Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [181]
Rather than leading with her own beliefs about the source, the writer emphasizes the issues and problems she believes are central in it. Although the writer’s position on her source is apparently neutral, she is not summarizing passively. In addition to making choices about what is especially significant in the source, she has also located it within the conversation that its author, Kristeller, was having with his own sources—the works of other scholars whose view of humanism he wants to revise (“Kristeller responds to two problems”).
As an alternative to formulating your opinion of the sources, try constructing the conversation you think the author of one of your sources might have with the author of another. How might they recast each other’s ideas, as opposed to merely agreeing or disagreeing with those ideas? Notice how, farther on in the paper, the writer uses this strategy to achieve a clearer picture of Kristeller’s point of view:
Unlike Kristeller, Tillyard [in The Elizabethan World Picture] also tries to place the seeds of individualism in the minds of the medievals. “Those who know most about the Middle Ages,” he claims, “now assure us that humanism and a belief in the present life were powerful by the 12th century” (30). Kristeller would undoubtedly reply that it was scholasticism, lacking the humanist emphasis on individualism that was powerful in the Middle Ages. True humanism was not evident in the Middle Ages.
In Kristeller’s view, Tillyard’s attempts to assign humanism to medievals are not only unwarranted, but also counterproductive. Kristeller ends his chapter on “Humanism and Scholasticism” with an exhortation to “develop a kind of historical pluralism. It is easy to praise everything in the past that appears to resemble certain favorable ideas of our own time, or to ridicule and minimize everything that disagrees with them. This method is neither fair nor helpful” (174). Tillyard, in trying to locate humanism within the medieval world, allows the value of humanism to supersede the worth of medieval scholarship. Kristeller argues that there is inherent worth in every intellectual movement, not simply in the ones that we find most agreeable.
Kristeller’s work is valuable to us primarily for its forthright definition of humanism. Tillyard has cleverly avoided this undertaking: he provides many textual references, usually with the companion comment that “this is an example of Renaissance humanism,” but he never overtly and fully formulates the definition in the way that Kristeller does.
As this excerpt makes evident, the writer has found something to say about her source by putting it into conversation with another source with which she believes her source, Kristeller, would disagree (“Kristeller would undoubtedly reply”). Although it seems obvious that the writer prefers Kristeller to Tillyard, her agreement with him is not the main point of her analysis. She focuses instead on foregrounding the problem that Kristeller is trying to solve and on relating that problem to different attitudes toward history. In so doing, she is deftly orchestrating the conversation between her sources. Her next step would be to distinguish her position from Kristeller’s. Having used Kristeller to get perspective on Tillyard, she now needs somehow to get perspective on Kristeller. The next strategy addresses this issue.
Strategy 6: Find Your Own Role in the Conversation
Even in cases in which you find a source’s position entirely congenial, it is not enough simply to agree with it. This does not mean you should feel compelled to attack the source but rather that you need to find something of your own to say about it.
In general, you have two options when you find yourself strongly in agreement with a source. You can (1) apply it in another context to qualify or expand its implications. Or you can (2) seek out other perspectives on the source in order to break the spell it has cast on you. To break the spell means you will necessarily become somewhat disillusioned but not that you will then need to dismiss everything