I bought a small pocket-sized monograph that fleshed out the details of his short, tormented life.
The monograph is still the thing: anyone who wants to be taken seriously as a scholar in the humanities should work towards having one.
Even with the changing publishing environment, some things stay the same: the importance of the physical, single-author monograph, and the importance of academic patronage.
The humanities' dependency on the monograph for the shaping and sharing of scholarship means that scholars – and publishers – should be paying attention.
Longer than an article and mostly intended to be read by fellow academics, the monograph presents primary research and original scholarship.
Open access is welcomed, and is seen to increase readership, but the physical object is still central to the consideration of the monograph: something that should allay fears of publishers wondering how any change in the REF requirement will affect their bottom line.
Will I publish another monograph without an associated open-access version?
The latest Jisc survey on the attitudes of academics in the humanities and social sciences to open-access monograph publishing makes an interesting contribution to this debate, showing how central single-author monographs remain to the humanities, and how important the physical – rather than digital – copies are.
It is an intentionally confusing and difficult book that manages to draw on both Proust and Beckett, yet remain intoxicatingly readable.McCarthy's subsequent monograph on Hergé's beloved comic cartoon journalist, "Tintin and the Secret of Literature", his avant-garde collective The International Necronautical Society and his second novel, "Men in Space" (2007), have been no less divisive.
Meanwhile Jim Chin, formerly an epidemiologist at the WHO, has given a more scientific account of the story in a monograph published by the International Policy Network, in London.Both level two main accusations.
No exhibition, no monograph, no conference.Still, if the name of this anglophile dandy is not familiar, his work is.
