True Compositional Stories: Part 2 of 5
Contributed by David Mansfield on 10 October 2006 at 12:39When last we left our hero, he had just received his research materials via Inter-Library Loan. So, how did he approach his research?
The important thing was to avoid limiting himself ... okay, forget this conceited third-person. The important thing was to avoid limiting myself to the ideas I'd had about the paper before starting my research. So I highlighted everything that remotely had to do with looking or observation.
For example, in del Rio's article on bodily transformation, she mentioned the evil eye. This represents the ultimate in problematic observation, since the mere act of looking at someone now becomes dangerous. Yet this connection had not occurred to me, even though it wound up being the basis for about a paragraph of my final paper.
And this is the important thing to keep in mind when researching: Often, the act of researching, if done with an open mind, can not only provide facts to support the thesis but can in fact spur the genesis of the paper's argument. My own idea had been to write about how Denis's films problematize looking in terms of the audience looking at the characters, but del Rio gave me the idea to consider as well the relationship between characters who look at each other.
Today's was only a short entry, but tomorrow I'll discuss my outlining process, which hopefully will involve a bit more meat.