This project began as a class assignment for graduate students in a research methods course. The course aims to guide new MA and PhD English students through different kinds of scholarly research, from thinking with theory to applying bibliographic techniques. This particular version of the course took a single literary text as its object of study. Ernest J. Gaines’s classic novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman became an entry point for asking fundamental questions about genre, the category of fiction, problems of representation, and legacies of humanistic inquiry.