Most graduate students in the humanities have the intelligence and insight required to publish outstanding studies, though, of course, they may lack the knowledge and persistence required of successful professionals. Whether or not they should publish remains an open question, with a number of issues that must be evaluated. Publication should be entertained only if neither graduate students' own classes nor those they teach would suffer. They should, moreover, make the attempt only if the potential article makes a significant contribution to the field. Nonetheless, students who wish to be competitive would be wise to have something accepted for publication when they look for a job. A faculty mentor is helpful, both to ensure that the manuscript is sufficiently expert, well written, and organized and to put negative, sometimes hurtful reviews in context. While the process of turning papers into first-rate publications can be a wonderfully useful experience, it can also take more time than students can afford and be undeservedly damaging to their self-confidence.
While it is always desirable to develop new archives, it is especially important for late eighteenth century France. A number of cultural historians have suggested that our sense of historical reality would be augmented if it were infused by the information provided by art and literature. The last half of the eighteenth century gives reason to believe that literature offers a particularly useful opening onto the reality of people's lives. Because the methods of literary patronage had changed, for the first time the financing of publication required a mass market. Fortunately, literacy was increasing significantly, thus producing sufficient numbers of paying customers to support a burgeoning publishing industry. People read for entertainment and, it seems, for information. Writers increasingly claimed their works were realistic. Numerous scholars have used these works for illustration of conclusions reached about the period; a few have turned to them as the source of indications of that reality. While literature in one way or another reflects the period of its creation, better methodology needs to be developed for using literature as an opening onto the age. Single works do not in isolation provide trustworthy insights into the thought, feelings, customs, and details of everyday life. Still, reliability increases as the novels and plays included in the archive become more numerous and common elements emerge. Multiplicity of example and congruence of significance are essential for using literature and the arts as reliable historical archives. If a large percentage of the actual works of art not only turn around but focus, for example, on the reasons for emigration, or the anguish of divorce, or incest, or suicide, it seems obvious that literature is responding to contemporary conditions and attitudes. Of course, any conclusions are particularly useful when they are buttressed by other, traditional resources.
OMPARED to the novel, the short story has had remarkably little criticism devoted to it, and what theory exists reveals few definitive statements about its nature. For the last quarter century, critics have neglected generic questions and turned to the consideration of narration or recit. They hedge on definitions, origins, major traits, on just about everything having to do with the short story as a genre. I make this observation without censure, for one is doubtless wise to be circumspect with a genre of unequalled antiquity and adaptability. As Gullason, May, and many others have pointed out, it may be an "underrated art" but it remains remarkably hardy, 1 so much so that Mary Doyle Springer and Elizabeth Bowen have attempted to distinguish a "modern" and "artistic" short story of the last one hundred years from a more antiquated, inartistic predecessor. 2 The case is, however, difficult to make. Not only does one remember, with H. E. Bates, that "the stories of Salome, Ruth, Judith, and Susannah are all examples of an art that was already old, civilized, and highly developed some thousands of years before the vogue of Pamela," 3 Clements and Gibaldi have argued convincingly that recent masterpieces continue in an age-old genre. 4 Indeed, without parti pris it is difficult to read certain Milesian tales or stories from the Arabian Nights, not to mention more recent masterpieces by such writers as Marguerite de Navarre, Chaucer, or Boccaccio, without being struck by the modernity of these creations from long ago. The subject matter may be different, the devices at variance, but no substantive trait or quality distinguishes them from the products of nineteenth-and twentieth-century practitioners. I do not say there is no difference. I argue rather that, similar to archetypes, which have certain key elements that are combined with other traits specific to a given epoch and are thus reconstituted, the short story genre has a central, identifiable set of characteristics which each age and each author deploys in different ways and with different variables. The result is generically recognizable, allowing for parallel and oppositional play, but specific to the author, age, and culture.
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