On Dec 17, 2008, at 1:45 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
What? WP:NOR barely mentions lit crit or anything related to it. It's a general policy that applies to literature as much as it does to science or history. I think you may be a little paranoid...
Lit crit, however (or more broadly, English departments), is the general discipline under which writing and research skills are taught these days. It is the discipline that generally teaches courses on research, the nature of sources, etc. It is also the discipline out of which the question of what reading is, what one interprets from reading, and what a given passage of text "means." The PSTS section, and particularly the portion in the primary sources section that I am complaining about does make clear declarations about these things. And it's clear that they were written by people who haven't cracked open a book of scholarship on the underlying issues in recent memory.
-Phil