discovering tasks

Here are some shorthand notes to the discovery task, if you want to make sure you get what was being asked of you.

1. What information about the author of the article is provided?
Not much. But we do get his university affiliation at the end of the article (as is standard in academic publishing), and we also get a reference to another publication he has on Arnold in footnote 33 (page 35), giving us the sense that he has worked a great deal on Arnold (which might confirm the fact that the article is secretly about Arnold). You can also that these publications are in or on Victorian Literature, giving you a sense that he is (in the language of the academy) a Victorianist. Now, what does this mean?

2. Summarize in a few sentences the thesis and major points that the author covers in the article.
done. see blog posting from Tuesday 4/15 discussion.

3. Is the evidence primarily from primary or secondary sources? Support your answer with examples.
Here it is important to keep in mind the relativeness of primary/secondary sources--secondary sources can also be primary sources. In Joseph's argument, all the Arnold/Hegel/Eliot/Woolf/Drabble texts are both. They are secondary in the sense that they "comment" on Sophocles' Antigone, but their comments on Antigone require the mediation/interpretation of Joseph. Thus they are treated by Joseph as "primary" sources.

4. Name one or two scholars mentioned in the article. Does the author agree or disagree with the scholars he or she cites.
Footnotes 1-37 reference a ton of scholars contemporary to Joseph. But none in the article--Mentioned in article I thought I found: W.F. Barry, author of The New Antigone: A Romance, but when I checked out the footnote, I found that it was actually written in 1887! So there are no scholars mentioned in the article! This is kind of shocking, since then Joseph doesn't do what you're being asked to do, which is to integrate secondary scholarly material with your own claim.

5. What is the subject focus of the journal that the argument in from?
In other words, what discipline does the journal deal with?: Literature--the PMLA is the publication of the Modern Language Association. http://www.mla.org/pmla. (The MLA is the professional organization through which aspiring literature graduate students apply for professorship jobs).