory, dismissing it as "notoriously out of favor" (10), a status that has changed dramatically since the time that she published her book.  However, her model (definitely anti-psychoanalytic, sort of pro-anthropological) is not quite specific enough to stand in for all the ideas she has rejected, and it shows when she gets down to analyzing novels of the period in question.

In the years since 1994, a number of important examinations of shame in literature have been published, adding to the body of theory and opening new possiblities of shame theory as a critical approach to literature.  None of these follow Fox's model; nor will I, as her approach does not add anything useful to the model I am constructing.

I guess this shows you how I write a first draft-- lots of repetition and rethinking in the middle, so I have to edit a lot.  On the other hand, I think I've gotten out a lot of what I want to say about her book, so I'll consider it useful. 

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What can you say about a Research Schedule?

Time Management
 (Photo credit: Intersection Consulting)

And the answer is:  not much.  I've been spending a couple of hours a week thinking about this project and making notes about the film, but I'm not sure if I can actually pin down how much time I need for everything involved.  I need to have my bibliography and the final revision of my Review of Scholarly Literature done on March 12, which is not that far off now, so it's time to step it up. 

I'm now (as of this minute) planning on giving at least an hour a day, every day, until the two projects are done, and if I do more than an hour, I will NOT deduct that time from the next hour.  I will also probably have to adjust that daily hour upwards in order to get it all done, but I think an hour is a good starting point.  Here's my to-do list, in chronological order:

• Find at least six articles that use shame theory to analyze something comparable to a film.
• Find two more books on the theory (I already have one) AND reviews of the books from scholarly journals.
• Create the MLA citations.
• Start reading the articles (at least two a week), writing the annotations as I go.
• Decide on which articles to use for the lit review, then write summaries (remember, they have to define the terms I'll be using).
• Examine the books to see what I can get from them, prepare annotations (and summaries as above for the two I'm using for my lit review).

That's what I absolutely have to do, but I'd also like to do a starter analysis of the three scenes I want to use in the research paper, since that's my primary research and I won't know for sure how much and what kind of stuff I need from my secondary sources until the analysis is done.

And, I just decided that I'm not counting the time it takes to write my blog posts as part of my scheduled hour.  Now all I have to do is stick to the plan

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