Note for professors
Those of you who are or intend to be professors, a suggestion: if you photocopy an article, say, to hand out to your students, it's really useful if you can put bibliographic information about the article on the front page. Just scrawl the title of the book or magazine the article appeared in, and the date, on the article. I know you can give that information in class and interested students can write it down, but it seems like it's more convenient for everyone if you write it on the article.
Partly I'm suggesting this 'cause it makes it easier for people to track down the original if they're so inclined, but mostly I think it can be very helpful to know the year something was published, to put it in historical perspective.
I don't think I realized 'til after college, for example, that Derrida was publishing stuff in the late '60s and early '70s in French, and that in some cases it wasn't translated into English 'til ten years later. I thought this differance stuff was some newfangled invention hot off the critical presses; I didn't get that it was as old as I was. (Still newfangled in some sense, sure, but not as much so as I thought.) And Derrida's rejection of established ways of looking at things somehow makes more sense as a product of the late '60s—hell, 1968 was the year of the student riots in Paris. (To be fair, the Derrida article isn't a good example of what I'm talking about, 'cause the translation we saw gives the publishing history in a footnote on the first page. But I do have an unrelated critical-theory article here with no indication of where or when it was published, which makes it hard to put it in a historical context.)
(Heh—all this talk about historical context presupposes that that's a useful way of looking at things. I was just re-skimming a piece on the "new historicism," which talked about placing works in historical context, particularly with regard to the interaction of state and culture; so I guess what I'm doing above is applying a new-historicist approach to looking at Derrida. I'm sure this is nothing new; I'm just amused. Critic, analyze thyself!)