In a letter to Peter Blau, who had taken over editorship of AJS from him, Everett Hughes expressed his view as follows:
A given piece of a man’s work has to be judged not merely by itself but as one item in his complete or growing production (…) and a man’s ongoing work is by the nature of the case a very personal product and by no means anonymous (quoted in Abbott 1999, 146–147).
This could be applied to auteurism, that a single film should be evaluated in the overall context of a director’s output. Each individual film is like a panel that needs to be placed in the work that came before it and the work that came after.
This could also be applied to my scholarship, and how my individual books are interrelated in terms of historical and chronological sequence.
Abbott, Andrew (1999) Department & Discipline. Chicago Sociology at One Hundred. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London.
