Abstract

The footnote, being dead, bears studying. Debilitated by disuse and misunderstanding, and finally euthanized in 1984 by Modern Language Association, footnotes in scholarly prose are gone with breezes that blow through English departments these days. The various subtleties and textures of referential and discursive footnotes, intricate interlockings of notes and texts, revelations of authorial intent-all terminated now, and quietly mummified. Therefore, since literary scholars need be wary of living art forms, which are inclined to twitch suddenly and knock over even most carefully constructed of critical hypotheses, footnote now becomes appropriate as a subject, rather than a method, of scholarly commentary. The footnote was a writer's direct address to reader, a message slipped under door, a whispered aside in counterpoint to formal discourse of text. Footnotes could elucidate, castigate, praise, blame, and crow. Notes might wander off on scenic side-trips, discurse eloquently on stuff and nomenclature, and run happily on for pages and pages until reader quite forgot she was supposed to be back at text by dinnertime. Material could slip into a footnote that simply would not fit body of work: Joseph Thomas, for example, in his sprightly 1985 history of College English Association, Sansculotte, appropriately published by that organization, used a footnote to present his wife's graduate-school recipe for roast bologna. Mary-Claire van Leunen's wise and witty Handbook for Scholars, a gift in 1978 from Alfred Knopf to a generation of perplexed students, attributed academic propensity for footnotes to soapbox phenomenon, wherein the footnote permits scholar to say another word, just one other word, just one word more, before he has to stop (8). Her discussion of content footnote was cautionary: