Two journal articles on "Citation"/“Footnote”

Martin J. Powers, The Temporal Logic of Citation in Chinese Painting

-- Citation is better conceived of as a ‘conceptual displacement’. The artist making a citation may admire the values championed by an earlier master – and therefore cite that master – but s/he views that master as occupying an alien moment in the historical record, something not fully comprehensible to her or him except as a token of a bygone time. Therefore, in citation the historical referent, far from serving as a model, appears in the work as an anachronism.

-- When a writer cites the work of classical masters he can do so directly [retaining the original meaning], or he can reverse the original meaning of the phrase [ironically] . . . Anyone can use a phrase with its original meaning, but to speak ironically? If one is not a writer of great erudition and firm disposition, able to rise above the shackles of ordinary views, a writer who does not mechanically tread in the footsteps predecessors have laid down already, how can he achieve this?

-- If we understand art-historical citation as a displacement, or an anachronism personally chosen by an artist to reveal something of his or her idiosyncratic views about the past, then citation is incompatible with the notion of a timeless, classical standard.

-- In art-historical citation we find:

1. The juxtaposition of at least two, inconsistent, historical styles in one composition. If one model adopts a naturalistic style, typically the other does not.

2. Citations are understood as the artist’s subjective choices rather than being dictated by the model.

3. Cited features appear as intrusions in the composition rather than seamlessly blended.

4. The referent of the citation is given a relative rather than an absolute position in the history of styles. This is necessarily so because the work references multiple periods or masters.

-- It was noted earlier that Song critics exhibited considerable anxiety over dependence upon the past. Pierre Bourdieu has linked such anxieties to the existence of an open art market and the competition that inevitably comes with markets. As Bourdieu observed, those ‘“inventions of Romanticism” – the representations of culture as a kind of superior reality, irreducible to the vulgar demands of economics, and the ideology of free, disinterested “creation” founded on the spontaneity of innate inspiration – appear to be just so many reactions to the pressure of an anonymous market’. Even so, neither the art market nor literary theory alone could explain the development of art-historical citation as we find it among the Song literati.

-- In much of the Song theory on citation, the relative autonomy of the poet’s dialogue with the past emerges as a major source of concern, reminiscent in some ways of Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety’. In this vein of thought, one critic promoted a mode of citation in which ‘poets borrow the words of the old masters but do not make use of their ideas at all. This is the most subtle of poetic techniques.’ In other words, the poet makes it obvious that he is citing an older work, but does so in such a manner as to rob the earlier passage of its original meaning.

-- It is heuristically valuable to distinguish between citation and other forms of repetition in art, such as copying, imitating, referencing, or emulating. The formal characteristic of citation is simultaneous reference to two or more mutually incompatible historical styles in opposition to canonical naturalism. ‘Incompatible’ is the key, for it is not unusual in China or Europe for artists to blend in harmonious ways styles emanating from two different regions or historical moments. In citation, irony and anachronism are diagnostic, so the artist will tend to highlight the disjunction of the two styles through unexpected contrasts in the handling of texture, scale, or space. Needless to say, this practice makes the construction of an illusionistic, unified space impossible.

Huaiyu Chen, The Reception of the Modern Historiographic Footnote in Twentieth Century China

-- The footnote as the central topic of contemporary scholarship could be traced back to 1984 when Glen W. Bowersock published an article on Edward Gibbon’s footnoting art. Later, Anthony Grafton seriously studied the history of footnoting art in Western Europe as a modern historiographic practice. In 1994, Grafton first published an article in the journal History and Theory discussing the history of the footnote from De Thou to Ranke. In 1997, Grafton published an English book titled The Footnote: A Curious History, which generated significant interest in academia. He argued that the culture of footnotes in historiography rooted in the German research university system in the nineteenth century that favored research originality rather than narrative.

-- The footnote had twofold functions: to persuade readers to believe that historians have done considerable work sufficient to discuss the chosen topic academically and to indicate that historians have used primary historical materials, prompting critical and open-minded readers to explore the process of interpreting texts.

-- In 2002, Chuck Zerby published a book titled The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes, attributing the initial appearance of the footnote to the invention of the British literary tradition in the seventeenth century. 

-- The traditional writing and printing format in East Asia did not use the footnote due to the vertical arrangement of the text, which was different from the alphabet-based Western texts, which looked more comfortable for readers by writing and printing in the horizontal format. Therefore, using the footnote in East Asia involved the process of writing, printing, knowledge acquisition, and reader cognition.

-- Traditional annotations have a long history in Chinese traditional learning, appearing in numerous names, such as notes, commentaries, or explanatory notes.

-- Chinese term “jiaozhu脚注,” which denotes the modern footnote, appeared very early in Chinese textual tradition. Some scholars pointed out that it had appeared in Buddhist materials as early as the Tang Dynasty. It refers to the notes written in small font characters at the bottom of the page.

-- Liang Qichao梁启超 clearly explained the function of annotations in traditional Chinese historiography. He pointed out that there were two kinds of annotations: exegetical annotations and supplementary annotations. (《中国历史研究法》) Liang’s knowledge might come from Japan, given his close connections with Japanese politicians and scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

-- Japanese publications in the late nineteenth century often indicated foreign vocabulary by using katakana characters. In Japanese, the katakana “フットノート” (or フット・ノート) (Fottonoto) is used to refer to footnotes.

-- The entry “footnote” first appeared in Yan Huiqing’s颜惠庆(1877–1950) An English and Chinese Standard Dictionary published in Shanghai in 1908. As the editor of this dictionary, Yan Huiqing was a scholar with a translation degree from St. John’s University in Shanghai.

-- Apparently, within the domestic academia of Japan, the footnote was not accepted as a standard practice in the humanities, including the fields of history, philosophy, archeology, and anthropology in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. However, Japanese scholars who had experience living overseas and studying in Europe and the United States usually followed European and American academic styles and norms if they published papers in Europe and the United States.

-- The 1920s and 1930s were transitional periods, so the traditional Chinese format and Western academic style might appear together. For example, the annotations on the top of each page in the traditional Chinese way (which was called eyebrow annotation, or “meipi 眉批” in Chinese) might appear together with footnotes on the bottom of each page.

-- Examining the evolution of the footnote in modern Chinese historiography in the 1950s shows that Marxist historiography eventually played a pivotal role in establishing the footnote as a national standard in Chinese academia.