On Apr 2, 2007, at 12:37 PM, John Lee wrote:
If there are no extant secondary sources, any
interpretation
whatsoever of
the primary source is novel. I suppose one could argue for the face-
value,
literal meaning interpretation as non-novel, but it's suprising how
often
people can disagree on a literal reading of a source.
Well, yes and no. First of all, this is where talk pages become
useful parts of our process. Second of all, there are cases,
including in academia, where you have to allow for some slippage
here. My usual example here is [[Jacques Derrida]]. There are
hundreds of secondary sources on him, but the good ones are A) no
easier to interpret than the primary sources, and B) POV to high hell
about what it is his philosophy means. The accessible general
overviews are of mediocre quality at best, and are far from respected
by any important Derrida scholars.
Attempting to write an article primarily from secondary sources about
Derrida is a doomed proposition.
The way to write a good Derrida article is to have a bunch of people
who use Derrida's ideas in their own scholarship write up summaries
of Derrida's thought, and have points of disagreement and tension
(i.e. the points where people disagree on exactly what On
Grammatology means right here) sourced to secondary sources and
explained in an NPOV fashion.
This is important. The best way to write this article on a major
philosopher who nobody would even think to nominate for deletion is
from primary sources, using secondary sources only when needed.
(This was, it should be noted, how [[Michel Foucault]], a similar
article, was written and became a featured article. No citations
anywhere in the "Works" section aside from the implied citation to
the primary sources. Damn good artlcle, and a great overview of
Foucault's work. This should be a model.)
-Phil
But in this case, the secondary sources are in existence. If anyone wants to
confirm that our reading of Derrida's or Foucault's works is non-novel, they
can just slog through all the secondary sources. When there are no secondary
sources available, however, then it's a whole different ball game: any
interpretation of the primary sources is essentially novel, and thus
verboten under NOR.
What I'm saying is, there's no reason we can't use primary sources if there
are already secondary sources. It's silly not to use what's available. But
if there are no secondary sources, how can we justify bringing up our own
novel interpretation of the primary sources, and becoming a secondary
source?
Johnleemk