« November 2003 | Main | January 2004 »
Momentarily we are off to A Touch of Asia, which is the best Indian restaurant we've found here in KC. Then champagne at a friend's place; like us, she's a fellow loft-dweller downtown. Finally, we might end up at the fireworks display scheduled to take place at the City Market.
May your new year bring you joy.
While we were at MLA, our 17-year-old cat was looked after by CJ's Pet Sitting, and I can't recommend CJ strongly enough. She obviously loves cats, is very affordable, and leaves a detailed report for every visit that she makes. If you're a Kansas City resident in need of such services, contact her at cjpetsitting [at] hotmail [dot] com or 816-305-3694.
It might be sunny in San Diego, but it's still winter in KC. Some highlights of MLA 2003:
Update: I met Steven Shaviro in a crosswalk as he and Chuck were on their way to get coffee. Shaviro has posted a handful of photos from the conference.
Greetings from sunny San Diego! We lucked into a room with a view of the bay. We've had some delicious seafood, have met with several friends old and new, and even attended a panel or two. Wish you were here.
What do Wordherders write about? Check out...
But "Winston" thinks we're all incestuous Marxists, apparently because I use the word "collective" to describe the Wordherders and because we comment on each other's blogs. I would respectfully suggest that inattention to detail and nuance is more likely to sink one's chances on the job market than academic prejudice against conservatives.
By the way, I use the word "collective" in the sense of "a collective body or whole" as in this example from 1655: "A Jewell (sometimes taken for a single precious stone) is properly a collective of many" (taken from online OED).
If you're going to San Diego and you want to do the blogger meetup thing, email me (ghw at wordherders dot net) to get my cell phone number. I'll be staying at the Marriott.
One of our projects while we're in San Diego, where we'll visit with MLA-attending friends who are now spread far and wide, is to write a rock opera. This is the sort of thing that kept us sane in grad school, where we came up with a few parody songs about literary theory and three songs of a rock opera about a serial killer.
Already some collaboration has started over email. It looks promising. I'll keep you posted, if you like.
At SRO Video the other night, L picked out City of Ghosts, Matt Dillon's directing debut. The movie's not bad, but I was really taken with the soundtrack, which featured what I assume to be traditional Cambodian music along with Khmer versions of American pop songs and Khmer pop songs from before Pol Pot's murderous reign. By browsing Amazon, I also came across additional recordings in a similar vein: the debut release by Dengue Fever and a compilation of various artists entitled Cambodian Rocks. You can listen to short snippets from the first two CDs at Amazon. Captivating stuff.
My standard disclaimer: I'm not a Methodist, but I research and write about eighteenth-century Methodism.
My Aunt Donna forwarded me the following info from the Thursday, December 18 edition of an email newsletter sent out by The Writer's Almanac at Minnesota Public Radio.
It's the birthday of hymn writer Charles Wesley, born in Epworth, England (1708). He went to Oxford University, where he formed a small religious study group that included his brother John and a few other friends. They were nicknamed "the holy club" and later "the Methodists" because of their methodical worship and strict discipline. The group eventually broke up, but a few years later John and Charles Wesley founded the first official Methodist Society, laying the foundations for modern-day Methodism.
After graduating from Oxford, Charles grew frustrated with Christianity and began to question his beliefs. He went on a mission to the new American colony of Georgia in 1735. He worked as a secretary of the governor, but he found it hard to adapt the rough lifestyle in America. He wrote, "Life is bitterness to me." When he returned to London, he experienced a conversion that confirmed his religious faith. On May 21, 1738, he wrote, "I now found myself at peace with God .... I went to bed still sensible of my own weakness ... yet confident of Christ's protection." The next day, he wrote his first hymn, which begins:
Where shall my wondering soul begin? How shall I all to heaven aspire? A slave redeemed from death and sin, A brand plucked from eternal fire!
Wesley went on to write over 6,500 hymns, including "Hark! the herald angels sing," and "Oh for a thousand tongues to sing." About a sixth of the 750 hymns in the official hymnal of the Methodist Episcopal Church were written by Wesley.
It's easy to pull a few unrepresentative examples out of over two thousand possibilities to ridicule the academic papers delivered at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, which is what Scott McLemee did over at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Perhaps McLemee just meant to write a light-hearted piece that wasn't intended to lump together all of the work presented at MLA. But I've heard too many comments over the years, usually from people outside the profession, arguing that the MLA features nothing but silly, trivial, over-politicized scholarship. It's just not true.
Fortunately, the MLA publishes online the program with all the papers listed, so you could potentially judge the conference for yourself. Unfortunately, you have to be a member in order to access this information. Fortunately, dear reader, I'm a member, and I've cut and pasted below all the papers classified as on the subject of "English Literature." (Note that this represents only a fraction of the total papers to be delivered there.)
I think they sound like the kind of interesting work one would expect scholars of language and literature to be doing.
Old English Language and Literature
110. Anglo-Saxon Cultural Reflections: Ghosts, Fire, Sex
1. "Ghost Words and Ghost Meanings in Old English Literature," Philip G. Rusche, Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas
2. "The Candle Relic of Anglo-Saxon Exeter: Early Medieval Ideas of the Physicality of Fire," Nancy P. Stork, San Jose State Univ.
3. "Sexuality and the Late Laws of Anglo-Saxon England," Carol Braun Pasternack, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
284. Toil and Trouble: Anxiety in Anglo-Saxon England
1. "Grief in Anglo-Saxon England: Weeping Men and the 'Wif-Hades Man' in the Lives of Female Confessors," Robin J. Norris, Southeastern Louisiana Univ.
2. "'Swa Begnornodon Geata Leode': Beowulf as Traumatic Memory," John P. Walter, Saint Louis Univ.
3. "'Eala! Hit Is Micel Gedeorf': Work and Problems of Identity in the Colloquy and 'Gifts of Men,'" Marie Nelson, Univ. of Florida
551. Heroic Masculinity
1. "Hrothgar's Masculine Tears: Gravitas," John M. Hill, United States Naval Acad.
2. "'Only a Dream': Searching for Heroic Masculinity in Cynewulf's Elene," Christina M. Heckman, Oberlin Coll.
3. "Devils and Other Strangers: The Antihero in Anglo-Saxon Poetry," Carl F. Larrivee, Wayne State Univ.
Middle English Language and Literature, Excluding Chaucer
245. Gower and Revolution
1. "Allegory and the Politics of Revolt," Emily Rebecca Steiner, Univ. of Pennsylvania
2. "Love Lyric and the Lancastrian Accession: Gower's Cinkante Balades and Chaucer's 'Complaint to His Purse,'" Robert W. Epstein, Fairfield Univ.
3. "Gower's Henry," Lynn Staley, Colgate Univ.
428. The England of the Chronicles
1. "Warfare, Language, and English Identity: The 'Battle of Brunanburh' in Old English and Latin," Kenneth J. Tiller, Univ. of Virginia's Coll. at Wise
2. "Crusading Identities: Ralph of Coggeshall, Thomas Walsingham, and the Assimilation of Josephus," Suzanne Yeager, Univ. of Toronto
3. "The Medieval 'Brut Mnemonic' and Early Modern Nationalism," Elizabeth Johnson Bryan, Brown Univ.
465. Literature and the Other Disciplines
1. "Ricardian Mirabilia? Reading Manmade Marvels in the Late Fourteenth Century," Scott Lightsey, Georgia State Univ.
2. "What's a Nice Scholar like You Doing in a Field like That? African American Literary Theory and Medieval Studies," Pearl S. Ratunil, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago
Respondent: John M. Ganim, Univ. of California, Riverside
Chaucer
326. Apertures and Orifices in Chaucer
1. "Theseus's Ars-Metrike: An Irresistible Opening for the Canterbury Tales, Fragment I," Harold N. Ramdass, Princeton Univ.
2. "The Body, the Taboo, and Epistemology in the Miller's Tale and the Summoner's Tale," Andrea Fitzgerald Jones, Univ. of California, Los Angeles
3. "'The Entree Was Long and Streit, and Gastly for to See': Visual and Verbal Penetration in the Knight's Tale," Disa Gambera, Univ. of Utah
730. Aggression in Chaucer
Speakers: Paul Strohm, Columbia Univ.
Peter W. Travis, Dartmouth Coll.
Christine Nuhad Chism, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick
Marion E. Turner, Univ. of Oxford, Magdalen Coll.
756. Chaucer and His Contemporaries
1. "The Chaucer-Gower Debate and the Poetics of Urban Desire," Andrew Scott Galloway, Cornell Univ.
2. "'What Shul These Clothes Thus Manyfold?': Chaucer and the Late Medieval Clothing Debates," Andrea Denny-Brown, Columbia Univ.
3. "'So Stant Thi Regne of God and Man Confermed': The Failure of 'To His Purse,'" Robert Frederick Yeager, Univ. of West Florida
Literature of the English Renaissance, Excluding Shakespeare
203. The Touch of Harry: A Session in Honor of Harry Berger
1. "The Trouble with Harry," Maureen Quilligan, Duke Univ.
2. "I'm Just Wild About," Patricia A. Parker, Stanford Univ.
3. "Renaissance Bergerlich Culture," Leonard Barkan, Princeton Univ.
429. Labor in Early Modern England
1. "Watching Women's Work in John Skelton's Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell," Maura M. Tarnoff, Univ. of Virginia
2. "Deloney's Jack of Newbery and the Revalorization of Women," Peter C. Herman, San Diego State Univ.
3. "'The Sweat of Their Labors': Reading the Sharers' Papers, 1635," Melissa D. Aaron, California State Polytechnic Univ., Pomona
552. The Poetics of Medicine in Early Modern England
1. "'Give Sorrow Words': Speaking Grief in Early Modern England," Michael Carl Schoenfeldt, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor
2. "Living Magnets and the Legacy of Paracelsianism in Donne's 'An Anatomie of the World,'" Angus I. Fletcher, Stanford Univ.
3. "Wound-Man Walking: Mutilation and the Martial Body," Patricia Ann Cahill, Emory Univ.
Shakespeare
285. Language and Gender in Shakespeare
1. "Female Macho Performativity," Donald K. Hedrick, Kansas State Univ.
2. "Translation, Gender, and Constructions of Identity in Henry V and Henry IV, Part I," Deborah Uman, Eastern Connecticut State Univ.
3. "Rhythms of Female Thought in All's Well That Ends Well," Lars Engle, Univ. of Tulsa
506. Shakespeare and Asia: Film and Performance
1. "Stylizing Shakespeare: Intersecting Cultural Identities on Chinese Xiqu Stages," Alexander C. Y. Huang, Stanford Univ.
2. "Intercultural Performance versus Transnational Cinema: Documentaries on Shakespeare in Asia," Richard Burt, Univ. of Florida
3. "Shakespeare and Kurosawa: A Conversation on Historical Responsibility," Joan Pong Linton, Indiana Univ., Bloomington
709. As through a Glass Darkly: Distortion and Subjectivity in Shakespeare
1. "Misframing Shakespeare: The Sonnets in Criticism of the Plays," Jonathan Vere Crewe, Dartmouth Coll.
2. "Fickle Glass," Rayna Kalas, Cornell Univ.
3. "The Subject of Forgetting," Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Penn State Univ., University Park
Seventeenth-Century English Literature
430. Religious Zeal in Seventeenth-Century England
1. "Mary Cary: Fifth Monarchist Zeal and Radical Religious Hermeneutics," David Loewenstein, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
2. "'Not Our Sort of Person': The Earliest Teaching of Bunyan at Harvard," Dayton W. Haskin, Boston Coll.
3. "Zeal and the Poets: Martyrs, Terrorists, Assassins," Nigel S. Smith, Princeton Univ.
588. Private Matters in Seventeenth-Century England
1. "Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces," Mary Thomas Crane, Boston Coll.
2. "Private Property and Privation: Amelia Lanyer and Female Recovery of Paradise," Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Fairmont State Coll.
3. "Architectural Involutions: Private Spaces and Domestic Places," Mimi Yiu, Cornell Univ.
757. Women and Science
1. "Margaret Cavendish and the Science of Sympathy," Seth L. Lobis, Yale Univ.
2. "Stones like Women's Paps: Assimilating Men in Jane Sharp's New Anatomy," Caroline Todd Bicks, Boston Coll.
3. "Traducing Sex, Translating Science: Lucy Hutchinson's Lucretius and Foucault's History of Sexuality," Denise Albanese, George Mason Univ.
Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century English Literature
204. Libertinism
1. "Aphra Behn's Religious Libertinism," Sarah Ellenzweig, Rice Univ.
2. "Icons and Phantasms in the Twilight of Libertinism," Alison Conway, Univ. of Western Ontario
3. "'The Most Agreeable of All Bad Characters': The English Libertine Rake and the Problem of Emulation," Erin Skye Mackie, Univ. of Canterbury
4. "'His Mind Is a Room Hung Round with Aretine's Postures': Libertine Spatialization in Restoration Writing," James Grantham Turner, Univ. of California, Berkeley
431. Transatlantic Crossings
1. "Polly's Work and John Gay's Cultural Transmission: What You See Is What You Get," W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Florida State Univ.
2. "Anne Bradstreet, Transatlantic Capital, and Creativity," Kimberly Suzann Latta, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh
3. "Antitheatricality: The Transatlantic Connection," Lisa A. Freeman, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago
507. Female Playwrights: Text and Performance
1. "'We All Smoke Here': Bacon's Rebellion, Colonial Identity, and the Invention of America in Behn's Widow Ranter," Peter C. Herman, San Diego State Univ.
2. "Recovering the Playwright: The Implications of Eliza Haywood's Theatrical Career," Emily Hodgson Anderson, Yale Univ.
3. "The First One Hundred Years: A Project to Return Female Playwrights to the Stage," Gwynn MacDonald, Juggernaut Theatre
Late-Eighteenth-Century English Literature
170. Equiano and the Cultural Contexts of Abolition
1. "New Writings by Equiano and What They May Tell Us," Vincent A. Carretta, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
2. "Equiano and the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Africa," George Boulukos, Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale
3. "Slavery, the Death Penalty, and Equiano's Interesting Narrative," Mark E. Canuel, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago
553. Women and Print Culture in the 1790s
1. "Anna Laetitia Barbauld: New Formats for Families and Literature," Frances Ferguson, Johns Hopkins Univ.
2. "Wollstonecraft's Lessons," Sonia Hofkosh, Tufts Univ.
3. "Locating Politics and Print Culture in the Anti-Jacobin Novel," Kevin Michael Gilmartin, California Inst. of Tech.
4. "Self-Representations: Advertisement and Uncertainty in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey," Barbara MacVean Benedict, Trinity Coll., CT
731. Recentering the Field: Peripheral Geographies, Peripheral Sexualities
1. "Captain Singleton and the Rise of the Novel," Jody Greene, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz
2. "'No, Madam, I Am an American': Lydia Maria Child's Romantic Revolution," Ashley E. Shannon, Univ. of Texas, Austin
3. "Imperial Reflections: Hindi and English," Alok Yadav, George Mason Univ.
The English Romantic Period
246. Materials of Memory
1. "Spots of Dust; or, What Remains?" Julie Ann Carlson, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
2. "Wordsworthian Memory and the Independent Life of Forms," Ann Wierda Rowland, Harvard Univ.
3. "Sardanapalus and the Spectacular Relic," Andrew M. Stauffer, Boston Univ.
4. "Romanticism and Modern Memory," David E. Simpson, Univ. of California, Davis
683. Materials of Print
1. "Mary Robinson and Radical Print Culture," Adriana Craciun, Univ. of Nottingham
2. "The Illustrated Lay of the Last Minstrel," Margaret E. Russett, Univ. of Southern California
3. "Print Culture on the Margin: Joanna Southcott and Her Followers in the Home Workshop of the Word," Gary D. Kelly, Univ. of Alberta
4. "Harems, Copyright, and the Working-Class Reader: Byron's Don Juan Underground," Colette C. Colligan, Simon Fraser Univ.
732. Technologies of Memory
1. "Daffodil VR: Memory as Romantic Medium," Richard Menke, Univ. of Georgia
2. "Fascinating Rhythm," Margaret E. Russett, Univ. of Southern California
3. "Juan the Memorious: The Feinaiglian Narrative Dynamics of Don Juan," Stuart Samuel Peterfreund, Northeastern Univ.
The Victorian Period
142. Victorian Terror I: Terror and Terrorism
1. "Christian Terrorism in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii," Matthew B. Kaiser, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick
2. "Domestic Terror and the Penitent Woman Tableau," Melissa Valiska Gregory, Univ. of Toledo
3. "A Tale of Two Towers: Teaching Dickens after 9/11," David Faulkner, State Univ. of New York, Cortland
286. Victorian Terror II: England and India
1. "Domestic Feelings and Cultural Terror in Mainwaring's The Suttee (1830)," Jeanette M. Herman, Univ. of Texas, Austin
2. "Terror and Terrorism in the Indian Mutiny," Christopher Herbert, Northwestern Univ.
3. "Kipling as Terrorist: Sadomasochism and the Imperial Cell," John R. Kucich, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor
432. Victorian Terror III: Shock
1. "Terror, the Unconscious, and Gwendolen's 'Hidden Wound': The Genealogy of Psychic Shock in Daniel Deronda," Jill L. Matus, Univ. of Toronto
2. "Body Shock: What to Do with the Dying?" Karen Chase, Univ. of Virginia; Michael Levenson, Univ. of Virginia
3. "Genre Shock: Victorian Terror for the Contemporary Film Spectator," Dianne Fallon Sadoff, Miami Univ., Oxford
Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century English Literature
111. Film and Ideology
1. "The Birth of a Nation and the Defense of Private Life," Michael Tratner, Bryn Mawr Coll.
2. "New Women Criminals: Suffragettes in Early British Film, 1896-1913," Elizabeth C. Miller, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
3. "Cat and Mouse: Technology and Ideology in Early American Cinema," J. Graham McPhee, Univ. of Portsmouth
Respondent: Michael Valdez Moses, Duke Univ.
327. Protomodernism
1. "'As Lord Campbell's Act Forbids': Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Protomodern Censor," Celia Marshik, State Univ. of New York, Stony Brook
2. "Disorientalism: Imperial Geography and the Origins of Conrad's Modernist Aesthetics," Michael Valdez Moses, Duke Univ.
3. "Meredith and Arelational Modernism," Christopher Lane, Northwestern Univ.
554. Speed, Velocity, Acceleration
1. "Time and the Circling of the World," Jonathan H. Grossman, Univ. of California, Los Angeles
2. "Being, Dwelling, Resisting: British Modernism and the Failure of the International Style," Victoria P. Rosner, Texas A&M Univ., College Station
3. "Slowness and Altitude: Aerial Photography and Interwar Modernism," Paul K. Saint-Amour, Pomona Coll.
4. "The Adrenaline Aesthetic: Speed, Pleasure, Politics," Andrew Enda Duffy
Twentieth-Century English Literature
112. Ted Hughes
1. "Ted Hughes and Keith Douglas," Cornelia D. J. Pearsall, Smith Coll.
2. "Cenotaphs and Photographs," Charles Daniel Blanton, Princeton Univ.
3. "Reassessing Ted Hughes," Charles Stewart Berger, Southern Illinois Univ., Edwardsville
205. Writing World War II
1. "Writing (and Talking) War: E. M. Forster's BBC Wartime Broadcasts to India," Elizabeth MacLeod Walls, Nebraska Wesleyan Univ.; Linda Kay Hughes, Texas Christian Univ.
2. "Oblique Representations of World War II in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Ian McEwan's Atonement," Earl G. Ingersoll, State Univ. of New York, Coll. at Brockport
3. "Raking the Ashes of Memory: Fragmented Silences, Grief, and Trauma in Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills," Hema Chari, California State Univ., Los Angeles
4. "A Different Battle of Britain: Contemporary British Women Writers and the Holocaust," Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern Univ.
328. Female British Gothic
1. "Negation and (Dis)Embodiment in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body," Ellen Elizabeth Berry, Bowling Green State Univ.
2. "Unwounding Women: Reembodying the Gothic in Dirty Weekend," Helene Meyers, Southwestern Univ.
3. "Erotic Sublime and Masochism: What's the Difference?" Marianne K. Noble, American Univ.
4. "In Memorium Darkwave Hippies: Angela Carter through a Goth Lens," Carol Siegel, Washington State Univ., Vancouver
English Literature Other Than British and American
113. Anglophone Interjections I: South-South Dialogues
1. "Caribbean Cosmopolitanism: Caribbean Travelers in the Caribbean and West Africa in the Late Nineteenth Century," Faith Lois Smith, Brandeis Univ.
2. "Antique Cosmopolitanism? The Indian Ocean Trade in Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie," Benjamin S. Graves, Univ. of California, Berkeley
3. "Internalizing History: Psyche and Solace in Bessie Head's A Question of Power and Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters," Stephane P. Robolin, Duke Univ.
4. "Love, the Home, and the World: Repositioning India in 'Asia,'" Samir Dayal, Bentley Coll.
206. Anglophone Interjections II: Old-New Discourses
1. "Colonial Fantasies, Postcolonial Masculinity: Ram/RAM Rajya in The Moor's Last Sigh," Deepika Bahri, Emory Univ.
2. "Revisiting the Indian 'Renaissance': Vernacular-Anglophone Relations in Colonial India," Makarand R. Paranjape, Jawaharlal Nehru Univ., New Delhi
3. "Anglophone Portraits of the Temple Dancer: Then and Now," Pradyumna S. Chauhan, Arcadia Univ.
4. "Imperial Theatricality from Kipling to Rushdie," John S. McBratney, John Carroll Univ.
5. "Plural Temporalities: Toward a Genealogy of Cosmopolitanism," Betty Joseph, Rice Univ.
466. Anglophone Interjections III: Southern Cosmopolitanisms
1. "Resurrecting Egypt in a British Shroud: Muhammad al-Siba'i's Colonialist-Nationalist Translations of Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle," Shaden M. Tageldin, Univ. of California, Berkeley
2. "Cosmopolitanism and Nostalgia in Amitav Ghosh," Gautam Premnath, Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston
3. "Gandhi, South Africa, and the Impossibility of Cosmopolitanism," Sameer P. Pandya, Queens Coll., City Univ. of New York
4. "Rooted Routes: Jamaican Patois Poet Louise Bennett and the Cosmopolitan Ideal," Ifeoma Chinwe Nwankwo, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Winston's Diary, a blog written by "a job seeking graduate student [of literature] who will remain anonymous until tenured, rejected, or so sick of academia that I leave it," describes "the dreaded Theory question" at MLA interviews. "Winston" fears that answers to that question will reveal political leanings, causing conservative job candidates to be turned down:
According to “the rules,” potential employers aren’t supposed to be able to ask you about your politics. But, given the highly politicized nature of theory, how can the theory question not constitute a question about politics? If I start talking about I. A. Richards’s influence on my work, I reveal myself as a literary conservative. And if I talk about A. C. Bradley’s influence on my reading of Shakespeare, I think that makes me a literary paleo-conservative. Whereas if I mention Foucault, or Said, or Derrida, I’m a fellow traveler. In many ways, the answer to the theory question reveals the candidate’s politics, or at least the candidate’s politics in terms of literary scholarship (though the two generally go hand-in-hand, in my experience).
Methinks "Winston" doth protest too much. I seriously doubt anything like this will happen. I had seven job interviews the year I was hired for this job. No one asked me a theory question, "dreaded" or otherwise. Instead, I was asked about my research, my teaching, and a little about the administrative work I did as a graduate student. The committees that expressed the most interest in me were from departments that had faculty who did work similar to mine. In my case that meant, mostly, book history and humanities computing. On one of my campus visits I did mention Judith Butler once, in the context of something completely unrelated to my dissertation on eighteenth-century Methodism, but aside from that, I can't think of a single situation in which I felt I was being tested regarding my politics.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most hiring committees don't care if you name-drop theorists or not. But they'd like to know that you're keeping up with the latest developments in your field, and if the only scholars you mention as influential were born in the 19th century, you're not likely to make that impression.
We are definitely switching broadband providers as today marks one full week without access and no answers to our calls of complaint. Dialup speeds, combined with end-of-semester grading, account for my light blogging of late.
Soon I'll be heading to southern California (shhhh! don't tell anyone), not really for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, but because many of my friends and (it turns out) fellow bloggers will be there for the conference. In fact, I'm leaning towards skipping the conference altogether, although the book exhibit is always worth a look.
Meanwhile, as Matt and KF point out, there's a tempest brewing over at Invisible Adjunct about a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that, as happens with tiresome frequency, pokes fun at panel and paper titles on the convention program.
I don't feel all that worked up about the whole thing, although I understand why others are more upset. Here are my thoughts:
There's an interesting article to be written about the MLA. I've yet to read it.
Why in the world am I feeling stressed out? I'm not taking any finals. I'm giving finals. I've been up since 4:30 this morning, grading. At some point delirium is sure to set in, isn't it?
Oh, and the broadband connection at home is down. Accessing the Internet through dialup is like trying to breathe through a cocktail straw.
A "tentative program" is available online in PDF format.
I require my students to leave their names off the front of their essays because I do not want to associate the person with the essay when I grade. Instead they just provide me with their social security number. In this way I hope to be unaffected by the characteristics of a student that are extraneous to the writing. If they've made many smart comments in class, for example, I don't want to automatically give them the benefit of the doubt if a written paragraph is unclear. If they've missed several classes, I don't want to feel like I should dock points on an essay as a response.
I realize by writing the above I run the risk of making myself sound like a capricious grader. I'm not. But I'd like to reduce the distractions running through my head as I'm making comments in the margins and considering the quality of the writing. I've not had a problem with my grading. I've been teaching since 1993, and I can count on one hand the number of times a student has come to me to complain about a grade on a paper. (Hmm. Maybe that makes me sound like an easy grader.) However, I've adopted the anonymous grading policy recently, and it seems to work pretty well.
When they don't get the grade they think they deserve, students often get quite upset, and I can understand why. Writing is a pretty personal act, and getting a negative reaction to your writing can feel like a personal attack. This is the logic behind the exclamation, "But I'm not a C student!" I would argue that there's no such thing as a C, or B, or A student. This is an essentialist argument, as if grades are a response to some quality inherent in the individual that magically makes itself apparent in the student's work. But I'm not grading students; I'm grading assignments. The anonymity assures this.
In a subsequent entry I'll address some of the potential drawbacks of this policy.
First in what I think will be a series of reflective postings on teaching:
It's all over but the shouting. Or the final exams, anyway. As the semester draws to a close, I'm thinking about teaching and planning for next semester.
In both English 317 and English 350 this semester I had the students play "Ivanhoe: a game of critical interpretation" developed at the University of Virginia's Speculative Computing Lab. I used Movable Type as the software and created a simplified version of the game (PDF rules) for my students.
The students seemed to like playing the game, and I think it really opened up some issues with the texts that they might not have otherwise considered. Now I'm faced with the challenge of grading their performance in the games, which is tricky. The classic assignment in an English class is the essay, and there are relatively standard requirements for what goes into a good essay even as the specific goals of that essay might change. Students will ideally be familiar with these requirements by the time they reach a junior-level English class, but this isn't always the case. (There is always a bit of re-explaining that takes place.)
However, I've always wanted to provide students with a variety of assignments that provide them with multiple ways of thinking about the subject of a class. Some times I've given them a menu of "Self-Directed Learning Tasks." If you give students an unconventional assignment, one they've never encountered before, you will have to be quite explicit about how to complete it, what the goals of that assignment are, and how their performance will be evaluated.
This semester I came up with a series of different assignments (more on them later) that were meant to provide for them the understanding that literature, literary criticism, and scholarship do not happen in a vacuum but are part of an ongoing conversation among writers and readers, some professional and some not. I think I need to work on how I explain this to my classes. And I need to determine for myself and for my students whether Ivanhoe helps provide them with that understanding. I think the answer is yes, but I will work on articulating why.
Although it's aimed at scholars in the fields of science and engineering, the Tomorrow's Professor Listserv archives feature some useful advice regarding teaching and research for academic professionals in any field. Anyone know of a similar resource aimed at the humanities?
From the National Weather Service. Looks like we'll be getting some snow tonight.
From the Technology and Bibliography department, via Slashdot: Remote-Controlled Robot Could Browse the Stacks.
From the Academic Blogger Attempts to Demonstrate He's Still Hip department: Cat Power is on tour in December. Well, Chan Marshall solo, anyway. Pitchforkmedia writes it up. Hilarity ensues.
From same department as above: Frank Black and the Catholics make four songs available exclusively on iTunes. However, no one will confirm if a Pixies' reunion is in the works for next summer.
From the Academics Who Like to Read Things that Upset Them department: Michael Bérubé writes about "Standards of Reason in the Classroom" in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Erin O'Connor, and others, take issue with what they see as his profiling of conservative students as mentally handicapped. Now, new life has been breathed into Bérubé's website, which is starting suspiciously to look like a blog, though he continues to claim it's not.
I've been using some version of a Palm for about 4 or 5 years now, and I'm just about ready to quit and go back to paper and pen. Why? The immediate reason is that my Sony Clie PEG S360 just crapped out on me again: the battery goes dead with frightening frequency. And this time, I think I've lost a good chunk of data as a result.
But more generally, I'm just tired of the cramped space on the little screen and the low-contrast black-on-green text and images. By contrast, a simple pad of paper has much more room to write and sketch, features a high-contrast black-(or blue-)on-white surface, and the information you store there doesn't disappear when the juice runs out.
However, I would miss the searchability, the small size, and the syncing with the laptop. And I have had my eye on the Palm Zire 71 since it first came out. A camera and an MP3 player along with the usual PDA functions? Mmmmm.
What about you? How do you keep track of contacts, appointments, interesting citations, to-do lists?
Warning. Cranky entry ahead.
When my family lived in Belgium, we used to travel to Brussels to see recently released movies. On our first such trip, we were struck by the strange behavior of the ushers, who would not guide you to your seat but instead would stand by the entrance to the theater with slick flyers advertising coming attractions. If you took one, they would hold out their hand for a tip. If you declined giving them the tip and gave them back the flyer, they were quite resentful.
In short, they served no purpose. At some point in the past they probably provided a helpful service, using their flashlights to help you through the dark, letting little old ladies hold onto their arms. Whatever. Those days were long gone. Well-lighted aisles and better designed entrance and exit ramps made them obsolete. But they just couldn't stop hanging around with their hand out.
Believe it or not, I think of those ushers when I think of the modern academic journal. What do we get for the (often considerable) money that we pay for journals? Ideally, we get well-written articles that have been vetted by experts in the field. And how much do the authors get paid? Nothing. How much do the journal editors get paid? Nothing (right?). How much do the readers who evaluate the articles for the journal get paid? Nothing.
Isn't something wrong with this picture? What exactly are we paying for?
How many journals do you actually read in print anymore? How many are not available online in addition to being available in printed form. Yes, I know that creating PDFs, say, of a set of articles is not free. And I also know that storing such articles on a server or set of servers costs money, too. But surely that cost is negligible and could be borne by universities for significantly less money than they currently pay to subscribe to journals. Can't we replicate the exact same system we have now - the articles being submitted, being distributed to experts for evaluation, being accepted or rejected by the journal - without the fee system? What's the difference?
I think we can agree that the current system has problems. For one thing, library budgets are (always already) threatened by the vagaries of funding and journal subscriptions are often the first things cut, meaning that crucial information becomes unavailable to library patrons.
Second, insane new copyright laws are pressuring libraries to put unreasonable restrictions on copying and distributing scholarly material. At UMKC, we can't put articles on reserve for more than one semester because library policy is that this violates copyright law. Here's the ultimate frustration for me: authors of these articles do not care one iota if you are making copies of their work so long as it's clear who the author is. Our reward for our scholarship is usually not financial; it's professional. We don't get paid for publishing our work, so we're not the ones losing any money. But are journals losing money from library reserves? I doubt it. What's the difference between a student copying an article from the reserves list and copying an article from the journal sitting on the shelf? And if journals are losing money, who cares? What purpose do they serve? The peer-review process does not need a commercial component in order to function properly.
Consider the list of journals available through Johns Hopkins University Press' Project Muse. I can link you to the home page, and you can take a look at the tables of contents, but you can't read the articles without a subscription because... Well, why?
What am I missing?
I'm making carrot soup with lemon and ginger. It smells great!
Two weeks from today I give the last exam of the semester.
Until then, I still have a stack of stuff to grade sitting in front of me.