I have a secret. I love my MLA style guide.
It was one of only 10 or so books that made it in the suitcase to Ireland. Ulysses came, for obvious reasons, as did my favourite-of-all-time book Homage to Catalonia, but not much else made the cut. My relationship with my MLA style guide started 5 years ago almost exactly. Imagine me, a freshman at NYU, book list in hand, navigating the narrow isles in the windowless basement of the NYU Bookstore. There it was, required for pretty much anyone in the College of Arts and Science, a steel blue cover with a snazzy multi-coloured graphic: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. "That's me!" I thought. "I'm going to be a writer of research papers!"
The relationship was testy at first, mainly because the MLA style guide tried to make my life a living hell:
"To cite an anthology or a compilation that was edited or complied by someone whose name appears on the title page, begin your entry with the name of the editor or compiler, followed by a comma and the abbreviation ed. or comp. If the person named performed more than one function--serving, say, as editor and translator--give both roles in the order in which they appear on the title page".
And that, my friends, is just the beginning.
Your basic citation is easy. Author last name, author first name. Title. Place of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication. But even that was hard to remember at first. Now it's ingrained in my fingers and my brain, but back then, I couldn't keep it all straight. Is it a colon after the publisher or after the city? Does the full citation end with a period? Who knows. The spine of my edition, the 5th, is broken from all the times I used the weight of my forearms to hold it open to section 4.6.1, The Basic Entry: A Book by a Single Author. There are translators, editions, reprints, articles, online publications, films, sound recordings, published dissertations, unpublished dissertations, anthologies, government publications (does anyone use government publications?), articles in scholarly journals that use issue numbers, articles in scholarly journals that page each issue separately...I could go on.
Back then, however, I didn't even know the half of it. They're not exactly sticklers for perfect MLA citations in a 120-student Conversations of the West lecture. You had to get the basic format right to avoid point deductions, but when we were young and naive, we might have given a citation like this:
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New York: Washing Square Press, 1992.
Seems straightforward, right? Well, Shakespeare wasn't around in 1992, so chances are someone compiled this particular volume, and they need credit too. So the citation is actually:
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992.
But wait! If I bought the book new, chances are it's not an original copy from the 1992 first printing. You need to figure out which edition, if it's numbered 2nd 3rd etc or by year, or if it's abridged or revised at all. OK, so here we go, the final citation:
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. 2002 ed. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992.
All of that information because you had "To be or not to be" quoted in your paper. Yikes.
I didn't realise how much my MLA style guide actually meant to me, however, until someone tried to take it away. By the Spring of freshman year I had declared myself an English major, and in the Fall of sophomore year, I took my first departmental requirement, Writing the Essay. My book list was exciting! M.H. Abrams' Glossary of Literary Terms! Poetry anthologies! T.S.Fucking.Eliot! The MLA Style Guide 6th edition!
Wait, what? The 6TH edition? I stood there, staring at it in the NYU bookstore. This cover was shiny shiny silver, like a fun house mirror, and it actually distorted my disgusted face and reflected it back up at me. But what about all the good times I shared with edition 5? Were those meaningless? All the late nights and long bibliographies just washed down the toilet?! "I won't have it", I thought. "I defy you, evil 6th edition, you and your flashy cover".
On the first day of class our T.A. told us we really ought to get the 6th edition instead of the 5th, because it included important updates related to the changing face of technology in research. More things were online, more databases, more confusing citations were in our future. I dug my heels in. "We're ENGLISH majors!" I thought. "We should be reading old books with musty-smelling covers and gold lettering, not faffing around online". I had no idea, of course, the countless hours ahead of me on JSTOR or Project Muse or the Times Digital archive, using my boolian search words and "advanced search" forms. But I kept my 5th edition, and I still have it today, right next to me at this very moment even, as I slave away on my masters thesis.
Now, the citations have become more complicated. Now there are revised editions of works that were originally written in the 1870's in French, only to be translated soon after and published by houses that don't even exist any more. There are title-less and author-less articles from The Times written in 1901, their scanned pages obscuring the really important bits you need. There are stories originally published in magazines that don't exist any more, edited into anthologies with introductions that were revised in the 1970s and reprinted in the 1990s. There are in-text parenthetical citations, endnotes, footnotes, bibliographic information in your works cited which is different than the bibliographic information in your endnotes. There are quotes you need which you actually found because you were reading a book where someone else quoted them. There are articles your professor photocopied for you but didn't include the publication information. There are original first editions from sometime before 1880 you think, except there is no publication date listed inside the text so you have to assume it was published the same year the author wrote the preface.
It's confusing and stressful and who the fuck knows if you're actually doing it the right way, but it's fine because I have my MLA style guide, 5th edition, to guide me.
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