Literature Reviews Deploy Theory Instead of Reconstructing It

This blog is a repost. The original can be found on APU Writing Center’s Graduate Writing Blog.

In this blog series thus far, we have talked about how literature reviews in the humanities and social sciences can be approached as historiography, or examining “how other scholars have framed a subject and analyzed its discourse” (McCollum and Herbert 2014, 362). For that reason, we don’t want to occlude the work that other scholars have already done in connecting ideas. In the previous blogpost, we talked about how to do that when citing one source to demonstrate how a scholar has deployed another scholars’ work. However, what should you do when you are working with larger theories or models?

When doctoral students in the social sciences bring their literature reviews to the Writing Center, they often ask how much detail they need to give about a specific theory or model. Should they give a history of where it came from and how it has been used? Should they outline its strengths and weaknesses? Should they discuss how it has been used effectively and poorly in their discipline? Should they summarize, or at least cite, every study that has (ever) employed it? Their questions reveal how they conceptualize a literature review—as a map or summary of a conversation. Consequently, as an academic-in-training, they feel pressured to showcase their knowledge of the topic.

I must remind doctoral students that literature reviews are still argumentative—readers need to know why you are telling them certain details but not others. Consequently, instead of thinking of a literature review as reconstructing a discourse, it is better to think about a literature review as deploying a discourse.

For this discussion, I will again use an example from ethnomusicology. The following example demonstrates how to create an argument out of an existing conversation by talking about the use of semiotic theory within ethnomusicology. Specifically, I will discuss the critique that ethnomusicologists use semiotic terms in a faddish way instead of to create an interpretive framework. I’ll outline this discussion in a few paragraphs and then provide commentary on the moves that I make.  

Because of ethnomusicology’s connections to linguistic anthropology and musicology, many ethnomusicologists use semiotic theory—the study of signs and symbols and how people interpret them—to talk about meaning in music. The work of turn-of-the-20th-century semioticians, such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, and Louis Althusser, are foundational to much music scholarship focused on meaning in music (e.g., Nattiez 1990, Tarasti 1994, 2002, Taylor 2001; cf. Stone 2008). As a result, some of the terms introduced by these semioticians are now so commonplace when discussing musical meaning that many ethnomusicologists are accused of using them in uncritical ways.

In setting up the conversation, I have provided an explicit thesis (which I’ve put in bold above for added visibility). This thesis should raise questions in the reader’s mind: How do we know ethnomusicologists are engaging with semiotic theory in uncritical ways? What does that even mean? This thesis also helps me, the writer, decide which details to include and which details to exclude because I can easily get carried away with reconstructing the actual theories of different turn-of-the-century semioticians or narrating the story of semiotics in ethnomusicology rather than showing how some ethnomusicologists have critiqued the use of semiotics within the discipline.

Following is my next body paragraph:

For example, after reviewing how music scholars had applied linguistic models to studying music over several decades, Steven Feld stated in the 1970s that the majority of semiotic terms used by ethnomusicologists were “hocus-pocus,” merely constituting a “fancier way of expressing only that part of ethnomusicological data that concerns music sound” (1974, 211). He accused ethnomusicologists of incorporating semiotic terms into their work because everybody was doing it instead of demonstrating how semiotic analysis would explain something new about music. In Feld’s opinion, these ethnomusicologists were “playing a game” instead of “doing science” (1974, 211). Feld argued for direct, reflective engagement with semiotic theory and urged ethnomusicologists to be more critical about how they were using this theory in their work.

In this paragraph, I summarize the work of one scholar who has already reviewed and drawn conclusions about how fellow ethnomusicologists were using semiotic theory during his time. I may go on to talk about similar assessments by other ethnomusicologists, perhaps from subsequent decades. In this case, I don’t need to read and assess on my own how these “other” ethnomusicologists are using semiotic theory because I’m interested in the existing conversation about semiotic theory in ethnomusicology.

Here is another body paragraph:

The work of ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino exemplifies the kind of direct engagement that Feld desired. Turino has explored how Peircian semiotics can analyze musical affect, or why music creates emotional responses in listeners. His article “Signs of Imagination, Identity and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music,” published in 1999, is a direct discussion of the inner workings of 19th century philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory and Turino’s proposal of how it can be applied to interpreting music. A good third of the article is dedicated to describing Peirce’s semiotic concepts—specifically, the terms icon, index, and symbol—and the remaining sections apply these concepts to specific musical examples. In these cases, Turino explicitly engages with Peircian semiotic theory to create a tool to understand musical affect—how music generates emotion, structures experiences, and thus shapes memories—and musical representation—how music shapes identity and community. Instead of just asserting semiotic theory’s virtues, he demonstrates its utility and tempers his examples with the ethnographic reflexivity expected of ethnomusicologists. Turino has gone on to use this theoretical framework in much of his own work, both original research (Turino 2000) as well as general works aimed at music students (Turino 2008).

This paragraph provides an extended example of the kind of engagement Feld was seeking. Here, I’m not interested in what Turino said, but how he went about saying it. For my purposes, I don’t have to reconstruct what icon, index, and symbol mean, nor do I need to re-iterate any of the examples Turino uses to show his points. I don’t even need to give any information about Peirce beyond the fact that he was a 19th century philosopher. All those things are outside the scope of my literature review; instead, I want to focus on the moves that Turino makes with Peirce’s theory.

(Notice how, in my commentary, I can justify why I can leave things out. My thesis defines the scope of my argument; including other things would detract from my original intentions and could leave my reader confused about my overall purpose. Leaving things out doesn’t mean that I haven’t considered them or that I’ve overlooked something. When you’re writing a literature review for your dissertation or journal article, you must be able to articulate why you excluded some details because committee members or peer reviewers may ask you in the defense or in their peer review comments why you didn’t address x, y, or z. Providing justifications should satisfy them and prevent someone else from redefining the scope of your writing project in a way that leaves you unhappy).

Here is another body paragraph, and a conclusion:

Nevertheless, unlike Turino, many ethnomusicologists continue using semiotic terms without directly engaging wider theoretical discourse. For example, Paul Greene uses the terms icon, index, and symbol in clearly Peircian ways in his 2003 article on Nepali popular music to explicate what this music means to Nepali listeners, but he neither defines these terms nor references Peirce or Turino. Greene shows how sound engineers use specific studio effects to both evoke and frame aspects of rural experience in order to voice desire for the “authentic and traditional as well as cosmopolitan and commercially empowered” (2003, 44).  He uses the Peircian concepts of icon, index, and symbol to analyze how these layers are connected. Like Turino, Greene is concerned with how people use music to shape memory and representation, but unlike Turino, he does not directly engage with semiotic theory by naming it or citing it. Greene’s application of these terms is not injudicious; however, by omitting term definitions and not linking his work to existing works in ethnomusicology that use Peircian semiotics, Greene opens his work to criticism.

When an ethnomusicologist uses semiotic terms without referencing foundational scholars or defining their terms, they are not necessarily using these terms uncritically. Ethnomusicologists have engaged for so long with semiotic theory that some of these terms are now part of the discipline’s active vocabulary, and defining them may be redundant. Nevertheless, taking the time to articulate why they choose certain terms or theories to interpret their work and explicitly connect their work to existing discourse could avert accusations of choosing a term or a theory just because it is faddish.

In my last body paragraph, I provide a counter-example to Turino’s work by analyzing how another ethnomusicologist with the same interests used semiotic theory. However, this ethnomusicologist did not explicitly link his work to other works that used semiotics as their theoretical framework. By not defining his terms, Green makes several assumptions about his readers that may not be true, which could introduce misunderstandings of his message. He also does not link his research to existing discourse that uses Peircian semiotics, excluding this work from these conversations. So, despite Green’s efficient use of Peircian semiotics, readers are left to make the wider connections themselves, opening his work to criticism. 

In a few paragraphs, I have deployed a conversation. I wanted to know what ethnomusicologists thought of fellow ethnomusicologists using semiotic theory in their work. Instead of reconstructing this conversation, I deploy it to demonstrate how people employ specific ideas (in this case, semiotic theory). While I forefront the ideas, I demonstrate how people shape them, move them around, and deploy them in specific ways.   

How doctoral students engage with a theory or model will depend on which genre they are writing—a comprehensive exam paper, a proposal, their dissertation—but the same principles that I outlined in the previous blogpost still apply here: (a) keep in mind your purpose for citing these works in the first place, and (b) use people’s names and active voice whenever possible to show how scholars respond to, build on, challenge, critique, and question, each other’s work. Next, instead of mapping a conversation, demonstrate a point about that conversation.

Remember, a literature review is not an encyclopedia article or a report. You can still display your knowledge of a particular discourse, but you want to weave that knowledge into an argument. When you do that, you want make it clear who shaped these discourses—and to whom they were talking. We’ll talk more about how to do that productively in the next blog post.

References:

Feld, Steven. 1974. “Linguistic Models in Ethnomusicology.” Ethnomusicology 18(2): 1977-217

Greene, Paul D. 2003. “Nepal’s “Lok Pop” Music: Representations of Folk, Tropes of Memory, and Studio Technologies.” Asian Music 34 (1): 43-65

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1990. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stone, Ruth. 2008. Theory for Ethnomusicology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice-Hall.

Tarasti, Eero. 1994. A Theory of Musical Semiotics. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press

Tarasti, Eero. 2002. Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics. Berlin/New York: Mounton de Gruyter

Taylor, Timothy. 2001. Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture. New York, London: Routledge.

Turino, Thomas. 1999. “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Perician Semiotic Theory for Music.” Ethnomusicology 43(2): 221-255.

Turino, Thomas. 2000. Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.