20150525.0833

Since it is Memorial Day, I probably ought to offer up the usual message. What I have said before remains more or less true, if perhaps adjusted for time and weather. Rain has continued to fall at Sherwood Cottage, leaving water standing in the yard, so I will not be grilling, for example.

More to topic, though, is to follow up on comments made at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies and mentioned once or twice in my discussions thereof. Those in question have to do with the nature of the conference presentation and whether or not it is to be taken as a finished, completed thing, subject to critique and review. That my inclination is to affirm it should be obvious, given both that I have been offering conference summaries for nigh on a week (with others to follow at Travels in Genre and Medievalism as soon as I get the complete set of data for which I am waiting) and that I have made use of my notes from conference talks in my work. (My dissertation and my forthcoming book chapter both deploy talks from the Congress, if in different years.) But that I am so inclined does not mean the discussion is not worth having, and it is entirely possible that I will change my mind about the matter as I work through my part of the discussion.

As I recall, and as I have in my personal conference notes--with the process by which I take them to be discussed elsewhere and at another time--the question came up in discussion of the public medievalism roundtable I attended. One of the presenters, Dave Perry, focused his talk to that end, discussing public intellectualism as an exercise in (among others) transitioning among registers. And what I recall and understand of his comments makes sense to me. The conference paper is something that is used to advance ideas, perhaps in tentative form, and to elicit comment and critique to be used in further development of them.* Papers I have heard--and given--include such phrases as "In a longer version of this paper" and "As this project develops," both of which bespeak work yet to be done. They often are reworked and expanded into articles, chapters in books, or scholarly monographs (something to which I ought to devote more effort and attention), and so they themselves are in several senses transitory.

At the same time, however, conference papers are supposed to represent intellectual effort that is sufficiently polished to be presented publicly. A conference talk is a public event, even if the public is small--but even if it is, that public is composed of interested parties and scholars in the field, so that something similar to the peer-review process through which more formal articles and longer works go is in place at a conference panel. One of the audience at the roundtable also drew the parallel to a poetry or prose reading, in which writers stand up or sit before audiences and present their work. Even if it is to be revised and refined later--and many are in need of much revision and refinement--the reading is a public presentation. It is an exposure to view, and it is too much to think that a thing seen will not receive comment. If that thing is formed badly, then it cannot expect to have its defects ignored any more than it can expect to have its virtues extolled. The same is true with conference work--or I tend to think so. But I may be wrong.

*Admittedly, all intellectual work is of this kind, meant to advance knowledge and serve as a place from which to develop more through critique and revision of it. The roundtable addressed the point to some extent, as I recall; we work to make things a little closer to truth, knowing that our work will be used by others to grow a bit closer yet. If things go as they ought, we will all of us be made obsolete.