Constellations of research
“What you see is their physical form, but you realize that this form is really just the web of relationships that have taken on a familiar shape. Every individual thing that you see around you is really just a huge knot—a point where thousands and millions of relationships come together … from the past, from the present and from your future. This is what surrounds us, and what forms us, our world, our cosmos and our reality. We could not be without being in relationship with everything that surrounds us and is within us. … Nothing could be without being in relationship, without its context” (Wilson 76).
“It seems self-evident that the ambiguous field of the word ‘communication’ can be massively reduced by the limits of what is called a context” (Derrida 1).
As Shawn Wilson’s “Research Is Ceremony” describes the methods and paradigms she applies to her field of indigenous research, it also sheds light on how, and to what end, I intend on conducting research as a literary scholar. The cultural artifacts—such as novels, poetry and literary criticism thereof—much like the physical form Wilson refers to above, are “really just the web of relationships” that have “taken on the familiar shape” in physical and/or digital form. I see all these various (eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British) texts as points “where thousands and millions of relationships come together” from our cultural past, present, and future. I have a relationship with these authors/texts and the countless people over the past two to three centuries who also have had relationships with them. Because “nothing can be without being in relationship, without its context,” I, like Derrida and those post structuralists of the 1990s before me, continually seek to examine ideas, characters, places, language and words, and so forth, within their context. For if we do not, even one word (such as “communication” itself) becomes obscured, and opens such a wide semantic field so as to obscure the relationship between speaker/writer and listener/reader, thus straining our relationship(s) to each other and to the texts that have formed and been formed by our shared culture.
Wilson presents some questions that are important for any researcher to ask: “How do my methods help to build respectful relationships between the topic that I am studying and myself …? … How can I relate respectfully to the other participants involved in this research so that together we can form a stronger relationship with the idea that we will share? What is my role as researcher in this relationship, and what are my responsibilities? Am I being responsible in fulfilling my role and obligations … to the topic? What am I contributing or giving back to the relationship?”
Much like Wilson’s example of an “aggressive and arrogant outside researcher” damaging the relationship between Cora and her grandfather, an Indigenous Elder (Wilson 78), I see scholars of literature as having an obligation not only to present correct information but to maintain harmony in relationships in our field. Barton’s “Further Contributions” attests to the obligation to respect and honor the relationship between the researcher and the researched, albeit in different ways (HHS.gov). Humanities’ subjects are, like Cora’s grandfather, “no longer with us”—but their texts are, and we have a responsibility “that comes with bringing a new idea into being” (Wilson 79) to honor that relationship by honoring the multiple contexts in which we/they work. “Forming and strengthening these connections gives power to and helps the knot between to grow larger and stronger” (Wilson 79); what could be more exciting than having the opportunity to grow and strengthen connections between the present culture and that of the eighteenth-/nineteenth-century from whence “we” and our very sense of (post-Enlightenment) selves sprang? Barton’s “Further Contributions from the Ethical Turn in Composition/Rhetoric,” and Ratcliffe’s “Rhetorical Listening … Code for Cross-Cultural Conduct,” show the ethics that govern relationships between the researcher and the researched to transcend disciplines.
Barton’s rhetorical examination of the dialogue between medical recruiters and patients, and Ratcliffe’s argument for increased emphasis on hearing/listening apply to the field of rhet/comp and could equally apply to the research that goes into literary/cultural studies as well: respecting one another’s boundaries and listening, not just writing, involves input as well as output—a balanced flow of giving and receiving that I believe to be necessary to maintain in order to produce successful, useful and purposeful scholarship. This is why academics teach, and this is why academics share their research at conferences, and with their community, the public, and other university departments (i.e., philosophy, history, psychology…). The academic essay, with its plethora of in-text and end-text citations, embodies the relationships between primary and secondary texts/authors.
Works cited
Barton, Ellen. “Further Contributions from the Ethical Turn in Composition/Rhetoric: Analyzing Ethics in Interaction.” CCC, 2008, pp. 596-632.
Ratcliffe, Krista. “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct.” College of Communication and Composition, 1999, pp. 195-224.
Wilson, Shawn. Research Is Ceremony: Indegenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing: 2008.
