fanboy ecstasy
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April 30, 2005
April 29, 2005
going out with students...
...from not one, but two Thursday night classes means I come home smelling way more like cigarette smoke than I ever want to again.
Oh, and I know more about nipple piercing among the young folk than I really needed to know. (No, not in the way you're thinking.)
April 28, 2005
can't start a fire...
...worrying about your little world falling apart.
There's only so long you can feel stuck, right? On the horizon: international travel, a cross-country move, an uncertain professional future. This morning I feel like I can handle whatever opportunities present themselves, but God knows what I'll feel like tomorrow.
Apropos of nothing:
- "In 2004, Missouri ranked 43rd in the nation (behind surrounding states) in appropriations for higher education per $1000 of personal income."
- According to a report (PDF, 477K) by the National Association of State Budget Officers, Missouri's total expenditures for higher education in 2003 were $985,000,000.
- By comparison, the state we're moving to spends over four times as much money on higher education with a population that's just 1.4 times as big and a per capita income slightly lower than Missouri's.
Consider all of this data, collectively, as Hint #4. No one has even attempted a guess, yet. To review: L got a tenure-track job in a different state; I have a research leave in the fall and will be moving with L; starting in the spring, I will come back to teach my classes. At some point in the hopefully near future, L's institution might hire me, or my institution might hire L. Your task: guess where we're moving.
April 27, 2005
a random question
It occurs to me that I've only ever met two Miriams in my life, and they're both English professors who blog. I wonder: Am I the only person to have met both Miriam Jones and Miriam Burstein?
April 26, 2005
bad news
Me: Hmm. Bad news from the world of music.
L: Really? What?
Me: Apparently, Paul Rodgers is now singing for Queen.
L: That's not bad news. That's terrible news of epic proportions.
April 25, 2005
on scholarship
VLADIMIR: Moron!
ESTRAGON: That's the idea, let's abuse each other.
[They turn, move apart, turn again and face each other.]
VLADIMIR: Moron!
ESTRAGON: Vermin!
VLADIMIR: Abortion!
ESTRAGON: Morpion!
VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!
ESTRAGON: Curate!
VLADIMIR: Cretin!
ESTRAGON: (with finality). Crritic!
VLADIMIR: Oh!
[He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.]
--Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Back in the day, two of my college professors, who happened to be married, were old-school, medievalist, analytical bibliographers. That is, their work concerned the physical analysis and description of books. I took a research methods course from one of them, and although I am not an analytical bibliographer, my approach to language and literature is still heavily influenced by something they used to say, "You can be a critic, or you can be a scholar. It's better to be a scholar."
I realize the distinction could be called arbitrary, but it's a quote that comes to mind when I read someone using the phrase "test of time" to describe how the modern literary canon came to be. "Time" is not an historical agent that conducts "tests" upon things to see what will survive and what will not. Writing exists in a world inhabited by people who make choices about what will be commissioned, copied, published, purchased, stolen, pirated, revised, taught in school, taught in church, read for pleasure, read for enlightenment, read for salvation, banned, smuggled, translated, adapated, bowdlerized, grangerized, set to music, given as gifts, and any number of other acts that take place among literate human beings.
These choices differ from one region to another and from one time period to another. We know these choices differ because we have a great deal of historical material from which we construct (and reconstruct) the complicated picture of literary history. Existing alongside these literate practices is the fact that texts themselves have physical properties that make them more or less suited to survival, and what we can and cannot recover from the past changes as new technologies are developed.
To believe that the canon is an example of literary justice is to believe that all of these things, across time and space, somehow conspired to present to you, the precious modern reader, only the best of what has ever been written. Man, you've gotta have some kind of big head to believe that, don't you?
In his influential 1957 work, The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt argues that we must consider the importance of cultural context if we are to understand how this now prevalent genre first appeared:
Defoe, Richardson and Fielding do not in the usual sense constitute a literary school. Indeed their works show so little sign of mutual influence and are so different in nature that at first sight it appears that our curiosity about the rise of the novel is unlikely to find any satisfaction other than the meagre one afforded by the terms 'genius' and 'accident,' the twin faces on the Janus of the dead ends of literary history.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: having an opinion is fine. Having an informed opinion is even better.
April 23, 2005
social networking
Most people remain ensconced in their own little clusters of people who are more or less like them and who basically have almost all the same information as each other. That’s why bridges to other social clusters are vital: if you find people who connect to people who are different from yourself and your buddies, you’re going to get a whole lot of new information and new ideas. That’s important.
where is hamlet?
James McLaverty [link]
"The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art: The Case of the Dunciad Variorum" [link]
Studies in Bibliography [link], Volume 37 (1984)
In a section of his Essays in Critical Dissent entitled "The Philistinism of 'Research,'" the late F. W. Bateson laid down a challenge to bibliographers which, so far as I know, has never been taken up directly. The question he poses is roughly this: if the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where are Hamlet and Lycidas? what is the essential physical basis of a literary work of art? Bateson's answer...is that the physical basis is "human articulations"; "the literary original exists physically in a substratum of articulated sound." A book, he claims, has the same sort of imperfect relationship to the original work as a photograph has to the man photographed... It follows from this, Bateson argues, that the bibliographer is guilty of mistaking the secondary for the primary: he busies himself preserving the author's "accidentals," when the author's responsibility stops with the sounds; the bibliographer confuses the function of the author with that of his copyist.
To much of this the bibliographer will have a ready answer, but the importance of these criticisms lies in their level of generality; they call for a justification of certain bibliographical attitudes in terms of aesthetic theory and they raise, in vivid if eccentric fashion, several of the crucial issues in aesthetics today. Without presuming to speak for bibliography, I want to challenge Bateson's conclusions on these issues and to suggest that the physical appearance of books sometimes has even greater importance than textual bibliographers are willing to allow it. I believe that leading writers on aesthetics -- writers quite independent and even ignorant of the world of bibliography -- are able to give solutions to Bateson's problems which, far from diminishing the role of the written or printed word, emphasise the importance of notation.
McLaverty is the author of Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford UP, 2001).
April 22, 2005
blah
It's almost summer. I have money to support my writing. I'll probably spend several weeks in England in various archives. This fall I'll be on leave from teaching and will be living within driving distance of not one but two universities with special collections useful for my research (that would be hint #3, by the way).
So why am I in a crappy mood today? Too much caffeine? Too little? Maybe whiskey will help. It is Friday night, after all.
free mp3s!
Hundreds from Amazon. Legal. DRM-free.
April 21, 2005
thanks, johann!
I just got my hot little hands on one of these. It looks very well done. More later.
the late '80s and early '90s called...
rockin' to the oldies
Rooting around in my own archives, I came across these two entries:
- Print and Information Technology
- Print and Information Technology, II (Grok is Jason, and I was going by gizmo, a nickname my niece gave me.)
Man, I remember 2003 like it was yesterday. Good times, good times.
April 20, 2005
go tell it on the mountain
Or, return to Pancake Mountain. They have some clips online, now, and you can buy DVDs and other stuff.
Be sure to watch the "Rufus" clips.
my favorite part
I will, perhaps, someday write a two-person play about arguments over literary studies. It will take place at a cocktail party. The opening scene will probably look something like this:
[Literary scholar (standing by the cheese plate); Inebriated guest (stumbling in suddenly).]
IG: Hey... Hey!...You know whadyer prollem is?
LS (startled): Do I know you?
IG: You spen' too mush time acting like yer a hissorian or a sosh... a soss... a sosheologiss. You shud luuuuuuuv lidderacher! Why doncha luv it? I luv it.
LS: I'm sorry. Have we met?
IG: Yer allays talkin' about race... or class... or genner. I mean... who really carez about that stuff?
LS: Well, a lot of people, actually.
IG: You shud luuuuuuuv lidderacher!
LS: Yeah, you said that. And actually, I do love it. That's why I've devoted my life to studying it.
IG: Don' allays try to be a hissorian or a sosheologiss. Why you do that?
LS: No. I don't do that, actually.
IG: Yeah, you do! Don' deny it.
LS: So you read literary scholarship?
IG (angry): Yer bein' snobby now? You think I can't unnerstand what you do?
LS: I didn't say you can't understand it. I asked if you were familiar with it.
IG: Misser Bigshot over here. Thinks he'z so smart!
LS: Are you an English professor?
IG: Wha..? You think I gotta be a profezzor to understand what you do?
LS: Well, weren't you saying I'm not qualified to engage with history or sociology? How is that any different than me asking if you're qualified to engage with the field of literary studies?
IG: Wha...? Hey, yer tryin' ta trick me!
LS: No, I just...
IG: You think yer so smart, doncha! I oughta... (passes out)
Later...
IG: You know wha? I like you! Yer allright.
LS: Get your hand off my shoulder.
IG: You have to admit. Thiz kina exchange is prolly good for you stuffy academic types.
LS: Oh, yes. I feel so enlightened now.
[Inebriated guest # 2 stumbles in.]
IG2: Hey! You know whadyer prollem is?...
April 19, 2005
prof. ellinghausen meets john doe
Laurie waited patiently in line to meet John Doe after the show on Friday.
Laurie says the conversation went something like this:
John: Hey, how are you doing tonight?
Laurie: Um...
John: Did you have a good time?
Laurie: Uh...so...do you like...stuff?
John: (pause) Which one of you is driving home tonight?
gender and professional authorship in the renaissance
My friend and colleague Laurie Ellinghausen has an essay in the latest issue of Studies in English Literature (subscription required) entitled "Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay":
Abstract: This essay offers a new perspective on the Tudor poet and maidservant Isabella Whitney's way of constructing herself as a female author in the early modern literary marketplace. While Whitney is most often read as a writer desiring textual communities through patronage and the exchange of letters, I note that throughout her miscellany A Sweet Nosgay (1573) she continually emphasizes her isolation from family and community. This stance, I argue, helps Whitney develop a sense of herself as a professional writer who must, after losing her post as a servant, achieve economic independence through the sale of her own verse.
A student-edited edition of Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay can be found here.
This article is a great example of the kind of work in literary studies I've been talking about (see comment 97 here). One of the strongest threads of inquiry in literary studies of the past decade (or more) is the development of the professional author. The professional author
- balances the demands of art and money in the marketplace, as opposed to navigating the equally complex relationships involved in a patronage system;
- practices self-representation to present the most attractive image to a large and largely anonymous audience in the print marketplace, as opposed to the more intimate situation presented by, say, coterie verse distributed in manuscript among a group of acquaintances;
- must develop an understanding of how that print marketplace works, from production to distribution to consumption.
All of these authorship-related developments (and more) took place in Britain between the Renaissance and the late eighteenth century simultaneously with the broader economic changes underway and the radically changing conditions of print production and a populace that was not only increasingly literate but increasingly convinced that reading was a valuable activity. It's an extremely complex picture, though not one so complex that we cannot understand what's going on.
Gender is an important category of identity with regard to professional authorship because for all of human history different expectations regarding labor have been applied to men than to women.
In "A Room of One's own," Virginia Woolf writes, "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." However, for several years now, we've been learning that Behn had predecessors. Laurie's article is a valuable contribution to this line of inquiry.
April 18, 2005
coincidence?
- Kevin notes the widespread availability of bike racks in Scandinavia.
- Heidi points out that our new library could use some bike racks.
According to Men's Fitness, Kansas City is among the 25 fattest cities in America.
Hint #2 about my new life: The city to which we are moving is also on the list with Kansas City.
April 17, 2005
that poet is such a spaz
Ray Davis has a great post over on The Valve:
"In mid-nineteenth-century Great Britain, a group of left-wing lower-class poets publish autobiographical free verse epic dramas. Critics name them the Spasmodics."
Could the Winter 2004 issue of Victorian Poetry be hoaxing us?
reading: the state of the discipline
Each issue of the SHARP journal Book History (subscription required) includes an overview essay on the "State of the Discipline" of book history with regard to a specific topic.
- 2003 - "The Politics of Print: The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America"
- 2002 - "The Epistemology of Publishing Statistics"
- 2001 - "Sacred Texts in the United States"
- 1999 - "Terra Incognita: Toward a Historiography of Book Fastenings and Book Furniture"
- 1998 - "The Rise and Decline of Book Studies in the Soviet Union"
- 1997 - "Booksellers and Their Customers: Some Reflections on Recent Research"
The 2004 volume features "Reading," by Leah Price. The essay begins with an amusing quote from William James concerning the distance between the experience of the world from a human and a canine point of view: humans fail to see the appeal of bones and smells, while dogs are surely puzzled by the act of reading, during which a human sits frozen for hours on end, staring at a handheld object. Price writes
James's example points to one of the central difficulties of a history of reading: how to analyze an activity that's too close for critical distance, and perhaps for comfort. What's "alien" here is not simply the relation of readers to illiterates (human or canine), but also one reader's relation to another. Writers on reading have lamented its unknowability or savored its ineffability as far back as Wilkie Collins's 1858 essay "The Unknown Public." This is the assumption that book historians have come to combat, either in practice (by uncovering the physical gestures and material artifacts that can make one reader knowable to another), or in theory (by tracing the origins of a Cartesian dualism that severs reading from the hand and the voice).2 For all the polemics that have shaped the field—about extensive reading, about technological determinism, about whether to determine the texts read by a particular demographic group or to define the audience reached by an individual text—historians seem united in the urge to contest James's characterization of reading as a literally "senseless" act.
This doesn't, however, imply any agreement about what the history of reading is. As David Hall has pointed out, different scholars have understood the term to encompass enterprises as various as the social history of education, the quantitative study of the distribution of printed matter, and the reception of texts or diffusion of ideas.
Read the whole thing (as they say) for a report on, well, the state of the discipline.
I regularly teach Robert Darnton's essay on studying the history of reading in an attempt to encourage students not to project their own reading habits and tastes upon readers who lived in previous centuries. As the work of Walter Ong reminds us, writing is a technology, thus artificial. Yet we have so internalized the acts of reading and writing that they seem natural, an essential part of being human. Literacy is a recent phenomenon in human history, and in fact, wide-spread literacy has existed in the Anglophone world for only 300 or 400 years. My position is that we should take this understanding and
- Avoid engaging in ahistorical romantic swooning over the power and beauty of literature. This is not to say that we shouldn't swoon, just that we should not project our feelings across time.
- Lose our fear of (but retain our intense interest in) new technologies' impact upon what it means to be human. Clearly our lives are enveloped by digital media, and while some observers see this development as a recent and radical break with the past, others view it more properly as part of a long history.
Last fall, a capacity crowd attended a local panel discussion of the NEA Reading at Risk report. (You can read my notes on this discussion here.) When the report came out, Matt K produced a response , the arguments of which are spot on, for the Electronic Literature Organization. There was also a panel discussion at the University of Maryland and other locations around the country. It's heartening that so many are concerned about the fate of reading and writing. But let's not forget that reading and writing have (long) histories that are much more complex and much more surprising than most of us realize. When we detect a shift taking place among contemporary readers, our first reaction should not be one of fear (words like "crisis," "problem," "risk" crop up regularly) but curiosity. Of course reading habits will change. They always have, and we would be foolish to expect to live in an age of stasis.
well said
Mel weighs in:
"In a world in which so many forces work to limit human expression, constrain human behavior, and destroy human lives, why bother feeling threatened by someone else finding beauty, pleasure, or intellectual satisfaction in a text that doesn't give you that same experience?"
remix culture: nine inch nails track
On April 15, Trent Reznor posted the "source code" of a single from the forthcoming Nine Inch Nails album. "The Hand That Feeds" is a 70 megabyte Garageband file for Apple computer users to download and play with. I heard the single on the radio yesterday, and I think it's pretty good. (Via BoingBoing.)
April 15, 2005
women in science
"For Women in Sciences, Slow Progress in Academia" (Sara Rimer, NYT):
Even as the number of women earning Ph.D.'s in science has substantially increased - women now account for 45 percent to 50 percent of the biology doctorates, and 33 percent of those in chemistry - the science and engineering faculties of elite research universities remain overwhelmingly male. And the majority of the women are clustered at the junior faculty rank.
Pop quiz, class. Complete these sentences:
- Women are underrepresented in academia because...
- Conservatives are underrepresented in academia because...
April 14, 2005
hey, we're bloggin' ovah heah
I'll be honest. I know that the vehemence of my response to the Crooked Timber post and thread was out of proportion to the attention it deserved. But here's the thing: Look at that list of bloggers under "literature, language, culture" on the "Academic Blogs" page CT maintains. How many times have you ever seen a CT post that references or responds to something one of those bloggers has posted? That's why I wrote that crack about CT getting $5 every time they mention Scott McLemee. And that's why I am incredulous when Farrell writes, in comment 10 on the aforementioned thread, “Why is it that you aren’t creating a competitor blog to us?”
Hey, that's a great idea! Why don't we start up our own blog? If we did, then you'd be able to read
- Matt on plagiarism, the web, and contemporary media culture (Feb 2003),
- Jason R on Gibson's Pattern Recognition (March 2003),
- Kari sharing a chunk of her dissertation (June 2003),
- Chuck on film and Lev Manovich (June 2003),
- Dave on politics and teaching composition (June 2003),
- Jason J on recent nonfiction (September 2003),
- Tanya on the Isabella Gardner Museum (August 2003),
- Ryan on his dissertation defense (August 2003),
- CJ on “Sylvia Plath’s Ekphrastic Poetry” (July 2003),
- Brandon on participating in a Renga (June 2003),
- Jeb's prospectus for jeblog (August 2004),
- Marc on the body as avatar (October 2004),
- Me on Walter Benjamin (March 2003).
Please. Do tell me more about this blogging you speak of.
award winning
For those who care to pay attention to the scholarly work that is recognized as exceptional in the humanities, The Making of the Modern Self, by Dror Wahrman, has won the Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which is one of the two most important professional organizations I belong to. The other is the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, which last year gave its top prize to Janine Barchas' Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel.
Now you can behave as if we're all obsessed with politically correct witch hunts, but I reserve the right to point out that your assertion is demonstrably false.
April 12, 2005
people have no idea what we do
Remember this thread from last summer?
Maybe what we need is one of those standard responses for when people start throwing around the "Literary studies is too political! It's too theory-laden. It's out of touch with what the people want!" crap in the same way that Clancy did with the lame "Where are all the women bloggers?" meme.
i suppose i should stop trying
The latest comment from Henry Farrell in the CT thread:
...the kind of division that some commenters here are trying to create, between academic literary criticism (which only other specialists, or those who read “contemporary literary fiction” are allowed to criticize), and vulgar debate over books is very strongly reminiscent of the division between “high culture” and “ordinary culture” that Raymond Williams tells us about, or the processes of distinction that Bourdieu describes. To be blunt, it smacks of defensive manoeuvres that aim to preserve discursive power, and to shut out debate that might be awkward or uncomfortable.
Tell you what, Henry: I'll start a blog about the current state of political science. I have a PhD in English, not political science, but what the heck. Then, when political scientists question the accuracy of my comments, and question the adequacy of my training for such an enterprise, I'll accuse them of being elitist and solemnly lecture them about Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. Maybe then they'll see the light.
What literary scholars do is an academic discipline that, whether people like it or not, requires years of advanced training. Do you honestly not see why saying otherwise is insulting to many of us?
I'm dropping Crooked Timber from my RSS subscriptions. (Yes, I'm sure they'll be heartbroken to learn this.)
April 11, 2005
what the heck is henry farrell talking about?
...or "Why doesn't Crooked Timber pay attention to people who actually study language and literature for a living?"
A recent Farrell entry on Crooked Timber defends collaborative literary blog The Valve against a critique offered by Cultural Revolution, a critique that, in part, points out that funding for the Valve came from the conservative Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. In fact, on that organization's website, the Valve is described as an ALSC "discussion forum."
Look, I don't have a dog in this fight. I haven't really read much of the Valve, although it looks interesting. However, I do think that Farrell is being naive when he fails to realize that buzz words and phrases like “imagination,” “shared literary culture,” “serious,” and “classicists and modernists” are loaded weapons in the hands of culture warriors. Here's an analogy: if you were to stumble across a political website advocating "states' rights" in America, you'd have an easy time figuring out which political party they were likely to support. You would have a similar reaction to such phrases as "culture of life" and "ownership society."
Let's say I asserted that "culture of life" was a suspect phrase used by Republicans to try to link a wide variety of otherwise disparate programs, from infringing on civil rights in the name of fighting terrorism to opposing a woman's right to determine the course of her own pregnancy. Now let's say someone responded to my assertion by saying, Who could object to establishing a culture of life? What kind of sick person opposes life? We would assume that person was pretty ignorant about the current state of American politics, no?
See, language doesn't exist in in a vacuum. Words that may appear harmless when taken out of context carry a significant amount of weight when understood within their original context. It's an obvious point, I know. I don't mean to patronize you, dear reader, and yet here we are.
I am not going to jump into the argument taking place in the comments thread. (I did ask Henry a couple of questions in that thread and he ignored me; frankly, it's not a bad policy to ignore people who use the word "Zombie" in their name.) No, my concern is with the framing of the debate as established in Henry's original post. He makes reference to
The hostility of many literary theorists to the notion that they ought connect with a wider culture, or that they are, in the end of the day, critics of cultural forms that have a value in themselves apart from the tropes that their methodologies can uncover
Here's one question: Who are these hostile literary theorists? I mean, I have a PhD in English, and I have no idea who he's talking about.
He also cites Scott McLemee on the annual meeting of the MLA as evidence of a "deeper malaise" infecting literary studies. (Sidenote: does Crooked Timber get $5 every time they mention Scott McLemee?)
After McLemee's quote, Farrell writes that the criteria of literary scholarship mean that literary scholars lead a miserable existence:
You spend your life studying work which you aren’t supposed to enjoy on its own terms; too high a degree of enthusiasm is anathema, unless it’s couched in political or critical terms that disconnect the value of the text from the text itself.
This is news to me, and I've been in the field he's talking about for over a decade. (Note that Farrell is a political science professor.) The thing that everyone who works in language/literature departments knows and that apparently everyone who doesn't refuses to believe/acknowledge/notice is that the annual meeting of the MLA is about jobs.
I'll say it one more time, so you don't miss it this time: The annual meeting of the MLA is about jobs.
That's why there's a malaise there. Desperate people are hoping to get hired. Exhausted people are interviewing the desperate people who are hoping to get hired. The rest is the tail on the dog that is the job market.
If you want to see the excitement at the heart of what literary scholars do, go to the specialist meetings. People who are Medievalists, Renaissance scholars, eighteenth-century scholars, Romanticists, Victorianists (and on and on) have their own annual, professional conferences. Jobs are not being advertised and sought there. No malaise is there.
The image of the blinkered literary theorist talking jargon-riddled nonsense to other blinkered literary theorists in a Mr. Magoo circle jerk that ignores the concerns of "real people" living in the "real world" is a tired, old, (and whether Henry Farrell wants to believe it or not) conservative stereotype.
But why listen to me? I'm just an English professor, so what could I know about, you know, the study of language and literature? This brings me to my second question:
Given that Crooked Timber so often has posts on literary matters, why are there no CT contributors who actually work in departments of literature?
I have been consistently bothered by the CT posts on the state of contemporary literary studies (most of which are, I think, by Farrell and John Holbo), and I do wish they would listen when others object to the way they characterize what we do. With the possible exception of Holbo, they are not qualified to comment.
public sphere theory
I'm working on understanding Jürgen Habermas' theory of the public sphere as well as the responses of others to that theory. From the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism:
Habermas's interdisciplinary research has touched on matters important to students of literature at several points. Perhaps his most influential work for literary studies in Germany was the book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). The "public sphere" is a realm in which opinions are exchanged between private persons unconstrained (ideally) by external pressures. Theoretically open to all citizens and founded in the family, it is the place where something approaching public opinion is formed. It should be distinguished both from the state, which represents official power, and from the economic structures of civil society as a whole. Its function is actually to mediate between society and state; it is the arena in which the public organizes itself, formulates public opinion, and expresses its desires vis-à-vis the government.
Habermas's discussion makes clear that the public sphere is not a given for every type of society; nor does it possess a fixed status. The Middle Ages had no public sphere in the sense in which Habermas defines it, but rather a sphere of representation of feudal authority. Only in the eighteenth century, with the breakdown of religious hegemony and the rise of the middle class, does a public sphere emerge. The liberal model of the public sphere, in which private individuals and interests regulate public authority and in which property owners speak for humanity, is eventually transformed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a realm in which the activities of reasoning and the formulation of public opinion are superseded by mass consumption and publicity.
In my research, a key question is this: How was the development of a public sphere in eighteenth-century Britain affected by the participation of religious movements such as Methodism?
thomson-gale: free access this week
It's National Library Week, and Thomson-Gale is offering free access to its electronic resources all week long.
changes
- The Home and the World: Why the frustration, Mano?
- New Kid on the Hallway: From student to professor
- Jill/Txt: happy not to be a PhD student anymore
- In Favor of Thinking: 31 Flavors of Guilt
monday morning mp3: ad astra per aspera
I saw a great local band on Friday night: Ad Astra Per Aspera.
Check out...
Listen to Bi-pedal, Ungrateful, Empty & Awake the Sun Sets on the Chalk Pyrmanids (mp3 hosted on Lawrence.com, 14MB)
April 10, 2005
annoyed
Apparently, I am annoying; I have no idea who this person is, but it looks like she's from Nebraska and is currently attending school (Johns Hopkins?) in Maryland, majoring in math.
She appears to prefer Nebraska to Maryland. I'll let my east-coast readers fight it out with my midwest readers over the significance of this preference.
am i a bad person...
...if I like Billy Squier more than I like Bright Eyes?
April 8, 2005
catch ya later
Hey, y'all, I'm crazy busy right now. In fact, I'm about to leave for a conference in another state. Granted, the state is just a few miles away, and it's an undergraduate conference, but you get my drift. I know I owe you an email (yes, you...and you...and you, too). Please be patient. My mental health thanks you.
April 7, 2005
krugman on liberal bias in academia
In a comment to this entry, Limadean points to this editorial by Paul Krugman: "An Academic Question."
Surprisingly, not many bloggers have linked to this piece.
You wanna know why conservatives think there's a problem in academia and liberals don't? Here's a theory:
- When liberal students' ideas are challenged by their professors, they respond like this: Hmm. I hadn't thought of that. Interesting.
- When conservative students' ideas are challenged by their professors, they respond like this: Waaaah!
I kid! I kid!
April 6, 2005
recent acquisitions
 | Jacques Derrida Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression |
 | Catherine Gallagher & Stephen Greenblatt Practicing New Historicism |
 | David Hempton Methodism: Empire of the Spirit |
 | Adam Nicholson God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible |
 | Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism |
April 4, 2005
post-show commentary, ii
A few thoughts regarding ASECS 2005:
- Giles Bergel, Katherine Ellison, and Eve Tavor Bannet each gave a stellar paper on the panel I chaired. As an added bonus, there was a good-sized audience for that panel, and they asked a number of insightful questions. Be on the lookout for Bannet's forthcoming book, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820. I do not know what Bergel and Ellison have in the pipline with regard to publishing their work, but those of you interested in book history would do well to keep an eye out for these names, and those of you interested in scholars doing a long history of information technology and media studies should attend particularly to Ellison's work.
- My new favorite way to read my papers at conferences is to blow up the font size, turn them into PDFs and read them off my laptop with Adobe Acrobat in full-screen mode. It's much, much easier than reading from paper, even if it's more time consuming to create and doesn't allow you the leeway of last-minute additions, deletions, or marginalia. People tend to frown upon reading from latops. Why is this? Do they think it's evidence that you've been working it right up to the conference? This would be bad because...? To pre-empt any frowning-uponing, I explained my composition process (longhand on a legal pad, then typed into a word processor, then converted to PDF) and why I use the laptop. I wasn't just being self-indulgent with this quick little preface, however; I was giving an example of cultural associations we have with technologies of communication and linking the example to the work that I do in the eighteenth century.
- My professional network is growing bit by bit. I have to work at this aspect of academic life, but it seems to be getting easier. One task I hope to fulfill this week is email followups with all the people I talked to. For example, I made an agreement with one person to exchange writing (like, right now), and I need to get that article draft in the mail to her.
- The grad student who corresponded with me about my diss came up to me to introduce herself. She said--approximately...I'd had a few drinks at the reception at this point--"Someone told me I should look into your work, and I wanted to introduce myself to you." Wow. I really need to wake up to the fact that people notice and respect the work I do, that I'm not a fraud who's masquerading his way through this, and that there are things I know and know how to do that can be helpful to people who are not as far along in their development as academics as I am. One person I met told me she'd been reading my blog for a year and was actually kind of intimidated by my authoritative persona. Really? Hmm. Even when you found out I can't even get my own university to give me summer research money?
- As much as things have been bothering me the last few months, talking with colleagues from all over has reminded me of the things in my (personal and professional) life that are quite good. Getting stuck in the imagined narrative trajectory of your life can be intensely counterproductive. Author your way out of it and into another.
- If you've attended 5 hours of papers being read from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., that's probably enough for one day.
- At the conference book exhibit, I took advantage of the 50% display copy discount to acquire Sensory Worlds in Early America by Peter Charles Hoffer, (a book with an Amazon page that led me to another interesing find: How Early America Sounded, by Richard Cullen Rath.)
- Someone who only knew what I look like from this pic said, "Oh, I wouldn't have recognized you without the blonde hair." And I replied, "Yeah, it looks kind of boring, now, doesn't it?" I need to get something tattooed or pierced, maybe.
- When waiting to use one of the hotel business center computers to check email, I noticed someone was writing an entry up for her LiveJournal site. Catching the username, I read her site when it was my turn to use the computer. She's an ASECS attendee, too. Was this unethical of me to look? I wouldn't have tried to see what the username (or even what she was typing at all) if I hadn't recognized the distinctive LiveJournal interface from a distance.
- The business center printer wasn't working at all during the conference. That's convenient. A little too convenient, if you ask me.
And so to bed.
post-show commentary, i
A few thoughts about Las Vegas:
- I expected Las Vegas to be characterized by 1970s glamour gone to seed, kind of grimy and slightly dangerous. But really its aesthetic is more like a giant shopping mall. Don't get me wrong: I'm not looking down my nose at the city. It's just not what I expected.
- The Las Vegas monorail may be a quick and inexpensive way to get from one end of the strip to the other, but it does so by taking you by the most visually uninteresting parts of the city. And the pre-recorded tour information is gratingly chipper.
- The Star Trek bar at the Las Vegas Hilton is a great place to get a Romulan martini. Okay, I made that drink up, but the bar and the whole Star Trek Experience thing is pretty cool. Every once in awhile, someone goes walking by in full costume and makeup, talking in character with the patrons.
- I had hoped to sleep on the flights home--I left at 1:15 a.m. and got back to the apartment at 10:00 a.m.--but alas, this was not to be. For the first time in over thirty years of flying, however, I was bumped up to first class. Very nice. I tried to watch Pieces of April on my laptop to pass the time, but I didn't think it was that good and gave up after about 45 minutes: too many indie film cliches. The movie they showed on the flight--and why show a movie from 1:15 to 3:45 in the morning?--was Spanglish. Even without the sound on I could tell that movie sucks.
- The Alexis Park Resort is a nice place to stay, but I had a frustrating time with my reservation and billing. Mistakes were made and apologies were not. I may blog about this in more detail, if I have the time and inclination
April 3, 2005
tired
My flight doesn't board until 12:40 a.m. That's the bad news. I have a couple of movies on my laptop, 28 Days Later and Pieces of April, plus there's free wireless here. That's the good news.
I had coffee with Mademoiselle Polkadot this morning and then walked all over Vegas. Crashing hard, at the moment. I'm much, much too tired to write it all up now. Suffice it to say that Vegas is not Boston.
Okay, I will report this: A room full of patrons at the Hard Rock Cafe singing along to Radiohead: "I'm a creep. I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here."
Yes, we are all on the margins.
April 1, 2005
vegas
After racking up 1,800 frequent flyer miles yesterday, I made it to the conference hotel, delivered my paper along with three other people on my panel, engaged in some Q&A discussion, which was nice, given that we were the last panel of the day and had gone over our time limit, looked around for people I know, didn't see any, went back to my room, ordered room service, crashed.
What kind of a time zone lets the sun come up at 5:00 a.m.? It's hard enough to sleep in, given the time zone change.
The weather here is beautiful. I haven't been to the strip, yet. I need coffee.
To the person who hoped to go out with me last night: sorry I crashed so early. I'm really not a boring old man.