The Mad Scientist and the Monster
Building a Literature Review (Part 2)
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In last week’s post about the benefits of lateral reading, I used Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of the unending parlor conversation to describe how writers enter into discussion around shared matters of concern.
In Burke’s metaphor, the writer joins the ongoing conversation after pausing to catch the “tenor” of the argument. They participate the discussion by supporting, refuting, or expanding what others in the room have said. The writer eventually departs, but the conversation keeps going long after they’ve left.
A literature review is a genre convention that introduces and explains the ongoing conversation by summarizing, quoting, or paraphrasing a range of sources about your topic.
I used to think of the literature review as a chore: the equivalent of “showing your work” in mathematics. More recently, I’ve come to realize that’s too reductive.
When you’re writing a literature review, you’re more like a mad scientist, toiling away on the textual equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. You’re digging up bodies of text, stitching together different parts of the corpus, and bringing something new to life.
In long-form argument, the literature review tends to appear toward the beginning of the piece. It’s often the first section after the introduction. The location of the literature review means it can be a good place to:
Define key terms and concepts.
Introduce important historical context or describe how the conversation around your topic has shifted in response to current events.
Identify key players and address their work on the topic.
Start setting up your argument by presenting evidence strategically, in ways that encourage readers to make inferences. When this is done well, you can win support for your position before you’ve explicitly stated your position.
Narrow your focus by drawing limits around your project. You can do this by specifying the criteria you’re using to decide which sources or texts you’re including in your analysis.
Highlight the stakes of your project by explaining how the evidence your presenting relates to the values, concerns, or priorities of your audience.
Establish your credibility with audiences by demonstrating that you’ve been following the conversation closely for a long time and you’re the best person to help them get their bearings in this unfamiliar environment.
Take a bird’s eye view of the topic to identify gaps, contradictions, and paradoxes in the literature base around your topic. This also reduces the chances of accidentally duplicating someone else’s work without realizing it.
Offer credible evidence to support counterintuitive or controversial perspectives.
Situate yourself in the discourse community you’re writing for.
One important thing to remember is that you’re not just writing something people will read. Ideally, you’re also writing something they’re going to cite. A well-written literature review transforms your article or chapter into a resource other writers can rely on in their own research and writing.
In the same way that it’s usually strategic to write blogs so they’re easy to skim, it’s also good to think about how people are going to be referencing your work of theory or philosophy as a source text. This means:
Acknowledging potential biases and uncertainty.
Fact-checking everything.
Immersing yourself in the literature base around your topic.
Familiarizing yourself with the discourse community and publication you’re writing for.
That said, not every long-form argument has (or even needs) a literature review. If you’re writing for a general audience that doesn’t need to reconstruct your research trajectory, it might be enough to identify two or three key sources.
Similarly, you might be less likely to find detailed literature reviews in older articles, or in articles written by late-career academics who are widely recognized as leading experts in their field.
The former is because genre conventions change in response to technological developments. Prior to the printing press, books and articles were expensive and hard to come by. There was no way to do a comprehensive “survey” of the literature because discourse communities were highly localized, even when they were devoted to the same subject.
The latter is because late-career academics don’t really need to establish their credibility with their audience. The folks they’re writing for are already familiar with their work, or their work is so foundational they’d be forced into the embarrassing practice of citing themselves.
That said, many established writers include a literature review anyway: after all, they serve a variety of different rhetorical functions and have a lot of strategic utility. We’ll explore these benefits next week, when we examine different ways you can structure a literature review.
In the meantime, good luck with your writing!