APPENDIX
C
New Approaches to the Research Paper: Literature, History, and the World Wide Web
To err is human but to really foul things up requires a computer.
—Anonymous
The Internet is the world’s largest library. It’s just that all the books are on the floor.
—John Allen Paulos
To me, the computer is just another tool. You have to have a pen, and to know penmanship, but neither will write the book for you.
—Red Burns
Information is, above all, a principle of economy. The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.
—Peter Drucker
The previous appendix describes the traditional model and methods for writing a literary research paper. But literary research has become more wide-ranging and complicated, and a book like this one needs to devote another section to it to take into account important changes in the field of literary study and developments in technology.
Students in both literature and composition courses are now often asked to work with historical and literary materials and to demonstrate skills in interdisciplinary learning—and this educational change has taken place on the introductory as well as the intermediate and advanced levels. Like other fields, literary study is supplementing printed texts with electronic search tools, databases, and resources; literary analysis, writing, and research increasingly take place as much on the World Wide Web as in the library, and, in some cases, through e-mail and e-mail lists devoted to specific subject areas.
Historical research, enriched by resources on the Internet, can be very rewarding; it opens up new lines of inquiry as it teaches us about the contexts for literary works and enables us to respond to them in more complex ways. But we need the right strategies to perform this research effectively. Students in literature and composition must now possess the insight and understanding to explore, and to make good choices when consulting the ever-multiplying amounts of information available.
Case Study on Literature and History: The Internment of Japanese-Americans
The best means of illustrating the new approach to literature and history, and outlining the process for identifying new kinds of resources, is through a case study. For this purpose we have chosen the literature and history of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. This is a subject for research that a student might select or be assigned in a variety of courses—an introduction to literature in which a group of contemporary poems are studied, with some of them related in subject; a first-year writing course in which the subject is the literature of American immigration; a course in American or Asian-American literature; a course in multicultural literature or in American literature since World War II; or a senior seminar that examines twentieth-century literature and history, types of ethnic and minority literatures, or poetry and politics.
Many books, articles, and conferences have been devoted to the internment, and we can hardly do it justice here. This discussion describes the type of inquiry into the subject that you can undertake, beginning with the analysis of literary texts and moving outward from it into history as well as print and electronic sources.
Literary Texts
Reprinted here are two poems. The first is Mitsuye Yamada’s “The Question of Loyalty,” from Camp Notes and Other Poems (1992); the second is David Mura’s “An Argument: On 1942,” from After We Lost Our Way (1989).
Mitsuye Yamada
Mitsuye Yamada, the daughter of Japanese immigrants to the United States, was born in Japan in 1923, during her mother’s return visit to her native land. She was raised in Seattle, but in 1942 she and her family were incarcerated and then relocated to an internment camp in Idaho. This was the result of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in February 1942. This order, in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, gave military authorities the right to remove any and all persons from “military areas.” In 1954 Yamada became an American citizen. In addition to Camp Notes and Other Poems, she has written Desert Run: Poems and Stories (1988) and edited Sowing TI Leaves: Writings by Multicultural Women (1991).
The Question of Loyalty [1976]
I met the deadline
for alien registration
once before
was numbered fingerprinted
and ordered not to travel 5
without permit.
But alien still they said I must
forswear allegiance to the emperor.
for me that was easy
I didn’t even know him 10
but my mother who did cried out
If I sign this
What will I be?
I am doubly loyal
to my American children 15
also to my own people.
How can double mean nothing?
I wish no one to lose this war.
Everyone does.
I was poor 20
at math.
I signed
my only ticket out.
David Mura
David Mura is a sansei, a third-generation Japanese-American. He was born in 1952, seven years after the end of the war. In both poetry and prose, he has examined race, ethnicity, and sexuality, and has described his quest for self-knowledge and personal and familial identity. A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction (1987) was his first book. Two years later he published After We Lost Our Way in the National Poetry Series, and followed it with a second book of verse, The Colors of Desire: Poems (1995). He has also written Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (1992) and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity (1996), which tells of his childhood in Chicago, his parents’ recollections of the internment camps, and the impact of internment on several generations of Japanese-Americans.
An Argument: On 1942 [1989]
For my mother
Near Rose’s Chop Suey and Jinosuke’s grocery, the temple
where incense hovered and inspired dense evening chants (prayers for Buddha’s mercy, colorless and deep), that day he was fired . . .
—No, no, no, she tells me. Why bring it back?
The camps are over. (Also overly dramatic.)
Forget shoyu-stained furoshiki,° mochi° on a stick:
You’re like a terrier, David, gnawing a bone, an old, old trick . . . 4
Mostly we were bored. Women cooked and sewed,
men played blackjack, dug gardens, a benjo° . . .
Who noticed barbed wire, guards in the towers?
We were children, hunting stones, birds, wild flowers. 8
Yes, Mother hid tins of tsukemono° and eel
beneath the bed. And when the last was peeled,
clamped tight her lips, growing thinner and thinner.
But cancer not the camps made her throat blacker 12
. . .And she didn’t die then . . . after the war, in St. Paul,
you weren’t even born. Oh, I know, I know, it’s all
part of your job, your way, but why can’t you glean
how far we’ve come, how much I can’t recall— 16
David, it was so long ago—how useless it seems . . .
Your goal is eventually to move to historical research, but first you must know the poems well. Reflect on the movement of each: how it begins, what occupies its middle sections, and how it ends. Consider the relationship of the structure—the length of the lines, the organization of the stanzas, the diction and imagery—to the dramatic situation and themes.
• For this analysis, reread the discussions of speaker, structure, figurative language, and other key terms presented in Chapter 16 of this book.
Yamada focuses on the conflict her mother experiences. The mother expresses her loyalty to her children, to her American children, even as she cherishes her loyalty to her own people, the Japanese (though this word, revealingly, is not used). She wants there to be no loser in the war; she hopes for an impossible stalemate, in which neither side loses.
The war thus manifests itself in the mother’s own identity, in the tension between the person she has been and the person, it seems, she must become. If the mother signs the form forswearing allegiance to the Japanese emperor, she will be denying her ancestry, forced to disclaim one-half of herself. She cannot be who she is.
Mura describes the conflict between his mother and himself and delves into the struggle that his mother wages with her memories. Unlike Yamada, Mura was not in the camps himself; he is seeking knowledge about an experience that took place before he was born.
The mother objects to her son’s efforts to make her remember: “You’re like a terrier, David, gnawing a bone, an old, old trick.” But as her own listing of details shows, the mother, if only to herself, has continued to linger over the internment—the men playing blackjack, the barbed wire. She says there is much she cannot recall, but one feels that there is much that remains keenly present for her, much that she could recall and has recalled.
The mother portrayed in this poem cannot practice the lesson she gives to her son. Nor will he allow her to. He is curious to know what happened; he wants his mother to tell about her experiences and, one suspects, to explain why she and the others did not resist then and have not spoken out since.
These are powerful poems even for a reader who knows only a little about the historical facts to which Yamada and Mura bear witness—a reader who knows only in a general way that many Japanese-Americans were forced during World War II to leave their West Coast homes and live in internment camps in the California desert, in other western states, and as far east as Arkansas. But the poems become still more effective for a reader who knows in depth and detail about this episode in American history, and who can bring this knowledge to a reading of the texts and present it in an analytical research paper.
One form of historical research is to follow a traditional route for literary research. The literary resources and methods described in Appendix B can lead to secondary sources on the authors and their writings and to information about their careers, the work they have done, and its major themes. There will be historical information in many of these sources, particularly those of a recent date.
By checking in the MLA International Bibliography (see page 1770), you can locate items such as the following:
On Yamada:
Jaskoski, Helen. “Interview with Mitsuye Yamada.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. 15:1 (Spring 1988): 97–108.
Schweik, Susan. “A Needle with Mama’s Voice: Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes and the American Canon of War Poetry.” In Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation. Ed. Helen M. Cooper and Adrienne Auslander Munich. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.
Usui, Masami. “A Language of Her Own in Mitsuye Yamada’s Poetry and Stories.” Studies in Culture and the Humanities: Bulletin of the Faculty of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University: 5:3 (1996): 1–17.
On Mura:
Taylor, Gordon O. “‘The Country I Had Thought Was My Home’: David Mura’s Turning Japanese and Japanese-American Narrative since World War II.” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate (Münster, Germany): 6:3 (1996–1997): 283–309.
General studies:
Nakanishi, Don T., ed. Japanese American Internment: Commemorative Issue. Special issue of Amerasia Journal 19:1 (1993).
Thiesmeyer, Lynn. “The Discourse of Official Violence: Anti-Japanese North American Discourse and the American Internment Camps.” Discourse & Society 6:3 (July 1995): 319–52.
Yogi, Stan. “Yearning for the Past: The Dynamics of Memory in Sansei Internment Poetry.” Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Ed. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996.
Through electronic access and interlibrary loan, a student can obtain almost any source, even if it is not carried by a library on campus. But sometimes interlibrary loan can take a few days, a week, or more. Remember the importance of starting early on research projects. Request copies of everything while there is still time before the deadline to examine them.
Historical Sources
The sources in the MLA International Bibliography, while promising, may take for granted more than you know at this stage; the discussion and analysis presented in them assumes that readers already have the background that you are seeking to acquire. How can you begin to acquire a base of historical knowledge?
Start small. Don’t overwhelm yourself with more information than you can handle. Keep in mind as well that you are not aiming to become a historian, but, instead, to enrich your literary explorations with knowledge drawn from another field and set of sources.
Basic Reference Books (Short Paper)
It is best to begin with basic reference books, and you can get to them by consulting the following:
Balay, Robert. Guide to Reference Books, 11th ed. Chicago: American Library Association, 1996.
Blazek, Ron, and Elizabeth Aversa. The Humanities: A Selective Guide to Information Sources, 5th ed. Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 2000.
This is an annotated guide to research sources in literature, art, and other fields in the humanities.
Or, consult ARBA Guide to Subject Encyclopedias and Dictionaries (1986); and First Stop: The Master Index to Subject Encyclopedias...
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