A really simple thesis works best. Something you can explain to a non-academic person.
For example, I am thinking two things about the setting of Lorca in the "art song" genre. One, that the Spanish art song is associated with folk or popular traditions. Secondly, the art song composers gravitate toward Lorca's seven songs for children--or other childlike material. So this genre will highlight two aspects of Lorca's reception more generally: his supposedly "childlike" nature, or "immaturity," and his identification with folklore. These two things seem to go together well. Then, I would explain how this is just one aspect of Lorca's legacy, etc... There are other ways of setting Lorca to music that don't emphasize those two things.
That's the thesis as I might explain it on my blog (for example). In a scholarly article, it would be expressed without this clumsiness. Writing the paper would involve refining this thesis, coming up with examples, a few examples from non-classical music, historical context.
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OK. I am writing without a thesis for the first time ever and need a thesis. Simple version:
Sarmiento enters into a circuitous dialogue with Cooper to describe the pampas ... and Villaverde describes Cuba by describing New Orleans.
What this does at minimum is add a new layer to the already complex process of composition of this novel, and to its web of references and contexts.
And that layer helps read the politics of this novel. And exposes the limits of 'originality' (of which the 19th century writers who touted it were well aware, as Silva-Greusz points out). And throws into relief the way the web of representation creates its own literary world, separate from the historical one
But more broadly, it explodes the borders of the nation and shows how the histories of the New World are not locally discrete moments (Silva Greusz again)
So that the question becomes what does this text signify and what circuits of meaning is it in?
HM. That's simpler than my mss. and eliminates a lot of my tangents, but it is still too complex. Or not? In this case not - this is a paper that needs one of those transition moments, where you say OK, what it all adds up to is that we've got to break our frame.
Are you saying there is a cultural imaginary, a way of looking at spaces and landscapes, that overrides a more direct mimesis of these landscapes, and that you can define that imaginary in precise terms by looking at these texts? And then the consequence would be what? That we cannot study these separate instances as "locally discrete moments."
This is a good idea, but I don't like the negative phrasing. When we phrase something negatively, like "x cannot be studies without y," it is probably correct, but I prefer something that highlights the advantage of what y brings to the study of x.
What I've got, basically, is that what Y brings to the study is a lot of hilarious gossip which:
1/ highlights the fact that authenticity is often borrowed, and what we say is uniquely ours rarely is, so go stuff your nationalism and exceptionalism, and consider global flows (or something like that) instead;
2/ helps illuminate the contradictory discourse of Cecilia Valdés on slavery/Blackness;
3/ discusses contexts of gestation of this novel such that concepts like "Cuban national novel" and "Latin American literature" no longer hold.
[It is possible that this is not a 6,000 word article but a book. I've got Villaverde, Isaacs, Carpentier, George Washington Cable, Longfellow, and Faulkner. I don't like these authors enough for a book, but I can see it. I need to direct a dissertation on this, then I'd get to enjoy the facts that get dug up without having to live with it 24/7. French Louisiana and Brazil both come into it all.]
"Borrowed Authenticity" would be a good title. Define in theoretical terms, stating precursors for your idea. Then, two case studies (your best ones), draw out conclusions and implications. I can see this in 7 or 8 thousand words.
P.S. Currently I start out with Sarmiento and Cooper, but I'm not really talking about them, just referring to work on them that has already been done, to show the kind of thing I'm talking about and to explain the term "plagiarized authenticity." I decided to start with Spanish America because that's what I intend to talk about mostly. But originally, this was my hilarious draft intro:
"References to Longfellow’s 1847 poem Evangeline are ubiquitous in South Louisiana’s cultural geography. The Acadian heroine has Anglo-American cultural characteristics and became popular among Louisiana's "‘cadiens" as they were assimilating to the United States as a white ethnicity. The figure of the placée, the unseen Creole mother we know from Absalom, Absalom, has origins in Haiti but is developed in the version we know by New England travel writers who wanted to see temporary, controlled liaisons in what were in fact the common-law interracial marriages of New Orleans. Louisianians enthusiastically embraced these Anglo origin myths, forgetting their origins in outsiders’ perceptions; as Jacques Henry points out, even the word Cajun is a United States, not an Acadian or Louisiana French term. What are we doing when we describe ourselves through others’ eyes?"
Humor is your best tool: expose absurdities and contradictions.
"Borrowed authenticity" is in fact the title of the file! :-D But Doris S.' term "plagiarized authenticity" is more fun. So currently it starts out:
From the late eighteenth century forward, Spanish American writing sought independence from the literary traditions of Spain; originality and representativity, as Angel Rama points out, were Dioscuri of a new literature that must be original to distinguish itself from its source. Originality would be attained through representation of the regions where the new writing emerged, since these were so clearly different from Europe. But what happens to postcolonial representation when originality is borrowed and authenticity is plagiarized, such that writing forges the nation in both senses of the word?
‘Plagiarized authenticity’ is Doris Sommer’s phrase referring to the Latin American rewritings of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. In his essay Civilización y barbarie, which locates Argentina’s originality in a landscape he wants to transform and a culture he wants to suppress, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento says the customs of the North American prairie Cooper evokes so resemble those of the Pampa that they could have been “plagiarized” from it. Neither author had seen the landscapes they described, but Cooper’s influence on Sarmiento’s depictions of the majestic wilderness is clear. Sommer even discusses Sarmiento’s appropriation of Cooper’s style as a form of [strategic plagiarism]: QUOTE ("strategic plagiarism" is my riff on her and Spivak).
Hahaha! This material is entertaining, you have to give it that.
Oh and P.S. The statue of Evangeline at the Acadian Memorial is actually of Dolores del Río, and many "Cajun" surnames (Domingue[z], Rodrigue[z], Segura, etc.) are actually Spanish although they've been reinterpreted as French.
Icelandic sweaters, a national icon, use Greenlandic patterns. Virgil's Eclogues locate the origins of ancient Rome in ancient Greece ... so they conquered it and swallowed it, and now get their authenticity and authority by saying they are the continuation. You can really go on and on with this, shock people and make them laugh. I could get famous on the public library circuit with this information and a for-a-layman discussion of the theoretical implications.
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