Zambrano Sans Signposting

Here is an introductory paragraph with no signposting:

No other figure in Spanish intellectual history has been more influential in shaping the “late modernism” of the turn of the twenty-first century than the philosopher María Zambrano (1904-1991). Her attempt to heal the rift between poetic and philosophical thought in her first major work, Filosofía y poesía (1939), determined the direction taken by late modernists like José Ángel Valente and Antonio Gamoneda and by women poets like Chantal Maillard. Many of Zambrano’s most significant books appeared in the second half of the twentieth century (some after her death), resulting in an intense interest in her work.

Zambrano, then, is a major Spanish modernist writer who comes into her own at a much later date...

The trick will be to cast the paragraph in which I will explain what it is I'm doing with no signposting. Transitions are still allowed. I'm still allowed to put forward what I'm doing in the rest of the paper, just not to say "my argument is that..." or "This paper will have three sections. In the first one, I will..."

I'm using Thomas Bøsball's structure of 40 paragraphs, mapping them out beforehand as far as possible. I've speculated in the past that excessive signposting often creeps in to compensate for defects in organization. The reader will only miss signposting if she is confused about where the paper is headed or if she cannot make sense of the digressions.

I am also eliminating hedges. If I am extremely accurate in what I affirm, then I don't have to say "perhaps" or "arguably." Anyway, since I am the author, everything I write is my thought, my opinion, so to say "in my opinion" is to say something that goes without saying. I will use the first person singular only to refer to myself in a biographical sense, not to talk about myself as the authorial voice you are now hearing.

There may be nothing wrong with hedges and signposting. I want to move my own prose toward a more classic mode. That's where I'm at right now, but I can also imagine telling a student to learn how to signpost more effectively.

The Concluding Paragraph

The perpetual crisis of confidence in the Humanities coincides (not so coincidentally perhaps) with the dominance of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and of the “argument for argument”—the idea that what we do in the Humanities can be reduced to the abstract and formulaic proceduralism that can be exercised in any context whatsoever, with no regard to the value of our raw materials. The inevitable reaction against these two developments has brought renewed attention to the principle I have identified here as “receptivity.” This is not a narrowing of the field or a return to a reactionary definition of the canon. In fact, receptivity entails an openness to every possible expression of human creativity and thus has the power to envigorate both our teaching and our scholarship.

Andrew Shields has been giving me a hard time about signposting--and with good reason. I thank him for that. I've been trying to write much more seamlessly. Here is my concluding paragraph. I simply conclude. The only signposting is the part I've italicized here. We know it's a conclusion because it's at the end, marked off by a few lines of blank space, and because of the conclusive tone. I don't need to write "as I have demonstrated here." Or, "in the first section of this article I showed that..."

Signposting Without Signposting

I had a sentence that started like this:

In the remainder of this chapter I will look at Eduardo Milán and Blanca Varela, the two Spanish American editors of this anthology, whose poetry illustrates some of the tensions between...

Then I changed it to this:

The poetry of the two Spanish American editors of this anthology, Eduardo Milán and Blanca Varela, illustrates some of the tensions between ....

I'm still signposting, simply by beginning a new section of the chapter by introducing the topics I'm going to be addressing. The reader can expect to find a discussion of these two poets. As easy as that.

So explicit signposting is only necessary when the topics do not flow into one another seamlessly. I'm not saying that you shouldn't ever use it, but often its presence points to an organizational glitch. Like: "I know you thought I've already discussed this topic, but I am bringing it back here because it has a different kind of relevance in this new context..."

Once in a while you are going to have to do things like that. I'm sure I had way too much explicit signposting in Apocryphal Lorca, because the book was hard to organize and I needed those extra nails to keep things from falling apart.

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