Essay: An Historical Materialist Reading of Document

In a formal, academic essay of at least ten pages, discuss the "historical materialist" sources of one document's meaning.

The Subject Matter
You can choose any kind of document: print, digital, mammalian (as in "an antelope in a zoo"). All documents will have contexts and "ancestries" that contribute to their meanings and effects. In terms of subject matter, this essay is similar to Levy's chapter "Meditation on a Receipt," but with one important difference. That is, while Levy's chapter uses the receipt to introduce his book's focus on the historical and material nature of documents generally, your essay should specifically explain how the historical and material forces that constitute your chosen document also contribute to--and even determine--its meaning. Such forces would include the economic, technological, and social "necessities" that shaped how the document means.

The Argument
Your essay should use the specific case of your document to argue against the naive, "presentist" notion that documents are meaning-neutral vessels of communication which we freely use for our own ends. Instead, you will argue that the following kinds of material and historical conditions help substantially constitute not only the document's form and design, but its very meaning, effects, and degree of authority:

• the physical/technological medium
• the genre (see Levy's discussion of genre on page 160)
• language(s) that compose the document
• its technical means of production
• its financing and capital
• the means of distribution
• editorial processes mediating between its producer and consumer
• economic, social, and institutional means by which the document's "author" was constituted and supported
• the economic and social competition in which the document is produced and used
• historical and material aspects of design (font, graphic styles, etc--Caplin's book catalogues some of these.)

The Method
To describe the history and material nature of each of these contexts listed above would fill an entire book and make for very tedious writing and reading. Instead, choose the three or four contexts that are most revealing, surprising, and productive in fulfilling your purpose of arguing that historical materialist conditions determine your document's meaning to a higher degree than is apparent.

Your essay will perform a close reading of the document, using specific verbal or visual features as springboards into discussions of the contexts, which you will support with secondary sources such as Levy, Caplin, or Tufte. Remember you are not blandly presenting the historical and material context as "background," but making an explicit argument that these forces constitute the document's meaning--indeed, that they even constitute the writer/designer and reader/viewer themselves.

Textual Guidelines

• the essay's text should run at least ten double-spaced pages (2,500 words), not including your Works Cited section
• including screen shots is good, but cannot be counted toward the ten-page-minimum requirement.
• quote, cite, and substantially apply Levy at least two times in the essay
• quote and cite at least two other print sources
• quote and/or cite online sources as desired (follow Alan Liu's Student Wikipedia Use Policy)
• the style of the essay should be formal, correct academic prose which smoothly combines your own ideas/details with those from your secondary sources to advance your argument.
• employ MLA format to cite each reference (including online sources, class handouts, etc.) and to document them in a "Works Cited" section at the end of your essay.
  
  

Historical Materialism
Derived from Marxist theory, historical materialism is a philosophical explanation of history and society. It argues that the course of history is most fundamentally determined not by conscious deliberations and decisions--either individual or collective--but by material and economic conditions.

These conditions are expressed socially when, in Marx's words, people "inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production." (Such "inevitable," social relationships include those at work or school, and among groups drawn together by geographical, economic, racial, gendered limitations).

Since history itself is determined by these material and economic conditions and relationships, argues Marx, so people's politics, cultural and personal identities, and beliefs are conditioned by these forces in ways that are "independent of their will." In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx writes, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." By "social existence" here, Marx means people's positions in the economic world--that is, their close or distant relationship to the "means of production."

An online introduction--including references to print resources--can be found on Wikipedia's page "Historical Materialism"

You are not required to cite the theory of historical materialism in your essay, though you can if it is useful. This section is provided merely as an context for understanding the philosophy underlying both Levy and this assignment.

Criteria

1. that the essay runs at least ten double-spaced pages (2,500 words), not including your Works Cited section or screen shots/illustrations
   
   
2. that the essay focuses on a particular document and its historical/material contexts and "ancestries"
   
   
3. the degree to which the essay explains how the historical and material forces that constitute your chosen document also contribute to--and even determine--its meaning, effects, and authority.
   
   
4. the aptness, productiveness, and clarity of the two, three, or four chosen contexts in which you place the document
   
   
5. the quality of the "close reading" of specific verbal and visual features of the document, and...
   
   
6. the extent to which the details of the close reading are used as springboards into discussion of the contexts and secondary sources (We discussed this critical technique as "bouncing" from a closely-read, concrete detail, to a abstract idea or concept, to the arguments, quotations, key ideas from seconary sources.
   
   
7. that the essay productively quotes and discusses Levy at least twice,
   
   
8. that the essay productively quotes or closely paraphrases at least two other secondary print sources, and follows Alan Liu's Student Wikipedia Use Policy in the ways it employs blogs or collaborative sites like Wikipedia.
   
   
9. the degree to which the essay smoothly and purposefully integrates your own ideas and details with those from your secondary sources to advance your essay's argument.
   
   
10. how correctly--and thus transparently--the essay uses MLA parenthetical citation and documentation format, complete with a "Works Cited" section at the end of the essay documenting all sources including print, digital, and even class handouts
    
    
11. the degree to which the essay demonstrates an understanding of the historical/material approach to analyzing a document