On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 10:44 PM, Phil Sandifer <snowspin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Dec 28, 2008, at 3:27 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: >> > >> The sole useful alternative view, would be that *both* report and >> counter-report are secondary sources. >> The simple fact that a person is speaking about their own work, >> doesn't make >> their words primary for that, it depends on the context in which >> they are >> speaking. >> >> I.E. You can't have your cake and eat it too. > > For the most part, we'd treat anything by Person X as a primary source > for [[Person X]]. I mean, if we want to make an explicit exception for > a category, that's fine, but right now, nothing I can see in NOR even > slightly undermines the idea that an article by Person X is a primary > source for [[Person X]].
If you want some more concrete examples, I was watching a documentary tonight about John Buchan where people quoted from a published volume of his letters (that is, letters written in his lifetime to other people and published later after his death). It reminded me strongly of the same situation with the letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, where the same sort of letters are quoted by later writers when talking about the author and his works. In this case (in both cases) it was actually addressing the charges of anti-semitism made against both authors (pretty weak accusations, but ones that were made and to varying levels refuted). But both sets of commentary (in the documentary and in the literature I've read about Tolkien) come up against the "they were a product of their times" meme, which is common when talking about authors born before the modern era. In this case, both authors were born in the latter part of the 19th century and wrote in about the same period (the early 20th century). Both were influenced by the First World War as well, another point of comparison between the two that I hadn't known about before, but that is less relevant here. (Though a quick search reveals that papers have been written comparing Tolkien and Buchan, but then papers have been written comparing Tolkien and Rider Haggard, and Tolkien and Wagner and Tolkien and Peake and Tolkien and Lewis, etc - it is one of the rather fruitful fields of literary studies to take author X and author Y and compare them to death - with varying levels of justification and insightful results). So, to get back on topic, where do "letters by [[Person X]]" fit into this, Phil? I can point to articles that source statements and claims to Tolkien's letters, or quotes from those letters. The articles should probably, more technically, point to secondary literature that uses those letters as a source, but there always seems to be exceptions where directly citing the letter seems the best way to allow verifiability. I can certainly attest that quoting a secondary source can give undue weight when the secondary source is giving only one interpretation of what a letter might mean. And the concern that quoting the letter directly is original research is also very real. Interpretation of the meaning of what someone has said can be very tricky. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
