From the Mast-Head

From the Mast-Head T he winds of change blow hard upon us here in the lofty editorial offices of Leviathan. And we editors are swift to take sail and scud before the wind, promptly responding to every hitch and beat, leading the fleet in All That Is New. Yes, it has been over thirty years since the Modern Language Association—that bastion of style, format, and mechanics—issued its decree that it would, hence forth and forever, adhere to a new code of bibliographical citation, known to all as the “Works Cited” approach. This new style, introduced in 1977, replaces the footnote as the conveyance of source citation with a procedure whereby abbreviations appearing parenthetically in the essay’s text refer readers to full bibliographical citations in an alphabetized list appearing at the end of the essay. Some thought the shift to this new (suspiciously social scientific) approach signaled the end of western civilization; some applauded it. I can now disclose to you, confidentially, that it is here to stay. And streaking like some meteor across the sky, I have promptly responded, over thirty years later, by changing Leviathan’s citation format from the “old” MLA format to the “new.” Even a mere skimmer of this page will detect a hint of self-irony concealing what? my chagrin at being so tardy in this matter? or my faint acknowledgment of the crusty conservatism of an aging academic? or my resistance but resignation to the new? Would that some such sad tragic principle were involved. Sloth, dear reader, accounts for the delay: or have I been sniffing Rip Van Winkle’s lilacs rather than attending “promptly” to my professional obligation to bring Leviathan into conformity with the late twentieth-century’s greatest contribution to bibliographic formatting? But enough. Granted, the “new” MLA method has its benefits. It spares us the redundancy, space squandering, and hieroglyphics of op. cit., loc. cit., and ibid. ibid. ibid. On the other hand, readers are required to head to the end of an article to check a source rather than to glance down at a footnote to find it. And this kind of immediacy seemed worth preserving when I took over as editor of Extracts in 1990; that and the fact that endnotes and works cited lists did not look nice in that journal’s quaint newsletter format. So these considerations led me to refrain from adopting MLA’s “new” style. And even when Extracts evolved into Leviathan, and we had a fuller journal format at our disposal, one other resistance to the works cited approach still c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 3 J O H N B R Y A N T lingered. Scholars like having footnotes to embellish their arguments; they like to introduce a source and let it meet and mate with other source entries in the sub rosa confines of a deliciously sauced note placed below decks. MLA ended all that with its works cited list. A perhaps more important concern, however, is the abuse of what I shall continue to call the “new” approach whereby a writer might seek to substantiate what would otherwise go as a mere assertion with the embellishment of a parenthetical citation containing nothing more than someone’s last name. Somehow these abbreviated parentheticals project certitude, suggest reliability, lend authority, as in “The world was created in six days” (Moses). Have you ever come upon a sentence like this: “Romance as a genre fulfills a hermeneutic dependency” (Goodman). Or make that (Goodman, Noble). What can these abbreviations mean? Did Goodman say this? or mean to say it? Is one book reducible to just one idea? Or: did Goodman and Noble agree on this matter or argue the point. And must I now go rooting about in their books to find this idea and their debate? Let me confess what you of course know: you will never come upon that sentence, citation, or string of citations because I just...