20190306.0430

It should come as no surprise that I have a personal library; I was for many years engaged in formal study of English languages and literatures, and I spent no small amount of time trying to be a professor in those same fields, and they call for books more than most. Even before that, I was an avid reader, given to spending money on books instead of on the kinds of things that others of my age, when I was of such an age, spent money on. And while I have made much use of the libraries where I have been, and I have at times pruned items out of my collection, I have tended to hoard the printed pages. There are several reasons, of course, and I may come back to them in another post, and it may even be that some of them still apply. But I think I may be about to go through and rid myself of some of the books and magazines and journals I have acquired over the years; I think they have outlived their usefulness to me, and the sentimental connections they embody and reinforce are not what I need them to be.
Clearly, not all of my books and suchlike fall under such rubrics. There are the fancy copies that my wife and I keep in the living room, decorations for it and advertisements to those who visit us that we read. (Yes, it's a bit snobby.) There are the copies of books I still use for what research I do, their pages stained by the oils of my hands as I've flipped through at high speed, looking for that one line to quote or that one passage to summarize. There are the copies I've been given as gifts, tattered from age and use by now and falling apart, but kept because they came from people I still value. And there are no few that I use in the recreational activities I still undertake--because I am a raging nerd, and the things I like to do involve reading even when they're not typically thought of as "reading."
But I also have boxes and boxes of academic journals, as well as many issues of them still in their wrappings. Some, such as CCC, College English, PMLA, and Profession, I no longer subscribe to; I am not a member anymore of the organizations that produce them, and I have no reason to be so. I will never be a real college professor; I will never be a full-time teacher. So there is no need for me to align myself with the MLA or the NCTE; they do not represent me, and they should not, so I should not give my time or the representation of my time that is the money I earn to them. And I probably ought not to continue to give space to works that I no longer use and am not likely to open again.
To be fair, such a thing feels like quitting. It feels like another admission of defeat, another acknowledgment that I have been wrong. It is not, at least not so much; when I undertook to get such things, I had honest hope that I might be one of the fortunate folks who picked up a professorial job. If I am wrong, it is in holding onto a hope that will never be; letting go of the things that informed that hope and that emerged from pursuing it is more a correction than an error. Such a correction is good to have, even if the reminder of error that it necessarily is is not the most comfortable thing to have provided.

20190303.0430

In the past, I have done a fair bit of summary and response in my online writing--not only in this webspace, but in others I have maintained and currently maintain. Sources have ranged across CCC, College English, Profession, the New York Times, the San Antonio Express-News, and others, some of which I no longer read with anything approaching regularity. And I have benefited from doing the reading and thinking about the reading that are needed to write summary-and-response pieces; I have had to keep more abreast of things to do so than I would otherwise be likely to do, and that has helped me to be more engaged with the world around me, even as it has annoyed me greatly at times (because the world is not as I would have it be, and for reasons I tend to think bad).
I am not doing that exercise this month, at least not consistently in this webspace, although I may well return to it. It is, after all, good for me. But thinking on it does lead me to think about the reading that I no longer do. I've let quite a bit of reading go along the way, which is something that is strange for me to consider despite the fact of my doing it. I have always prided myself on my ability to read both quickly and deeply, and I have long worked--successfully--to incorporate what I read into what I do. But much of what I used to do, I do no longer, or do so little of that it makes no sense for me to maintain the subscriptions that facilitated my reading. Thus, I have let go of a number of my professional journal subscriptions, and I am rarely in the kind of library that would let me get around that lack with any real skill.
Oddly, however, I feel that I am doing more useful work with my reading and writing now than I did when I was doing more such reading. What I note seems to be taken more seriously, and I feel I am writing that kind of writing with greater skill and nuance than was formerly the case. And it seems I am doing more writing, overall, whether in this webspace or in others, or in my personal journals, or for other projects entirely. It would seem that I was getting in my way with what I was doing to try to get my way; I no longer do as much of that, so I am not as much in my own way, and more gets done. It's a good thing, although it is still strange for me to think on.
I had thought that my identity would be as one thing, one particular thing that it has not been allowed to be. But after being pushed aside from that thing, I seem to be doing more to approach that thing than I had done before. It is a paradox, perhaps, but not one that I think I will work to puzzle out so much as to enjoy.

20140721.0720

Along the way back from Texas to Sherwood Cottage yesterday, my wife and I talked about my journal-keeping. As I think I have noted, I have kept a journal for some years, switching from gathered legal pad pages to inexpensive bound volumes in spring 2005 and upgrading from them to nice leather-bound, gilt-edged volumes while I lived in the Best of the Boroughs. (Brooklyn treated me well; I feel obliged to sing its praises even living away from it.) I am nearing the end of another such volume, the twenty-fifth in just over nine years (I did not say I was good at keeping a journal), and as I want to continue to keep one, I have to see about procuring a successor volume. And that means I have to think about what type of volume I want for the next volume, either to maintain my current practice or to change it, and if to change it, how to do so.

Determining how best to proceed requires that I contemplate what I want to do with my journals. It is a task to which I am giving attention...in the journal. But similar questions obtain here; how ought I to proceed with the entries on this blogroll, and to what purpose do I make the posts that I make? In answering the latter and more fundamental first (because it is more important, and it is easier), I look back at the earliest entry in this webspace. In it, I write of the same kind of impetus that prompted my switch in journal-writing: the desire to offer my comments in a socially-privileged form. What I had been doing before, making status updates (now lost) on a vanity site (that still exists but that I do not maintain as I ought to do), seemed no longer to suffice for my purposes. Although it was not until late last year that I began to make daily or near-daily posts (and some of those, I admit, are made more to post daily than to post well), there seemed to be a difference in presentation that pushed me to do a better job of writing for this blog. If nothing else, it has equipped me to better carry out the work I do for the Tales after Tolkien Society here.

So has the work in public intellectualism--if I can call it that--begun early in this blogroll and continued intermittently throughout. Whether or not it has done any good for me to offer summaries and responses to the piece I have read in, say, CCC, College English, the New York Times, PMLA, and Profession, I do not know. They have helped me to better understand what I have read, certainly, and that has helped me to be better in the classroom, but I am not sure that they have been of benefit in fostering conversation about the kinds of things that need to be discussed better than they generally are. I have tried to encourage it as I can; it has been another of the standing projects of this blog that I do so. I have to wonder, however, at the effectiveness of it. Perhaps it is another thing at which I need to keep working. Perhaps I have my answer to the earlier point, as well; I ought to keep doing what I have been doing, hoping that it will make some kind of breakthrough and practicing for other writing venues whether it does or not.

20140623.0547

A few days ago, a friend of mine commented on the stories of his library collection. Like most scholars of the academic humanities, I join him in having an extensive home library. Like his, mine is filled with stories, not only those within the books but those of how the books came to me. Some are simple enough, author to publisher to bookstore shelf to my home shelves. Others have been gifts, and so their stories are a bit more complex. One of the piece on my shelf is yet more complicated, and quite dear to me; my name is on it, not inside the cover but outside on the spine, and I hope to have others join it yet.

There are some others of the sort I have mentioned before, others whose pages have been marked by scholars who have gone before me. I have from them not only the benefits of teaching but of their own notes and notations. Were I a better reader than I am, I might be able to develop somewhat of their character and their scholarly process through examination of their marginal notes. Not all of what those of us who work in the academic humanities do reaches the pages we publish and that few others read. Most does not, actually, with pieces getting rejected and ideas explored and found lacking and others only fleetingly considered but soon forgotten because not written down or not read again once written. The marginalia only appears when the book is read; if the pages are not opened again for a while, the words they bear, inked from the press and from the pen of the purchaser, are also left entombed.

The exhumation of such words makes for interesting stories of the sort my friend discusses. The image of the book as mausoleum for the author (something that plays in part with Mark Edmundson and in part with the assertion by Barthes of the death of the author) is perhaps macabre, one that makes scholars of literature ghoulish, grave-robbers as often or more so than archaeologists (although without the fedora-and-bullwhip social cachet, more's the pity). But delving through dungeons and raiding the tombs of the long-vanished, searching for the knowledge and treasures hidden therein, makes for entertaining narrative. It is one of the primary plot-arcs of the role-playing game, from Dungeons & Dragons (which has the one in the name) through text-based video gaming through the raids of the MMORPG. A number of movies follow the idea, as well, and not only the Indiana Jones films or Tomb Raider. In a sense, the Christian resurrection narrative partakes of it, as well. Surely, then, those of us who root around among pages seeking our own treasures and looking to use them to make yet others can be forgiven for doing so. We but enact in practice what others fantasize; are we to be blamed because others do not themselves seek where we seek and find what we find?

20140620.0749

One of my colleagues, Brian Brooks, has resumed blogging at This Is Why, and people ought to go read what he has to write. Leave many comments, too, as feedback is helpful. And do not be an ass to him. Please.

I promote his blog, as well as that of the Tales after Tolkien Society, because I believe in collegiality. Brooks is a friend, and the Society people are my people, and it is appropriate that I talk them up therefore. It is also the case that I promote them because I believe in the potential for development represented by the format of the blog, following Kathleen Fitzpatrick and others. I believe that we all benefit from the presentation of ideas by people and through consideration of the same, and I believe that those who push forth their ideas benefit from the reports of that consideration. It is a commonplace, I am sure, but it has also been my experience that the more serious examination of what I write by others has helped me to write better. There are things in my work that I do not see; they are in my blind spots. There are things I see in my work that are not necessarily there; they are the projections my mind makes onto what it observes to help it make sense to me. Other readers are not blinded as I am, they do not project as I do, and so they can help me to remove what needs removing and enhance what needs enhancing...if they will.

It is a process with which I have become familiar, and from both sides. In my work at the front of the classroom, I am often one who reviews the words of others to find what they need to write and what they need not to write. In my work on The Work, I am the one whose writing is assessed. It is not always assessed favorably. For example, I had a freelance piece rejected yesterday, which annoys me greatly, but I still look for the feedback on it so that I can improve from the experience. My contribution to the Society volume is in revision at the moment (if a bit lower in priority, as I have a conference paper to pump out before I can attend to it more fully), and I early on lost track of the changes I had to make to the text of my dissertation after my committee saw it. (I remain thankful for the time the committee members spent in poring over the pages I sent them.)

I write in part to improve my ability to write, to think as I need to think to make some semblance of sense of the world and to express that sense-making in a way that may help others to do the same for themselves; I write in part to practice writing. As with any such practice, however, I do not do well to do it in a vacuum; I cannot always tell where I err when I write alone, and so I hope for commentaries about the words I release into the world. I do not think that I am alone in doing so, and so I ask not only for feedback for me, but for those with whom I associate and in whose success I would take some delight.

20130829.0824

It has been a little while since I have read anything from the New York Times, including the opinion columns that have tended to attract my attention.  I remedied the lack in some small measure this morning, reading John Kaag's 24 June 2013 article "On Writing with Others" in the online version of the newspaper.

In the article, Kaag discusses the difficulties he faced in beginning to write explicitly collaboratively, going beyond referring to the writings of others and engaging in writing with others as co-author.  The difficulties inhere in writing as a professor of philosophy, he notes, as philosophers are trained to work as individuals and not in collaboration, as distinct from those in the academic sciences, who almost always author papers and books in groups.  Collaborative authorship, though, as with any collaboration, opens fruitful discussions that precede writing and publication, likely leading to better ideas and better-phrased ideas.  More importantly for Kaag, it guarantees that one other person will read what is written, validating the writing in a way that he and many of his colleagues have sought to be validated since childhood.  It is a useful statement on the value of including others in the writing process.

What Kaag says of philosophy can be extended to many of the academic humanities--many of those working in those fields of study are doctors of philosophy, after all.  In many such fields, such as my own literary studies, it is very much the case that the individual effort is what is prized and rewarded; I do not have the texts with me at the moment, so that I cannot refer to them in detail, but I recall a number of articles in Profession and other journals which wrestle with the question of how to evaluate collaborative scholarship in the humanities for purposes of tenure and promotion, which tells me that it is not common practice to write in groups, that doing so is something which is not particularly favored.  I and those like me tend to write alone, sequestering ourselves in offices and libraries, hiding away from the world in the oft-decried ivory tower, pursuing esoteric truths that reveal to those few who care to look some small slice of the nature of humanity hitherto unseen.

I have said, and many others have said, that a large part of the problem facing the academic humanities, a major factor in the common public disdain for them, is the lack of transparency in them.  That those of us working in them do retreat from the world, following the monastic origins of The Work in which we are engaged, allows others to ignore us or to ridicule us; in neither case are we present to be able to answer those accusations leveled at us, usually of irrelevance or inanity.  Kaag is correct, therefore, in asserting that "writing with others might be a first step in writing for others [emphasis mine]," that in writing together those of us in the academic humanities can begin to write in such a way that we not only say what it is that we mean to say, but do so in such a way that others are able to read it and happy to read it---as happy as they are to read anything, which is a different discussion altogether.

My saying so is hardly unique, of course, and my practice does not as much follow what I preach as it ought to do.  I have also said before that if I am a hypocrite, I am in good and abundant company.  If I and others could make of that company a group of collaborative writers, as those in rhetoric and composition seem to be beginning to do quite effectively (witness the increasing occurrence of collaboratively authored journal articles and scholarly books, as well as the increasing numbers of full-time, tenure-track jobs open in composition), we could do a fair bit of good in the world, helping to increase our mutual understanding of one another and presumably thereby opening avenues for the diminution of such conflicts as do so much harm to us all.

20130828.1710

I know that today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered what is now one of the most famous pieces of oratory in human history.  I also know that other people much better qualified to discuss the event and its commemoration are doing so at great length; I need not add my voice to theirs, and I have my own matters to discuss:

One of the assignments that I am obliged to require of my students at Oklahoma State University is a literacy narrative, a piece in which students relate a moment of significance in their developments as reading persons and connect that moment to a broader socio-cultural context.  It is my usual practice to offer my students models of the kind of writing I want to see them do--my teaching blog is in large part taken up with such examples--and so I really ought to put together a literacy narrative for my students.  Certainly, those I have now deserve as much time and attention as those I once had, and I have discussed having more of it to give them (here, for instance).

Something stops me, though, namely that I have always had difficulty putting together literacy narratives.  I have made no secret of my training and my profession, of my calling, and being such a person as successfully pursues a doctorate in English makes of me the kind of person for whom the experience of literacy is not able to be disentangled from the workings of my life.  I know that there are many people--I would venture to say that it is true of most people--for whom reading is somehow separate from their "real" lives, for whom writing occurs seldom if at all, but I am not one of those people.  The opposite is more or less the truth of things for me.

To be able to identify a single moment of significance in my development as a reading person is not something that I can do well, therefore.  Or I thought so, but something occurred to me as I considered how I will proceed in the way I discharge my duties as a teacher.  An article from Profession, one I discuss at length in the first substantial post to this blog (more than three years ago, now), has continually cropped up in my academic writing, and even in much of my personal writing.  I have even referenced it in putting together proposals for research panels at conferences and in interviews for positions like that I now hold.  I think it safe to say that the article in question, Mark Edmundson's "Against Readings," has influenced my life as a reading person insofar as it has affected the way in which I do the work that I do--and my work is the work of a reading person almost entirely.

It is good to have come up with a topic, the way the article in question has affected me.  It is not, however, enough to move forward with the project of putting together an example essay for my students.  They are asked to generate some three to five full pages of material, some 950 to 1600 words in total, and simply announcing the way in which the text has affected me, lodging in my mind so as to serve as an initial point of reference for much of my academic discourse about reading, writing, and teaching, will not suffice to offer a developed model for their edification.  How that effect manifests, and what it means that it does so, needs to be explicated.

I have little right to ask my students to do a thing I cannot also do.  And if I have had difficulty in performing the task, then I can empathize with their challenges (at least in part), and in surmounting them, I can show them that they, too, can accomplish the goals laid out for them.

Now, to get them to set some goals of their own...

20130503.0957

One of the things that the digital humanities is supposed to foster, as a number of articles in the last several issues of Profession note, is the exchange of ideas.  Scholarship promotes itself as being a venue for sharing knowledge and understanding, regardless of the medium, but digital versions thereof have the ability to reach broader audiences and to facilitate faster feedback than their print counterparts, as well as to permit asynchronous discussion and enduring potential for revision based upon the feedback received.  So "conventional wisdom" holds,* and so my own admittedly limited experience has shown.

I try to be a generator for some of that feedback.  On one blog I follow, Helen Young's Diverse Fictions, I make a point of offering comments in response to the author's posts.  From time to time, they have even been potentially helpful and productive conversations.  I can hope that I will benefit from similar commentaries on my own work.

If and when I ever get back to teaching, and teaching a class conducive to the idea, I think I will follow the practice I have seen some of my colleagues deploy and require my students to write their papers as blog entries.  I have had some practice in doing so, writing reflections and the occasional academic bit on this blog and another I maintain (if less well than this one), so I think I can speak from some situated ethos.  And, despite the protestations of many who claim that digital media are ruining writing in a way never before seen in the history of writing (which are inaccurate, I might add), there is much good writing on the Internet.

I entertain the conceit that I do some of it.

The assignment suggests itself as one suited to the continually-emergent digital environment and one likely to help students prepare for work; many of the job opportunities I have seen specifically ask for experience in blogging and other social media.  It allows for more flexible submission, permitting those students who have many other concerns (children and jobs) to be able to get their work done and turned in around their schedules.  Whether or not it is more environmentally-friendly than traditional submission, I am not sure.  But it might be, and that, too, is worth considering.

*I place the phrase in quotes because I am not entirely sure that digital scholarship has managed to develop conventions yet.  And convention should be questioned in any event.

20130214.1230

Yes, I know that it is Valentine's Day.  I have already told mine that she is my Valentine--not that she needed the reminder.

This blog post is not about that.

It will be no secret to those few who read this blog with even as much regularity as I update it that I devote quite a bit of thought to my teaching.  The argument could even be made that I think about it too much, that I am wasting mental effort on something that is not my "real" work of humanities research--or that I am wasting my life on several things that do not matter ("Why do we need to teach this crap, anyway?  And what good is it to look at a poem like that?  Who cares?").

I am not going to address the issue of such arguments at the moment; I bring them up only to acknowledge their existence and use them as context for what I do want to discuss: a perhaps not so strange idea I had about my teaching.

One of the things that I tend to do in my classrooms is to bring in examples of the kinds of writing I want from my students.  In my remedial and developmental classes, I am obliged to explicitly teach expository modes such as description, narration, and contrast.  I therefore bring in passages from my own understanding of English-language literary canon and more mainstream publication that I find illustrate those modes.  In my more "normal" first-year composition classes, I bring in examples of short literary-critical essays, so that students can actually look at what one ought to look like, rather than trying to guess based on preconceived notions that are almost always wrong.

In my technical writing classes, I bring in examples of technical writing that I come across in my own (entirely too slow) readings.  Sometimes this is in the form of committee reports published in Profession, CCC, College English, and the like.  Sometimes it is in the form of reports and proposals I have had to do, although redacted--there are some things about which it is not appropriate for students to know...

One of the things that I hope to point out to the technical writing students with the examples is that technical writing ought to be clear and explicitly instructive.  It focuses primarily on the efficient transfer of information, rather than presenting knotty concepts that tease the reader to think through them or attempting to foster a specific range of aesthetic response (as much literary writing does).  And that means that it ideally supplements clear and lucid presentations of evidence, solid explanations of how that evidence functions, and an explanation of any unusual terms in it with clear graphics and paratextual features (subject headings and sub-headings, for instance) that guide reading effectively and facilitate quick reference.  Sentences will be of mixed length, usually simple in structure; parenthetical phrases and subordinate clauses are minimized.  Vocabulary will be of a somewhat but not fully formal register, with jargon in place but (in most cases) defined either upon first use or in a glossary at the end of the work.

It occurred to me as I was looking over materials for my play of the Legend of the Five Rings RPG that the gaming materials are themselves fine examples of technical writing.  The core book for the current edition of the game offers a fair bit of data--simple explanations of game-play mechanics and examples of the kind of narratives that drive the game*--with explications of game play and discussions of how the core rules interact with themselves.  Graphics abound, including art meant to impart understanding of cultural norms and mores and tables that neatly encapsulate the evidence that is described in detail in the text, and the information throughout is neatly divided by clearly distinguished hierarchical chapter and subject headings and sub-headings.  They join an extensive index in facilitating quick reference, and that index joins a substantial glossary that clarifies a great many terms that are unfamiliar to those newly approaching the game--the jargon of the RPG experience.

I have nursed the idea for some time that I ought to do some kind of paper on the topic (have I ruined my ability to do so by making this blog post?)--sometime, when I have time and the other projects I already have on deck are done.  But I had the thought within the past day or two that I might use the game as an example of technical writing for my classes.  I am already quite the nerd--who else would teach English?--so that I would risk little abrogation of my teacherly identity by bringing in such materials, and the example would serve to highlight the extent of the socio-cultural space which technical writing can occupy.

The only question I have, then, is about the manner in which the material would be received, both by students and my colleagues.  Would I be excluding students yet more by bringing in materials from a sub-culture which I occupy but which many if not most of those in my classroom do not?  Would my colleagues look at me (even more than many do now--"You're young; you'll feel like I do when you have some experience") as frivolous?  Should I worry about either?

I welcome the input of those of you who do look at this from time to time, however many you may be.

*I suppose that comments about this will be required at some point, but one of these per day is enough for me, I think.

20120218.2142

On another blog I maintain, I make a point of providing examples of the kind of work that I would like to see my students do.  In part, this is because I have been taught that a part of good teaching is the modeling of the kinds of behaviors desired.  My own experience in the classroom, both as student and as teacher, confirm this.  Some comments I have had from students also serve to confirm it; a number have reported to me that looking at the examples I provide has helped them frame their own arguments--and I even believe them, not just from vanity (although I am egotistical enough that it bears in), but also from the fact that they bring annotated copies of the examples with them to class, as well as in the content of their writing.

I have noticed that, even so, the students often do not allow themselves to indulge in the kinds of topics that I do.  This term, in the four sample papers I have written for my students' use, I have treated a sitcom character and a comic book character, poked fun at myself, pointed up the flaws in Arthurian knighthood, and explicated the citizenship of characters from two major science fiction continua.  Only one--the Arthurian piece--treats "legitimate" work; the rest are pop culture references or geek/nerd subculture references.  (I am sure that some of my more ethnographically-minded friends will have some dispute with my choice of terms here; I welcome the discussion.  I also know that popular culture has a variety of scholarly resources applied to it.  But I also know that there remains something of a disdain for much that lies outside of the traditional canon, even so.)  Certainly, I am not a "regular" topic "worthy" of scholarship (yet; I did note that I am vain, yes?).  And examples from earlier terms have been very much in line with this term's thrust; I have ranged from laundry to role-playing games (which got me into graduate school) to progressive rock to Donaldson, and there is not necessarily much scholarship aimed at any one of them.  The question of why I would turn to such things as I do to put together examples becomes an easy one to ask, then (as though it is not always something easy to ask--and which well ought to be asked).

The question has many answers.  One of them, and one wholly pedagogically legitimate, is that in treating mundane matters rather than the rarefied, sacralized "great" works, I am bringing the tasks I assign my students more nearly into that cognitive space which Vygotsky calls the "zone of proximal development" (discussed, among others, here and here).  By demonstrating that the methods I teach are applicable to the mentally nearby, I try to show the students that the tasks required of them are much more accessible than is often presented.

Another reason, one grounded in my research agenda (or one, as I have several), is related: bringing scholarship to the masses.  It is one of the more sustained pet projects of mine, one I discuss in my actual personal life (when I am around people who are not already involved in study, which is not terribly often, even in the dojo--we have a high number of teachers and professors on the mats).  I also have gone on about it at some length in this blog (see this entry, this entry, this entry, and this entry).  I find that one way to do so is to apply scholarly methods to commonly accessible materials, and to explain how the application happens.

Yet another reason, which seems to be still related, as well as to tie back to an above aside, is that what is "worthy" is not nearly so inclusive as it ought to be.  I know of at least one journal that made a go of looking at the mundane, so I am far from the only one who thinks that there should be more attention paid to the quotidian.  Indeed, one of the sources I reference in my dissertation, Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch's "Robert Southey," remarks that "it is often precisely the minor, noncanonical writers who initiate, and typify, what the major figures perfect and thereby transcend"; the unmarked depicts what is going on in the broader social consciousness, and so it ought to be studied by those who want to know what is in the hearts and minds of the people--something in which all of us have interest.

Fundamentally, though, my reason for my topic selections is the one that I hope (often in vain) that my students will deploy: I write about what I write about because I like it.  I have written before about my agreement with Mark Edmundson, that those of us who enter into the scholarly life often do so because of our joy in what we study, and that it behooves us to show that joy in our work.  When I remark that it was the role-playing game which got me into graduate school, I am not joking; my undergraduate thesis centered on Legend of the Five Rings and Dungeons & Dragons, largely because I enjoyed them and I wanted to find a way to bring what I loved to do and what I had to do together.  I wrote my first scholarly publication and my master's thesis on Robin Hobb because I love to read what she writes.  My dissertation is on Arthurian legend because I have long enjoyed reading it.  And I like to read comic books and to watch sitcoms; I certainly am fond of myself (I did mention that I am vain, yes?).  Is it any surprise, given how much of my other work is on stuff that I like, and for no reason other than that I like it, that I would turn to what I like to set up examples for my students?

Works Cited
~Bernhardt-Kabisch, Ernest. "Robert Southey." Dictionary of Literary Biography 93. Detroit: Gale, 1990. N. pag. Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 March 2011.

20120126.1832

As part of the teaching I am engaged in, I try to provide a number of examples to my students of how I want things done.  This semester, I am teaching three classes which have as explicit requirements the composition of summaries; I have them read and summarize articles from the New York Times Opinion/Editorial section, and because I want them to succeed, I show them what kinds of things I want done.  To that end, I recently put together the following summary, posting it to the teaching blog I maintain so that my students can more easily access it:

On 23 January 2012, Stanley Fish's "Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation" appeared in the online New York Times.  In the article, Fish complains that the tools being developed and employed by digital humanities scholars are changing methods of study for the worse by eliminating the possibility and need for critical interpretation.  He opens by carrying out a mock-reading of Milton's Areopagitica, using it as an exemplar of the kind of work that digital humanities facilitates, pointing out the inadequacy of such work by asserting that the simple existence of a pattern does not suffice to support a given interpretation of that pattern.  Fish moves on to assert that the simple identification of patterns is the focus of digital humanities research, a paradigm diametrically opposed to the methods by which literary criticism has been carried out for nearly a century.  He assails digital humanities work because it does not, in his view, offer closure and meaning, but rather rejects the certainty of meaning that he presents as the end-point of his own critical analysis.  Unfortunately, the article fails to convince for several reasons: he indulges in reductio ad absurdum arguments based on supposition errors (such as a tacit assertion that digital humanities research never approaches a text with an idea of critical approach already in hand, that researchers wholly hand over their agency to the machines), over-simplification, and, in his last paragraph, an excessive degree of smirking sarcasm.

Fish exerts a certain influence on those working in the academic humanities.  For instance, more than a third of Profession 2009 is devoted to responses to and from Stanley Fish; for an annual publication to focus so narrowly on a single scholar bespeaks the importance of that scholar.  Even those people who take issue with him concede that he does have useful things to say.  Patricia Bizzell provides one example ready to hand for me.  Jonathan Culler provides another.  So it is clear that he is worth attention.  And even in critiquing digital scholarship, he is not entirely in error; there are, admittedly, problems with the field.  Some of the questions he raises are questions that need to be asked.  And there are other stress-points in doing digital work; one of the major ones is the shift towards an attitude and social context which facilitate what we currently regard as plagiarism.  It is a potential problem, as I have discussed.

The great opening of information that digital work performs does set up a climate in which anyone can access and contribute to information, and the concepts of ownership of ideas and the receipt of credit for articulating them are becoming more contested.  That Fish makes claims that grate is not a reason to reject him out of hand; he does make a number of good points, and even when he does not, the fact that he does pose questions, that he compels them and the defense of ideas that they entail, is a good thing.  One of the tenets of critical thinking, that chimera we are exhorted to pursue in our classrooms, is that one must question ideas and claims, and in the questioning, they are either strengthened or shown to merit being discarded--an idea DePalma lays out quite succinctly in his article.

That he says what he says is not the problem.  What he says can be argued against--and any scholar should expect that there will be argument against it.  Certainly, Fish's position against the value of the digital humanities is argued against.  Purdy and Walker, for example, assert the need to integrate digital scholarship into the rubrics used for hiring, promotion, and tenure, noting that it is "often more likely than print to be read and used" (190).  Their position is hardly in line with that of Fish.  In addition, Profession 2011 gives as much of itself to discussion of digital scholarship as Profession 2009 devotes to Fish, and it would not likely do so were there not something to discuss about the matter.  In it, Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen make the point early on that "humanities disciplines must find ways not simply of evaluating but also of valuing digital scholarship" (123).  The position is one more or less diametrically opposed to that Fish outlines in his New York Times piece, and it is one supported by a number of other scholars.  Excellent speller Geoffrey Rockwell, for instance, remarks on the potential for the development of new modes of inquiry by digital scholarship, viewing it as one of the assets of digital work (154-55).  Jerome McGann, whose “On Creating a Usable Future” I have discussed, even asserts digital scholarship as a potential corrective to the crisis in which the academic humanities currently find themselves.  It is hardly a condemnation of the field of study.

No, the problem is not that he says what he says.  The problem is where he says what he says.*

Many people read the New York Times, whether in printed or online format, and so Fish is positioned to be able to address a wide audience through writing for it.  The position is one that not many in academia have; most of us speak to our students and our colleagues about our work and the views we come to have through it, and we try to publish articles and books, but in reality few people outside the academic establishment (and not as many within it as should be the case) pay attention to what goes on within the walls of the proverbial ivory tower.  The affairs of those descended from Chaucer's Clerk do not often penetrate the perceptions of the bulk of people in the United States, something I think I have commented on before (here, here, here, and here, if not elsewhere).  So what Fish writes has the opportunity to exert disproportionate influence on popular perception of the work done by those in the humanities.  When he decides to condemn a field of study, then, he does more than simply express a divergent opinion of scholarly discipline--which he is certainly within his rights to do, both as a human being and as a scholar.  He marshals opposition to the ability of others to do their work--and in that, he undermines himself, for in saying that any one of us working in the academic humanities is wasting time to no good purpose, the accusation that any others of us, or even all of us, are similarly wasteful becomes not just possible but viable.

After all, if even our own are calling into question whether or not the work we do is actually worth doing as a field, as opposed to simply disagreeing about results or specific methods...

Works Cited**
~Bizzell, Patricia. "Composition Studies Saves the World!" Profession 2009 (2009): 94-98. Print.
~Culler, Johnathan. "Writing to Provoke." Profession 2009 (2009): 84-88. Print.
~DePalma, Michael-John. "Re-envisioning Religious Discourses as Rhetorical Resources in Composition Teaching: A Pragmatic Response to the Challenge of Belief." CCC 63.2 (December 2011): 219-43. Print.
~Fish, Stanley. "Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation." NYTimes.com. New York Times, 23 January 2010. Web. 24 January 2012.
~McGann, Jerome. “On Creating a Usable Future.” Profession 2011 (2011): 182-95. Print.
~Purdy, James P., and Joyce R. Walker. "Valuing Digital Scholarship: Exploring the Changing Realities of Intellectual Work." Profession 2010 (2010): 177-95. Print.
~Rockwell, Geoffrey. "On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship." Profession 2011 (2011): 152-68. Print.
~Schreibman, Susan, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsen. Introduction. Profession 2011 (2011): 123-35. Print.

*I understand that this comment is somewhat problematic.  I think I explain the reasoning behind it in the following paragraph, but I do know that I appear to tread dangerously close to advocating censorship.  For the record, here as often, I am not generally in favor of restricting speech, particularly academic speech (do I need to make a full disclosure statement here?).  Fish has every right to voice his opinion, and he goes to great length to support that opinion, so that he is exercising sufficiently due diligence--even if he is wrong.  And the Times has the right to print what it pleases, both as an instrument of "the press" and as a business providing a product.  That does not mean that I have to be happy, or that I in fact am happy, to have seen it pop up where it did.  There is a lot of potential for damage in it, and since I am one of those who may be damaged by it, I think I have the right to express my displeasure at the decision no less than did Fish and the Times to make it.

**I am aware of the irony of my employing a preponderance of print sources in discussing digital scholarship.  Many of my sources, however, discuss the necessity of interplay between traditional print and new digital media.  I hope to be aligned with the practice current research suggests is preferable.

20111214.1823

I have continued to read through my copy of Profession 2011, today getting into its cluster of articles centered on digital humanities scholarship.  One of the articles in that cluster is the work of Jerome McGann, whose book The Textual Condition informs my dissertation; because I am familiar with his work, I was interested in seeing what he released in “On Creating a Usable Future.”

In the article, McGann makes a convincing case that scholars in the humanities need to get involved in digital scholarship, especially since the dominance of print is coming to an end in the near future.  We—and I am a scholar in the humanities, so I can use that pronoun—have not done well enough at it yet, “reacting to the rapidly changing scene rather than working to shape policy and exert control over events,” although that is beginning to change (184).  The Google Books settlement is presented as a case-in-point example (192).  There is much to gain from developing and employing digital resources, and there is a need to adjust the institutional practices of humanities departments to accommodate the valuation and assessment of digital media.  Even so, as McGann remarks, there is a need to move beyond the surface-level phenomena that digital media tend to foster: “Social software technologies have a wide-spreading but shallow root system whose most impressive result to date, Wikipedia, illustrates both its capacities and its limits” (187).  Substantial scholarship requires substantial engagement, even in digital media, and it will be the task of those in the humanities to foster that engagement.

As he discusses his points, McGann makes several particularly pithy comments.  For one, he remarks that “Book culture will not go extinct: human memory is too closely bound to it” (185); if he is correct, then it will be a relief to such bibliophiles as myself.  For another, he relates “the belief, long held by the university community, that innovative research would drive effective and innovative pedagogy” (189).  It is in no small part due to the need for that innovation that some of the protections of tenure were set up; despite the complaints people have against it, the freedom from fear of reprisal for sincerely and ethically undertaking otherwise unpopular research is necessary to the advancement of human knowledge about the world and about ourselves.  The latter is one of the purposes of the humanities, and people are not always pleasant, so that what the study of us reveals is not like to be.

Related is the idea “that a usable future is a function of a usable past” (187).  To paraphrase McGann, the humanities work to create an inclusive and reliable cultural record which scholars can augment through the exercise of their disciplines (185).  We have to have knowledge of who and what we were to understand fully who and what we are.  Both have to be in place for us to have any hope of conceiving of who and what we will be, or even if there will be a “we” for us to be.  And what is “we,” anyway?

Digital technologies can be put to the ends of the humanities, certainly, but much needs to be done.  McGann remarks that the resources currently available are all too often left at the peripheries of scholarly endeavor (190).  More needs to be done to integrate them.  I have made a start on doing so; although my dissertation is largely on a traditional model, it makes free use of digital materials.  And in my non-dissertation writings, many of which I at least like to pretend are of a somewhat scholarly nature, I try to link to relevant materials (as herein).  In addition, I know of people who do quite a bit of scholarship electronically, such as HASTAC.  Perhaps if more of us do it, the study of the humanities can move in a direction that will help to redeem it from the onus under which it is currently operating.  And something needs to be done, certainly, lest the whole enterprise die.

Work Cited
McGann, Jerome. “On Creating a Usable Future.” Profession 2011(2011): 182-95. Print.

20111213.1315

I received my copy of Profession 2011 in the mail a week or two ago, and I finally got around to reading it in the past couple of days (I was already reading something else, thank you kindly).  I am not yet done doing so, although I have gotten through a number of the articles in it, of which one is Hillary Chute's "Comics Form and Narrating Lives."

I point out the article because of the coincidence or synchronicity of my having had an article on graphic narrative while I complained about another treatment of graphic narrative.  In addition, I think it offers things that are valuable as an introduction to the study of the graphic novel.  For instance, Chute presents a description of the genre as one "in which words and images create unsynthesized narrative tracks; that is to say, it is not an illustrative form in which each is redundant of the other....The form is built on the ongoing counterpoint of presence--in frames or panels--and absence, the white space between frames where a reader projects causality and that is called the gutter" (108).  Chute goes on to narrow the description, marking comics as "largely a hand-drawn form that registers the subjective bodily mark on the page....It demands tactility, a physical intimacy with the reader in the acts of cognition and visual scrutiny" (112).

It seems to me that the description, moving into definition, that Chute employs is a good starting point.  But it also seems to me to be problematic in some respects.  For example, The Legend of Zelda (which remains on my mind) partakes of the framing and unsynthesized synchronic presentation of word and image Chute remarks upon.  While it may not appear to be "hand-drawn" in the conventional sense, it is certainly a hand-making, since people had to put it together.  And there are certainly demands for tactility and "reader" involvement in "cognition and visual scrutiny" involved in playing the game.  Moreover, there are generally recognized comics which are themselves computer-generated; do they not count as "comics," or is there more at work?

As I said, I think it a good point of entry.  I would welcome the input of those in my acquaintance who, more adept in the study of graphic narrative than I, can comment more thoroughly.

Work Cited
Chute, Hillary. "Comics Form and Narrating Lives." Profession 2011 (2011): 107-17. Print.

20101221.0733

When I got home last night from taking in final papers and doing a last bit of Christmas shopping, I was pleased to find my copy of CCC 62.2 (December 2010) waiting for me. I just got done reading Profession, and it is good that I get to keep keeping up with the research in a large part of my work--I am a medievalist by training, but I end up being a compositionist by institution and sheer dint of course-load.

As to that, I am unsure if I have discussed this, but in the Fall 2010 term, I taught 29 hours of coursework across seven sections. Four of those were five-hour developmental freshman composition sections (two, in the evening, were five-hour solid blocks). Another was a section of the new remedial course at my institution (which seems to have worked out well), and the remainder was taken up by speech.

In the Spring 2011 term (which will begin on January 12, last I heard), I am teaching only slightly less; I only have three of the five-hour courses, while the rest remains the same. My days are still more or less shot, but I do have a bit more time in the mornings, which will be of great help; one of the hardest things this term has been teaching until 10pm and having to be back on-site at 9am the next morning.

I will be hard-pressed, I know, to get my dissertation done for presentation the Spring 2011 term at my PhD institution. I should still be clear to go for the year, however, which is some comfort.

20101220.1046

I noted in my last post that I had received my copy of Profession 2010. Some days later, after a holiday party and several sets of exam-gradings, I have finally finished my first reading of it, and as with the previous issues, I find myself quite pleased with the text.

The 2010 issue is divided into some four sections. The first, centering around the Presidential Forum, discusses translation studies, which is a seemingly strongly emergent field of inquiry in the humanities and one which piques my interest both as one who does work as a medievalist (which almost always involves some translation) and as a teacher at a school largely populated by non-native speakers of English. The second discusses disability and language, a field with which I have had only limited contact. The third is a less-organized grouping of articles discussing a variety of subjects (including one relevant to this blog and all blogs, generally), while the fourth is the "Forum" in which Philip Goldstein and Gerald Graff argue about what the latter states in Profession 2009.

A concept that I had had earlier but that I find reinforced by the translation studies section of Profession 2010 is the notion that translation traditionally relies on the concept--not entirely accurate--that there is a single, stable version of a given language, which can be converted into a single, stable version of another language. For example, Naoki Sakai directly addresses the futility of the idea in "Translation and the Figure of Border: Toward the Apprehension of Translation as a Social Action." Professor Sakai notes that "The unity of language cannot be given in experience because it is nothing but a regulative idea, enabling us to comprehend related data about languages" (27); Sakai cites Kant's definition of the regulative idea as one not actually in evidence but applied so as to make possible systematic interpretation of present evidence (I am, of course, paraphrasing). In Sakai's view, the concept of unified language accompanies unified nation-hood, and both are comparatively recent concepts that are artificially developed (30-31), and as such, both are contingent upon an Other (32). Sakai's viewpoint opens up any translated text to postcolonial analysis, really, and so the article serves to undergird more critical work.

More work on translation is, in fact, called for by the articles in the translation studies cluster in Profession 2010. As part of this, Catherine Porter notes that there is demand for qualified, productive translators (7), seemingly as an imminently understandable response to globalism and the breakdown of sociolinguistic hegemony. Verena Conley expands upon the notion, stating that "the global circulation of languages and cultures that, intersecting and interacting multifariously, are the foundation no longer for Towers of Babel but for myriad networks in and between which translations proliferate" (19). And it is in this multiplicity of sociolinguistic interaction that my teaching begins to be affected.

As I noted, many if not most of my students are not native speakers of English. By the time they reach my classes, though, they are expected to be able to function at the collegiate level (whatever that means) in English, largely as a result of having taken and passed a long sequence of ESL courses offered by my institution. In large part, they are; the tasks I set before them, they accomplish, perhaps not spectacularly well, but competently.

But there are always some who manage to slide through and should not have. I know I am not always as patient with them as I ought to be (though in one or two cases, I have been far more forgiving than is entirely appropriate). Still, at what point do I actually enter the sequence? I know that much of what I do is explicitly the development of vocabulary and specific modes of thought and inquiry which are derived at length from culturally-specific underlying concepts, and that the cultures spawning them are not the same which give rise to my students (including many of the native speakers, though I am not about to go into that particular discussion at the moment). Am I not then simply doing what we might call a more advanced level of ESL? Or is it something different altogether?

Ideas?

Works Cited
~Conley, Verena. "Living in Translation." Profession 2010 (2010): 18-24. Print.
~Porter, Catherine. Introduction. Profession 2010 (2010): 5-8. Print.
~Sakai, Naoki. "Translation and the Figure of Border: Toward the Apprehension of Translation as a Social Action." Profession 2010 (2010): 25-34. Print.

20101215.1724

I have several things to note today. One is that today is my dear younger brother's birthday; I have already called to wish him well.

Another is that my copy of Profession 2010 has arrived. It seems to be of slightly less extent than the previous few editions, and I am not yet sure of the implications of that. I have not yet had a chance to read it fully, though I have gotten through the two introductory pieces. I do, though, intend to do as I have been doing with the journals I take: after reading through, or reading into, I am going to write some kind of response to one or more of the articles contained within. As usual, they will appear here when done.

In the interim, though, I offer the following (in part so that I will have examples for my students in coming terms):

On December 13, 2010, the online New York Times released an op-ed piece by David Brooks, "Ben Franklin's Nation." In the article, Brooks notes that the world is increasingly composed of the middle class, and that the growth of the middle class across the globe will increase in the next few decades. Brooks sees this as an opportunity for a redefinition of the place of the United States in the world; rather than being the world leader in standard of living (which we will not be able to sustain), we can become the world leader in determining what it means to be middle-class. He writes: "Americans could well become the champions of middle-class dignity. The U.S. could become the crossroads nation for those who aspire to join the middle and upper-middle class, attracting students, immigrants and entrepreneurs." He goes on to note that doing so would oblige the US to redefine and enhance what it means to be middle class, arguing that doing so could make the twenty-first century "another American century."

I am, in part, pleased by this message. As I have noted elsewhere, I am (despite being a liberal elite who, as an academic, is supposed to hate America) more or less fond of the country of my birth, and so I cannot help but be moved by the idea that American exceptionalism can be perpetuated; I confess to being enough of an egotist that I like seeing that which is associated with me and with which I identify valorized. And, if nothing else, it is a better view of American exceptionalism than that which holds that the country has the right and duty to police the world.

That said, as one of the "pointy-headed elitists," I am aware that there are problems with the middle-class ideology that Brooks espouses. In its current form, at least, the American middle-class-ness of which I partake and which Brooks lauds is based upon the exploitation, both historical and current, of various populations. Immigrant laborers and overseas sweatshops do much to make the kind of consumption upon which middle-class life depends--even when predicated upon social contexts, following Brooks, since "the community clubs, the professional societies, the religious charities and Little Leagues" that he notes have material requirements--possible. So for Brooks' idea of a worldwide middle class led by the American concept of the same to work in an equitable, sustainable, ethical sense will require not so much a refiguring of what the middle class is as a resetting of it to an (idealized or romanticized?) earlier notion of it.

There was a time in the United States, so goes the story, that a solid manufacturing job would enable a person to enter into some kind of middle-class life. Perhaps wealth and "luxury"* were beyond the average factory worker, but that worker could support a family of four or five reasonably comfortably, taking an annual vacation and making another annual trek back to old homes to meet with family over the holidays. Parents could afford to help their kids through college, helping the next generation do better than they themselves did.

That condition, if it ever actually existed, certainly no longer does in the United States, and I have doubts that it exists elsewhere in any great abundance. Until and unless it does, unfortunately, the utopian middle-class world Brooks envisions cannot--and damned well ought not to--come to pass.

*I use the term advisedly, realizing that for many people, having enough food to eat each day and a secure place to live is a luxury currently beyond their means.

20101002.0907

I mentioned earlier that I work for one of the proprietary colleges in New York City. As should not be a surprise, I am part of the union at that college; aside from my personal belief in the power of collective action (and its Constitutional justification in the First Amendment), it is more or less one of the terms of employment that I be enrolled in that union.

The union contract with the school expires on October 9, and so the union and the management of the school are currently in the process of negotiating the next contract. Right now, though, the management is arguing that because there is a chance that regulations being debated might in the future hurt the school, the management (which reports that enrollment and incoming monies are up right now) needs to be able to do, among other things, the following:

Cut the wages of all union employees (which includes all teaching faculty as well as the whole of the clerical and maintenance staffs) by 4%,

Cut employer matching contributions to the 401k by 1.5%,

Exclude newly-hired part-time faculty from participation in the 401k,

Extend the probation period (during which an employee may be fired without cause and without access to grievance procedures and protections) to seven semesters for teaching faculty and five for staff,

Install cameras in every classroom to use for "Lecture Capture," which can be used as a surveillance tool (inhibiting the academic freedom on which intellectual inquiry depends) and as a means to rebroadcast lectures as a moneymaking tool,

And reduce total teaching hours (including hours taught at other institutions, so that it messes with people caught in the traditional plight of the adjunct--bouncing between institutions in an attempt to cobble together enough hours to make enough money to live on).

These management demands are not acceptable to the union membership, obviously. And it is not simply because of the financial impact they have on the members, but because they will negatively impact the ability of the teachers to teach.

That impact will come from the reduction of employee connection to the institution. By giving the employees less reason to partake in the community of the school--particularly the part-time employees who, here as in most other colleges and universities across the country,* comprise the bulk of the teachers students encounter in their pivotal first year of classes--the school gives them less incentive to do the myriad outside tasks that result in good teaching. Limiting teachers' hours forces them to seek outside employment, thereby reducing the amount of time they may spend with students outside of class in office hours and consultations and the like, which in turn sharply limits the ability of students who might do well with a little extra help to get that help. And denying employees access to benefits reduces their connection to the school. So, too, does putting them under minute surveillance, for while observation from time to time is a boon to teaching, constant watching speaks of distrust, and who among us responds well to being told we are not worth trusting?

Because of these things, the union membership voted on Thursday to authorize a strike. The motion carried overwhelmingly; some eight members voted against it, while those in favor numbered in the hundreds. We do not look forward to this; we hope instead that the management of the school will come to its senses and not attempt to set up, in the interest of making money in the short-term, policies that will exert a long-term negative effect on the institution and the students it serves.

But we will not let these things pass.

*This according to information taken from Profession, College English, and CCC in their last few issues.

20100522.1255

I have struggled with beginning this post.

The reading I have been doing over the past couple of weeks has largely concerned itself with the profession of teaching (in order of increasing specificity, in the humanities, languages, literatures in languages, and English). Much of it laments the perceived lack of faith in or regard for such teaching, and some of it (several articles in Profession 2008, for example) addresses ways in which those lacks can be addressed and possibly rectified.

At the root of discussions of such lacks is this: academic work in the humanities is seen as detrimental to the various sorts of fiber of the United States and, in a larger context, the world. It is seen as destructive to the concept of truth, morally relativistic and therefore permissive and even encouraging of perversity, and regarding as anathema the institutions which allow it to flourish. (This is in addition to the general removal from "reality" in academia at large; those in the sciences, however, get to claim that their work speaks to immediate practical concerns, which insulates them from some of the critiques of irrelevance that those in the humanities suffer.) And there is a motion among a great many people to rein in such tendencies.

Because of my vocation in the academic humanities, I am perforce among the targets of such animosity as I note above. And I am, I think understandably, not entirely pleased that such "rhetoric" as "All academics hate America" gets levied at me.

I was born in the United States and have lived all of my life here. Doing so has afforded me great opportunity, among which has been the chance to be able to pursue my love of English language and literature and to share my love (and hard-won understanding) of it with my students. And that opportunity has been funded, in part, by federal aid programs; I am very much mindful of what I have gained from living in the United States, and I am very much appreciative of it.

But that does not mean that I believe this country which has given rise to me is perfect. It is a human endeavor, and as such, it is subject to error. And why, if I see an error, should I not point it out, that it might be at least examined (acknowledging that it may well be that correcting any individual error causes problems that are worse than the error corrected)? Is it not the purpose of the First Amendment to protect such criticism? And if it is so, can I be faulted for exercising the rights which my own parents enlisted to defend and for the preservation of which soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines continue to fight, suffer, and die?

Is it not an insult to them to not employ and enjoy that which their sacrifices have purchased on behalf of us all?

And the ideas that 1) such examination and critique are somehow "unpatriotic," and 2) that a humanities department--of which English is one--is somehow detrimental to the moral fiber and character of the nation, are fallacious. The United States Military Academy, cited by Forbes as "America's Best College," maintains a department of English and philosophy, and said department has among its stated objectives the intellectual inquiry and examination of cultures other than mainstream American that are so often decried. The United States Naval Academy seems to endorse a similar view, as does the United States Air Force Academy (look for "English").

The United States military views such as necessary to the training of its cadets and midshipmen. And the graduates of the service academies often become the officers at the highest levels of the military, among the most venerated of our citizens. And if they are encouraged--and even required--to take on such inquiry, can we truly say that doing so is un-American?

20100506.1630

That I have been a bit slothful in my reading should be evident from the fact that I only today cracked open my copy of the Modern Language Association's Profession 2009. I am not through with it yet, but I have already found an article in it that piqued my interest: Mark Edmundson's "Against Readings."

I take issue with some comments Edmundson makes in the article, namely in the following paragraph:

But primary socialization doesn't work for everyone. There are always people--how many it's tough to know, but surely a minority--who don't see their own natures fully reflected in the values that they're supposed to inherit or assume. They feel out of joint with their times. The gay kid grows up in a family that thinks homosexuality is a sin. The young guy with a potent individualistic streak can't bear the drippy collectivism foisted on him by his ex-hippie parents and his purportedly progressive school. The girl who is supposed to be a chip off the old legal block and sit some day on the court only wants to draw and paint. The guy destined (in his mom's heart) for Princeton is born to be a carpenter and has no real worldly ambitions, no matter how often he's upbraided. (57)

Two things in particular attract my attention in this. The first is the assertion that only a minority fail to see themselves "fully reflected" by the prevailing sociocultural mores promulgated by mainstream media and most public education; I think this false. The "values [kids] are supposed to inherit or assume" (57) are in large part derived from romanticized notions of what it means to be "American,"* which typically means "white, Anglo-Saxon-derived, Protestant, middle-class, suburban American." Despite popular portrayal, such a population is not a majority (US Census Bureau), and even within that group (to which I belong, with all the problems that entails), there are a number of people who are aware of their non-conformity to the standards advanced--as evidenced, among other things, by the prevalence of eating disorders and the increasingly-reported separation of youth populations into distinct, often mutually hostile, sub-cultural groups. People abuse themselves and one another in attempts to "fit in," an abuse systematic and prevalent such that it is not "surely a minority" as Edmundson avers (57); those who already belong, or feel that they do, do not work to "fit in."

The second thing I noted, and with which I disagree, is the final sentence in the paragraph. My objection to this is purely anecdotal, and betrays in no small part my own familial structure and concern. And it is this: since when is a desire to work in a building trade not among the approved list of "real worldly ambitions" for people to have? The disdain for skilled manual labor implied in the comment speaks to at least part of the reason that such salt-of-the-earth people as fill my family look upon academics (such as myself) a bit askance; there is a perception that those of us who work in scholarly disciplines look down upon those who work with their hands--and it is one that is, in all too many cases, true. It is not surprising that a group perceived as dismissive of another group should be held in low esteem by that other group.

But even with my objections in place, the thrust of Edmundson's article, that "we need to befriend the texts that we choose to teach" (63), is spot on. I agree with him in his assertion that those of us who deal with the criticism and interpretation of text (at varying degrees of professionalism and proficiency, admittedly) tend to stray so far into abstract, arcane intellectual ideas of how texts work and what functions they perform that we lose sight of the immediate effects they often have, not just on the "untutored" or "casual" reader, but on the very people who study them so assiduously (us). How many of those of us who entered into literary study did not do so because we love reading? And how many of us who love reading love it for how it makes us feel, what it allows our minds to do?

Edmundson is correct in noting that those who teach literature "set the scene for secular conversion" (60). The modern university is an outgrowth of the monastery, and though it has come to be seen as a bastion of anti-religious thought and ideology, it retains at its core the study of the inner being of humanity. There is a great need to understand the physical realities of our existence, and so the sciences need to be taught and studied. But there is as great a need to understand that which makes us human, that which proceeds from our humanity and which is the exemplification of it, and it is in the attaining of such understanding that those of us whose work is in the humanities must remain grounded. At root, we are here to figure out what it is that we are, and the conversion experience that Edmundson describes is one tool among many that helps us to learn it.

Accordingly, it is incumbent upon us to aid others in discovering their own experiences of understanding, their own instances of the "golden moment" of the realization of commonality and community (Edmundson 58). And that means that we cannot reject the personal, gut-level reaction. We cannot rely entirely upon it, certainly, and there is much to be said in favor of the application of outside ideas to a text (Lord knows I do so often enough), but Edmundson is right: "it all begins by befriending the text" (64).

My own teaching experience bears this out. The experiences of most of my students have been greatly divergent from my own; I am lucky enough to have been raised in a household that assigns prime importance to education (and I know that saying so makes me sound like the child of privilege that I in many ways am), and I know that a great many of those who have sat in my classrooms have not been fortunate in that particular way. Even so, I believe--because they have told me after they were no longer enrolled in my classes--that a number of my students have come to appreciate the written word more or differently than they had before sitting in my class, and that they came to do so as a result of my own enthusiasm for the texts I discussed and the materials I taught. In short, because I befriended the text (to use Edmundson's term), I showed the students that such a thing could be done, and in my teaching I explicitly (and repeatedly) invite them to do the same.

This is at variance with the way many of them have been taught--and even the way that I was, in many cases. All too often, the classroom instructor--at whatever level--does not engage with the text at a personal level. And while, again, I believe in the value of a systematic, scholarly approach to text, students quickly become bored with and disinterested in (and even hostile towards) such teaching. Because it does not even acknowledge the possibility of simple human impact, it tacitly rejects that possibility. And in rejecting the humane, it closes off what is, at least at first, the only entree into the reading that students reliably have.

The works we teach are, as Edmundson notes, "the testaments of human beings who have lived and suffered in the world. They too deserve honor and respect" (63), and we can show them that respect by affirming their humanity--and ours, which is shown in so doing--in their impact upon us, personally. And while the approach may not work for everyone (not that any do), it certainly cannot hurt.

*I am aware that Edmundson does not specifically restrict his argument to persons growing up in the United States of America. I make the inference that he does so based on his employment by the University of Virginia, his specific reference to his own childhood "growing up outside Boston" (58), and the Americo-centrism of the MLA. Then again, I am Americo-centrist, so I'm not complaining much, but full disclosure and all that...

Works Cited
Edmundson, Mark. "Against Readings." Profession 2009 (2009): 56-65. Print.
US Census Bureau. American FactFinder. US Census Bureau, n.d. Web. May 6, 2010.