Blogging

The Death of the Critic, Reprise

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Bill Benzon kindly pointed out this Salon piece to me:

Louis Bayard: The signs are ominous, Laura. Book reviews are closing shop or drastically scaling back inventory. Film critics at newspapers all over America are getting tossed on their ears. TV reviewers are heard no more in the land. All the indicators suggest that America’s critics are becoming an increasingly endangered species.

Or maybe something a little more than endangered, judging from the title that’s just come across our desks: “The Death of the Critic.” Ronan McDonald, the author, is a lecturer in English and American studies at Britain’s University of Reading, and he’s particularly exercised by what he sees as the loss of the “public critic,” someone with “the authority to shape public taste.” It’s only in the final chapter that the mystery behind the critic’s disappearance is solved. The culprit is none other than … cultural studies! (With a healthy assist from poststructuralism.) By treating literature as an impersonal text from which any manner of political meaning can be wrung, cultural studies professors have robbed criticism of its proper evaluative function — the right to say this is good, this isn’t, and here’s why.

So, Laura, it seems that, if we aren’t quite dead, we critics are on something like life support.

Laura Miller: I suppose it’s only natural that McDonald, being an academic himself, would blame the academy. He believes that substantive scholarly criticism acts as a foundation for serious non-scholarly criticism — such as reviews and essays in newspapers and magazines — lending credibility to the idea that criticism (specifically, literary criticism) is a job for trained experts. When academia falls down on the job of, as you put it, saying what’s good and what’s not, then all criticism starts to look arbitrary and dispensable. We don’t have celebrated “public critics” now because critics don’t care about the public, not because the public doesn’t care about critics. What do you think: Is criticism responsible for its own demise?

I didn’t see any great revelations in their discussion, but there are some good moments. Here’s one I liked:

 

Bayard: I like that phrase “go home with” because, when I think about the critics I love the most, they’re not necessarily the ones I agree with, they’re the ones I’d like to date. I argue with them, but when they’re gone, their music is still bopping around in my brain. Many years ago, Susan Sontag, in “Against Interpretation,” argued for “an erotics of art.” Is it time now for an erotics of criticism? Instead of bemoaning the decline of literature, should we be doing a better job of showing people what they’re missing: the excitement of unexpected insights, the thrill of new voices, the sex of ideas? That sounds like a lot more fun than figuring out which fiefdom we’re going to defend in the Theory Wars. (I’ve a hunch Ronan McDonald would be on our side.)

Miller: You’re right! Why pillory theory, when even the people who used to espouse it are saying it’s dead? Let’s talk about what makes for a good critic. I often think that there are two kinds: the ones whose taste I find simpatico — the ones I come to for recommendations on what to read — and the ones who are themselves terrific writers, irrespective of what they recommend. Sometimes there’s an overlap, but not often.

There are critics, like Wood, that I go out of my way to read, although I have no intention of ever opening the books they tout. That’s indicative of an additional aspect to criticism besides evaluation (which McDonald wants to bring back to academic criticism) and interpretation (that is, elucidating the work and its many meanings, which we could use more of in journalistic criticism). It’s the literary worth of the criticism in and of itself, and the chance to see a sophisticated reader at work.

Yes: “the chance to see a sophisticated reader at work”–that sums up a lot of the pleasure I too take in reading James Wood. And they also offer a couple of unusually reasonable remarks on the usual straw targets, bloggers and English professors:

 

Bayard: Yeah, the blogosphere is the elephant in the room that McDonald never really gets round to discussing, but to my mind, it’s a far more pressing issue for criticism than theory is. Why pay a professional critic to evaluate something when you have a gazillion volunteer evaluators ready to fire off at any given moment? . . . I myself don’t have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn’t qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I’ve learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism. [that “believe it or not” seems gratuitous –why should it be hard to believe?]

and

Miller: . . . It hardly matters whether or not an English professor actually likes to read novels and poetry, does it? Books are the salt mine, and the academics are the miners. If anything, literary enthusiasm can be a detriment if your job is to prosecute books for their ideological crimes. When even English professors won’t stand up for literature, is it any wonder it’s failing? [Sigh!]

But in reply, Bayard: Well, it’s been a while since I was in college, but I do remember professors who loved English literature every bit as much as I do, so I don’t want to tar the whole profession out of hand. [Whew! Because I’m pretty sure some other people would be right there with feathers to finish the job!]

I wrote up some thoughts of my own about McDonald’s book here. McDonald and I share an interest in reviving the role of the “public critic,” but I can’t quite get on board with his emphasis on evaluation as the necessary method. I give some reasons for that here, in response to an inquiry from Nigel Beale–and, more facetiously, here!

Blogging, Criticism, Reviewing

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

A recent discussion at The Reading Experience raises questions related to some I have raised before here and have been thinking about a lot again as I try to imagine how best to direct the energy I have put into blogging–issues such as whether ‘litblogging’ is at its best when used as a form of literary journalism or reviewing (focusing on the new), what kind of writing about ‘classic’ or old literature has appeal or relevance to modern readers, whether (or how) blogging can also serve as a medium for popularizing or making literary expertise accessible, or whether there really is any comfortable middle ground between academic specialization and standards and the interests and habits of common readers. From Dan’s original post:

What the litblogosphere promises to offer is the possibility of multiple sources of well-supported reviews and commentary (many more than have been available in print publications, whose numbers are only continuing to decline, anyway), which can only enrich the discussion of current fiction (and poetry) and in turn encourage writers to believe their work is getting serious attention.

And from the comments that followed (all are excerpts; other comments also appear in the original thread):

Which is precisely why I grumble over the fact that an awful lot of Litcritbloggage (not the majority, probably, but a worry-worthy chunk) seems wasted on texts long-established in reputation (and thoroughly colonized by academics; in some cases for centuries), not to mention being relatively impervious to casual analysis. (Steve Augustine)

But has it ever occurred to you that people who blog about texts that are “long-established in reputation” do so because they are new to them? Because they didn’t read them in school? And that the odds that they have been exposed to much of the critical apparatus is rather small? Are you suggesting that one should first read all the extant literature before deciding whether something ought to be blogged? (Richard)

Bloggers discover as we discover (not everyone’s put paid to the canon the way you have); their essential charm (I think it’s charming) is that they flatten the mountaintop elevating the critic-priest above the rabble and allow us to watch them form and respond to ideas. In other words, their discovery of Austen or James at the age of X is crucial to *them*, if not to us, it provides answers to questions *they’ve* wondered about, fills holes in *their* knowledge that they (well, some of them) are happy to admit to having had. I don’t think it’s necessarily a critical form, I think it’s often a form of self-expression, and I suppose that to gripe about someone’s preoccupation with Thomas Hardy when there’s so little attention going to Jerome Charyn is to cast that someone in a role they haven’t sought out. (Chris)

I find classics blogging among “serious” litbloggers (ie, those positioning themselves to take the baton when periodical print collapses) relatively useless; not because of the medium, but because there are already metric tons of readily accessible critical analysis of Shakespeare, Homer, you name it, in print. Seeing centuries-old opinions on Hamlet rehashed (or mutilated) online in a not-entirely-serious fashion doesn’t float my boat. If I have to read civilian (non-academic) takes on Hamlet, I prefer to read something that Anthony Burgess or Victor Pritchett or George Steiner sweated over for weeks or months… otherwise, the results are fairly back-to-High-Schoolish…I’d just like to see more critical litbloggers who take themselves seriously step up to the plate and provide more of the kind of content that *really can* give the best of what we called “print” (past tense because I’m thinking of a Golden Age) a run for its money… (Steve Augustine again)

I certainly agree with those who don’t think there’s any call to be prescriptive about these issues: individual motives for writing and reading blogs vary widely, and the distinctive features of the form are precisely its accessibility to all (internet-connected) people and its adaptability to all voices, styles, and agendas. The questions I raise above, then, really have to do with my own interests and aspirations as a blogger and a critic: what can or should I in particular be writing out here, particularly if I want to identify this blog as part of my professional work in more than a very peripheral way? I’m not an expert on, or even an avid reader of, contemporary fiction, particularly of the more experimental kind for which Dan Green is such a persistent advocate. I can contribute only as an amateur reviewer, then, where new releases are concerned, and while I enjoy writing up comments on my recent reading and sometimes feel I have found something of interest to say, I can’t afford the time (and lack much incentive) to turn these posts into genuine thought-pieces. I’m in a better position to talk knowledgeably about Victorian fiction, but Steve is certainly right that there are “metric tons of readily accessible critical analysis” on all the classic texts, including any on which I feel qualified to opine. So here my contributions will be better-informed, but they are not likely to be especially original–meaning the key issue becomes purpose and audience. If I aim for the kind of originality necessary for a scholarly publication, I’ll be back to writing esoterica for fellow academics, and the claustrophobia that practice induced was what drove me to the blogosphere in the first place. But is it any more useful or productive–any more of a contribution to literary understanding–to add my own 2-cents worth to what’s already available to a general reader (including on the internet) about Middlemarch or Jane Eyre? Someone like Michael Dirda or James Wood has the ‘street cred’ (or market appeal) to do this (though I’m currently reading Dirda’s Classics for Pleasure and I think the same questions could quite reasonably be asked about the need for or value of his contribution as well). I think a key point, made by a couple of the comments quoted above, is that the classics are in fact new to everyone at some point, so there is genuine pedagogical value in critical material that helps them make the most of their reading experiences. In the classroom (or in the right internet context) there’s always a good reason to explain (again) ways of reading and thinking about Middlemarch…

I realize that this is to put a fairly solipsistic spin on a more abstract discussion. But, hey, this is my blog, after all! Here are earlier some of the versions of this semi-internal debate, showing that, after over a year of blogging (and blog-reading), I have not moved very far ahead on these questions:

Literary journalism differs from literary criticism, it is usually assumed, in being prompted by an occasion needing a fairly prompt response to give it relevance. Criticism takes more of a long view. But without that occasion, that immediacy, what appeal does criticism have for the non-academic reader, especially in a medium like the internet? Is there an audience online for writing about Dickens or George Eliot? And what could be said that would matter, or appeal? The kind of stuff that gets written for academic audiences apparently (unsurprisingly) alienates almost everyone else, while the kind of stuff that gets written for popular audiences often seems trivial or redundant to those who read the academic stuff. And yet…books such as John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel or Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer do get published, so there is presumably some interest out there in enhancing one’s experience of reading “the classics.” One approach might be to look for the contemporary relevance in past authors, as I attempted to do with my paper on George Eliot as “Moralist for the 21st Century.” But that means only highlighting authors and texts that lend themselves to modern purposes, which gets pretty tendentious and unsatisfactory pretty fast. (“The Occasion for Blogging,” May 24, 2007)

Of course, when past works are the ones at issue, there’s presumably no longer any question of reviewing them–or is there? Actually, that’s an interesting question, and one linked to my ongoing musings about the potential role of something like a blog in my own work. How or why could writing about a ‘classic’ be relevant, useful, desirable to a contemporary audience? I still hold to the fairly simple distinction that reviewing is a form of literary journalism that requires a specific occasion as an incentive, while criticism has more abstract (longitudinal?) interests. (“More on the Purpose of Criticism,” June 20, 2007)

The high degree of specialization in academia is one of the main reasons academic research is not particularly accessible, never mind interesting, to broad audiences. My own interest in blogging is motivated largely by a desire to escape or redefine the limits of specialization, not to reproduce them in an alternative medium. Cohen’s account of what makes a blog successful exacerbates my ongoing concern, though, that there’s not much point competing with thousands of other blogs for readers’ attention unless your own site offers something distinctive, some angle or attitude they can’t find anywhere else. To use my own blog as an example, I enjoy writing up my latest reading and I find it useful posting about subjects related to my embryonic project on ‘writing for readers,’ but if my ultimate goal is to provide something that will, in Cohen’s words, “frame discussions on a topic and point to resources of value,” I’m going to need to narrow, or at least define, my focus–ideally, in a way that still satisfies my desire to get out of the ivory tower and into a wider conversation. (“Professors, Start Your Blogs…,” July 18, 2007)

One aspect of this situation that I’ve been thinking about is the tension between generalization and specialization that academic blogs perhaps illustrate. It’s difficult to provoke comments on a specialized topic, except from other specialists. Non-specialists may be interested in reading or using your material, but they are unlikely to add to it. (I’m thinking, for instance, of the posts on The Little Professor about Victorian anti-Catholic texts: this is just not a topic on which many people can, or would, chime in, though now I know where to go if I want to learn something about them.) But if your offerings are general enough to interest a lot of people, they may lose their value in establishing a community of expertise, or in contributing to the development of your professional work. . . . Further to that last point, I’m starting to notice a divide in blogging between two kinds of literary sites, which I would roughly divide into ‘bookish’ and ‘academic’–and the academic ones really don’t seem that literary, in the sense of talking about, well, literature, as opposed to politics, philosophy, theory, and criticism. (I know, I know: talking about literature always involves politics, philosophy, and theory, etc….) I ‘m thinking especially at this point of The Valve, subtitled ‘A Literary Organ,’ after all. The bookish ones seem quite contemporary in their focus, so for those of us who spend most of our time reading loose baggy monsters from the 19th century, well, once again but for different reasons, we aren’t really equipped to jump in–and there too, I don’t see that much discussion, to return to my first point. (“If a Blog Falls in the Forest,” October 22, 2007)

Novel Readings–Not So Much!

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I was thinking today that for a blog called ‘Novel Readings’ this one hasn’t shown many signs of novel reading lately (not counting, of course, the ones I’ve been teaching). Appearances are somewhat misleading. I’m in the grading zone right now: papers and exams! This means not much time (or mental strength) for other things. But I am reading, and hope to write soon about, Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy and its follow-up, the Levant Trilogy. And I have an enticing stack of books to read in the summer months, when required reading no longer takes up most of my evenings and weekends (or lunch hours, or time spent in waiting rooms–this is the price I pay for being a Victorianist). A Suitable Boy, for example, top on my Christmas wish list and still waiting for me, along with Affinity and Austerlitz (speaking of which, didn’t someone at The Valve propose a Sebald book event? I expect I’m going to need a little support with this one–again, something to do with my being a Victorianist) and Bel Canto and The Grave-Digger’s Daughter and … Plus I have finally joined the Trollope discussion group, and though I think it’s too late for me to get in on the ongoing exchanges about Orley Farm, I’m game for whatever’s on their summer schedule too.

But the other thing I’ve been thinking is that a lot of what I’ve been doing here continues to be metacriticism, and I’m not altogether pleased about that. I was drafting a longer post, for instance, on criticism in/and the public sphere, putting together some pieces from various things I’ve been reading on- and off-line as well as some of my work on the Broadview anthology of 19thC criticism I have been working on–sort of a make-up exam for a CFP I didn’t manage to submit a proposal for. But today I found have lost interest in it. I started blogging precisely in order to free myself to write about fiction straight up, as it were. Only that’s hard to do when you’re trained to frame every reading you do with an elaborate critical apparatus. It’s also just plain hard to do, or at least to do well. Where do you even begin, after all? And why, if you aren’t writing about the latest thing (that is, if you aren’t offering up a review)? In some ways, it is easier to do “the other thing,” if only because often there’s an argument ongoing just waiting for you to put in your two cents’ worth. I’ve been puttering away at ideas for a grant proposal for some kind of project on the purposes of and audiences for criticism…but really, that’s not what I was hoping would come out of this experiment. Anyway, I’m not swearing to give up writing about criticism altogether. I’m just resolving to do more literary posting, if only to see what purpose I discover for my efforts. Also, tonight while pacing in the strange state of mental suspension that is exam invigilation, I thought I had an idea about how to conceptualize a different kind of project…but maybe it was just lack of oxygen, so no more about that now.

Reflections on Blogging My Teaching

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I began my series of posts on ‘This Week in My Classes‘ back in September, in response to what I felt were inaccurate and unfair representations of what English professors are up to in their teaching. As I said then,

I don’t suppose that my own classroom is either wholly typical or exemplary, but I think it might contribute somewhat to the demystification of our profession, now that the teaching term is underway, to make it a regular feature of my blog to outline what lies in store for me and my students each week.

The resulting entries range from brief commentaries on key passages to meditations on larger critical or theoretical issues prompted by a particular reading or class discussion (on October 1, for instance, there’s some of each); from notes on pedagogical strategies or favourite discussion topics (such as ‘giant hairball’ day) to protracted afterthoughts on the central issues of a class meeting or reading (such as the didactic or instructional aspects of 19th-century courtship and marriage novels).

And so? What did I accomplish by writing all this up–and by putting it all out in public? I think there’s no way to tell if I made any difference at all to the kinds of pervasive and (in my view) pernicious attitudes towards literary academics expressed in the Footnoted posts that prompted me to do this. It seems pretty unlikely! How would these angry people even know my blog exists, after all? And even if they did come across it, the odds of conversion would surely be pretty slim for a determined anti-academic. Still, I think it was worth making the effort and putting some evidence against their version out there, just in case. Where in my posts would these people find evidence that I hate literature and spend my time on political indoctrination? (April 16: or, again with reference to this post, that I dismiss aesthetics, hold in contempt the notion of literature as “record and register of literary art,” and oppress my students with my hyperliteracy? Sigh. A classroom is large and can contain multitudes–of ideas and voices and critical approaches.)

As the weeks went by, though, I more or less stopped thinking about these lost souls. So who was I writing for? Well, as other bloggers often remark, your only certain audience is yourself, so you have to find the effort intrinsically valuable and interesting, which I almost always did. Teaching is, necessarily, something you do in a state of rapid and constant motion (and I mean not just mental but physical, as the Little Professor has recently proven). Classes follow on classes, and on meetings and graduate conferences and administrative tasks and attempts to meet proposal deadlines, in what becomes a blur of activity as the term heats up…and though a great deal of planning and preparation typically goes into each individual classroom hour, I hadn’t usually taken any time to reflect further on what just happened, or what’s about to happen. I found that taking this extra step each week not only helped me identify the purpose, or, if writing retrospectively, the result of each class, but it made each week more interesting by giving me an opportunity to make connections or articulate puzzles or just express pleasure and appreciation in ways that went beyond what I had time for in class. I pursued links between my teaching and my research projects, for example, as well as between my teaching and my other ‘non-professional’ interests and activities. I articulated ideas suggested by class discussions that otherwise would have sunk again below the surface of my distracted mind. Blogging my teaching enhanced my own experience of teaching. That in itself is a worthwhile goal.

But isn’t that a goal I could have achieved by keeping a teaching journal off-line? Well, sort of, but not altogether. For one thing, blogging (again, as other bloggers have remarked), precisely because it is a public form of writing, puts a different kind of pressure on you as a writer. Though perhaps nobody will read your posts, somebody actually might! And once you realize that, you try to write better–just in case. Maybe there are all kinds of dedicated prose stylists in the world who laboriously craft the entries in their private notebooks. But even they probably have their eye on posterity (“one day, when I’m famous, these notebooks will sell for a fortune on eBay!”). It’s true, too, that the ‘blogosphere,’ with its millions of members, includes many samples of writing done, as far as anyone can tell, with no care at all. But for me at least, the accessibility of writing in this medium (and the impossibility of ever really taking something back once it has been ‘published’ on the internet) raises the stakes, even while the relative informality of the blog post as a genre has been a welcome change from the demands of professional academic writing.

Further, I like the idea that I might write something that other readers find interesting, useful, or mentally stimulating. My teaching posts in particular seem to me likely, if chanced upon, to be welcomed by readers outside an academic setting who are, nonetheless, interested in learning more about the kinds of reading contexts and strategies I work on with my students. Looking through my posts, I think there is nearly enough in them for someone to do an ‘independent study’ of my reading lists for any of the four classes I taught this year. The frequent publication of ‘books about books‘ aimed at non-academic audiences suggests an appetite for what you might call ‘reading enhancement.’ Maybe other teachers, too, would get some ideas for how to approach some of the texts I’ve discussed, just as I have often sought ideas from posted syllabi or from the blogs of other people in my field or, more generally, my discipline. At its best, the ‘blogosphere’ is a great reservoir of information and insights made generously and collaboratively by people of all kinds; we can learn from each other and contribute to each other’s learning. This is not something that can happen off-line. (Here, of course, is the justification for blogging at all, not just for blogging about teaching.) And in the year or so that I have been blogging, I have been contacted by a few readers who have seemed genuinely appreciative of my efforts in this direction.

Finally, as a blogger, I found that carrying out this plan to do a regular series of posts on one theme added a helpful structure to my posting habits: it was a kind of productive discipline. Like all academics, after all, I’m used to working to deadlines. Often, I began my week thinking I had nothing in particular to say. But I ‘had’ to post about my classes (also like all academics, I have an over-developed sense of obligation and I’m used to generating my own necessities). And once I started writing, most of the time I quickly found I was invigorated by discovering that I did have something to say after all.

Overall, then, I’m glad I set myself this task, and reading through my posts, I’m pleased with the results. No doubt other English professors do very different things, including with the same primary materials I took on. No doubt there are some who would be alienated, rather than won over, if they happened upon this material; no doubt some who have read it have turned away impatiently (or worse), for their own theoretical, political, or other reasons. But my posts represent my classroom well, and thus I admit, they represent me well too. Yup, that’s me: the one who cries over Oliphant’s Autobiography and finds passages in Dickens poetic, who admires George Eliot’s stringent morality but worries about the way her better people seem driven to sacrifice themselves to their petty partners because ‘the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision,’ who watches House and Sex and the City and finds Agatha Christie clever but shallow, who goes all pedantic when homework comes in but relishes her students’ creativity and humour in devising class activities, whose children delight and torment and distract her. That’s the thing about teaching–and about blogging too. You put yourself out there, try to be your best self most of the time, have moments of irritability and moments of eloquence–and then you sit back and see if anyone was paying attention.

The Shelf Life (Half-Life?) of Blog Posts

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In a piece on the role (or not) of public intellectuals, Russell Jacoby raises some questions about blogging that I’ve wondered about too:

On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or “archived”), has anyone ever looked at last year’s blogs?

“Rapidly produced,” he concludes, blog posts are “just as rapidly forgotten.” Jacoby is interested in how blogging has affected “the quality or content of intellectual discussions.” I’m interested in that too, but for now I’d just like to pick up on the issue of the status of past posts. For instance, as I familiarized myself with academic and literary blogs that looked interesting to me, I often found myself trailing through archives sometimes three or four years old. Some of the discussions–the most ‘occasional’ ones–obviously had become outdated, but others, including discussions of books, retain their currency just fine. But do they really? Well, not in practice, of course. Especially with the backwards chronology blogs impose, with newest always first, they do seem designed to keep us moving on. I’m also not aware of an easy way to locate material in blog archives unless the blogger has a particularly thorough index or set of labels or categories. Especially when discussions link back and forth across different blogs, the process of following older threads is extremely laborious. I guess I’m basically wondering about a couple of things: first, is there some “netiquette” principle that governs when a post ‘expires’ and ought not to be commented on any more? and second, does the perhaps fleeting nature of the attention any given blog post can have, as it is relentlessly shuttled down and down into the archives, add an extra dimension of futility to writing in this form?

Meanwhile, on the subject of public intellectuals, there’s much discussion at The Valve about Stanley Fish, who is busy actually being one, for better and for worse, with his own blog at the New York Times. The enormous chains of comments on his recent posts on ‘the uses of the humanities’ (the first one reached around 500 comments, I believe, while the second one is up to 244 as I write this) suggests the rapidly diminishing returns at this extreme end of the commenting scale. A recent comment thread at the Valve raised questions about the importance of commenting for measuring the success or value of blogging; I’ve noted a couple of times the generally low level of discussion on literary topics and, in a more general way, felt that without active back-and-forth blogging is not as worthwhile or rewarding as I’d initially hoped it would be. But, as blogging skeptics have often noted, the greater the quantity, typically the lower the quality of the discussion. I have only scanned the replies to Fish. In general, they seemed to stand up well to the threads over at the Guardian blog, which degenerate pretty quickly. But even so, who can process so many replies or synthesize them in any kind of meaningful way? (I recommend reading the Valve comments instead; there are “just” about 80 of them, including a number of extremely thoughtful and illuminating ones.)

Post About Books=Lackluster Response?

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In his reflections on “The Best and Worst of Intellectual Blogs 2007,” Joseph Kugelmass remarks “the consistently lackluster response to posts about books.” I’ve noticed something similar in my expeditions around the ‘blogosphere,’ on both academic sites and litblogs, regretted it and wondered why blogging, which seems ideally set up for informal but thoughtful back-and-forth of the kind that so many readers value, does not seem to generate it. Anyone out there have any thoughts on the reasons for that “lacklustre response”? And are there any blogs at which you have seen rich conversations develop about books?

I’ve also seen and regretted the phenomenon that Kugelmass seems to see as a positive development, namely that in response to the apparent lack of enthusiasm for book chat, “most intellectual bloggers turned towards politics and professional matters with increasing frequency.” I’ve regretted it partly, as I noted in my previous posts, because by “politics” they usually mean “American politics,” partly because the political stuff often seems to lower the level of discourse (i.e. people become meaner and ruder, and discussion gets polarized and predictable), and partly because I went online to avoid some of the more confining aspects of professionalism. (It’s true, mind you, that one side-effect of my own blogging experiences has been to make me more appreciative of some features of professionalism in literary studies, including expertise and civility–though it’s precisely the spread of civility in the blogosphere that Kugelmass points to as a problem as he sees it leading to a kind of deadening blandness. He also sees “polish” as antithetical to the spirit of blogging, but given how fast and how publicly you can be taken to task for what you post–maybe rightly, maybe not, depending on the post and the context–there seems more chance of a high quality of debate if you slow down.)

Blogging Talk Follow-Up

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There was a great turn-out and a lot of lively discussion at my talk on Friday about blogging. Several people suggested that they would like links to the material I highlighted, so I’m providing them below, grouped by where I used them in my presentation. First, though, here are some of the things I’ve taken away with me to think about more.

Because I framed my discussion of blogging with some material on academic publishing, one topic that got a fair amount of attention in the questions after was peer-review; this was no surprise, and also it’s something that is addressed a lot among academics who blog. One colleague made the interesting observation that debates about academic blogging seem always (including in my talk) to be set up in terms of its potential contributions to or value as research; much less consideration is given to how it might relate to our teaching. I know there are people using blogging as a pedagogical tool, as a way for students to communicate with each other about course material, for instance, or as a version of reading responses (Miriam Jones does course blogs, for instance). But I think this comment was not so much about how we might add student blogging to our array of assignment options (though others picked up on this possibility as appealing) as about how writing as an academic blogger might put a kind of public face on our own pedagogical activities and ideas (along the lines of what I have been doing with my posts on ‘This Week in My Classes,’ perhaps). The ‘routine’ or everyday character of blogging also matches the rhythm of teaching, in which you are incessantly rethinking your material and looking for ways to bring it to life (intellectually and affectively) in your classes. Writing up this work requires conceptualizing it in ways that perhaps we don’t always do otherwise–and also, I’ve found, brings out connections I might not have seen otherwise. I’ve seen some suggestions that, of the categories used to measure academics’ professional contributions, blogging should be considered ‘service’; I guess I think that’s just a way out of trying to evaluate the substance of the writing.

Another suggestion, from the same colleague, was that academic scholarship has a wider audience outside the academy than is often supposed. I’m not sure how we would go about testing this hypothesis, but it would be interesting to know. And another colleague observed, also in discussion about our relationship to the wider public, that teaching is too often overlooked (in my dozen years of teaching, how many students have passed through my classes? it’s tricky to measure, especially as many students take two or more classes with me–I’ve had some take five or six!–but certainly the number would be somewhere around 2000). As others pointed out in response, even so, that’s only a fraction of the reading public, and only for a limited part of their lives (and when they are under compulsion to pay attention!). But when measuring our impact on literary culture, it’s true that we ought to take teaching into account. (That said, one of the reasons I’ve been thinking again about my own research projects is that they tended not to resemble very much the work I do for my teaching. This is where the trouble starts, for me.)

Finally, another colleague proposed that, overall, the internet is great for connections, comments, and other ‘lighter’ forms of scholarly interaction (I’m paraphrasing) but not suited for sustained analysis. I think this is true in a way, but more because of how we use the internet than because of any necessary limits on its forms. Among the disincentives to long, thoughtful posts is that they don’t ‘matter’ or ‘count’ professionally, for example. But if we re-imagine scholarly discourse to accommodate or value some kinds of on-line exchanges as professional contributions (CV-worthy, in other words), I don’t see why they should be taken any less seriously by writers or readers than, say, ‘responses’ to articles that sometimes appear in journals by invitation–which are not, strictly speaking, peer-reviewed in the same way as anonymous submissions. Participation in book events is a form of on-line academic discourse that seems basically equivalent to publishing a book review, with the extra burden of having to respond to other scholars’ queries or dissenting views. (Update: See Dan Green’s thoughts on these issues at The Reading Experience.)

Overall, then, much to continue thinking about. As the point of my presentation was to get just this kind of conversation going, I consider it a success. Thanks to everyone who showed up!

Links:

First, I compiled a number of links about academic blogging previously; see here. Also, if I referred in my talk to a source I haven’t included here and you’d like to follow it up, let me know; it wasn’t feasible to put in every single cited source.

I. Questions About Academic Publishing

MLA Task Force Report
FitzPatrick, “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements
Krause, “Considering the Value of Self-Published Websites”

II. Questions About Audiences: Ourselves, Other Academics, Other Readers

Erin O’Connor, “Relatively Sincere”Lisa Ruddick, “The Near Enemy of the Humanities is Professionalism”

III. Blogging in Particular

Tedra Osell (BitchPhD), Academic Blogging and the Public Sphere
John Holbo, “Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine”
Miriam Jones, “What I Told the Tenure Committee”

IV. Varieties of Literary and Academic Blogs (samples)

Bookish
DoveGreyReader
Conversational Reading
The Elegant Variation
The Reading Experience
PaperCuts

Academic (Administrative, Literary, and Other)
Confessions of a Community College Dean
Deans’ Weblog
BitchPhD
The Little Professor
Michael Berube
The Long Eighteenth
Blogging the Renaissance
Crooked Timber
The Valve

V. Long-time Bloggers Reflect

An Enthusiast’s View of Academic Blogging
A Skeptic’s Take on Academic Blogging
Academic Blogging Revisited

If a blog falls in the forest and nobody hears it…

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Some assorted and preliminary follow-up thoughts to my previous post on blogging as a spectator sport:

  1. While I certainly find some value in blogging for myself, in sorting out my thoughts more carefully than I sometimes do in a notebook, for instance, because of the chance that someone else will read them, and in the practice it gives me in writing often, and in the excuse to write about books and topics not strictly work-related and in a relatively informal way–while I like these and some other aspects of blogging, I am disappointed in it at this point as a medium for dialogue and exchange. To be sure, the format readily allows for plenty of back-and-forth, through comments and replies or through linking, cross-posting, and cross-referencing. I certainly don’t get much of that here, myself. It’s true that as far as I know I have very few readers, and I don’t post much that’s edgy or controversial–but I do sometimes ask questions of my (imagined) audience, and sometimes it would just be nice to know what someone else thinks, whether of something I’ve read or of an issue I’m puzzling over–to have some constructive but casual conversation. I can think of two factors that militate against me in particular, in this regard: in the first place, there are over 75 million blogs now, so it’s no wonder that things are quite quiet over here; and in the second place, the kind of conversation I imagine is hard to come by in the ‘real’ world because the people I’d like to talk to are very busy, and I’m sure the same is true in the ‘blogosphere.’ But my question about the possibilities of dialogue-through-blogging is only partly about my own case, because (sensibly) my expectations remain about as low as my profile. The thing is, as I mention in the post I’ve linked to above, even the busy discussions on some of the most established ‘academic’ blogs are dominated by a small number of avid participants, while the rest of us basically eavesdrop or ‘lurk.’ The more political the topic, the more likely it seems to be to engage people. (Though there are always surprises: I think the longest comment thread I’ve come across anywhere is still this one , with 210 comments on the first round and 53 more on the next…)
  2. One aspect of this situation that I’ve been thinking about is the tension between generalization and specialization that academic blogs perhaps illustrate. It’s difficult to provoke comments on a specialized topic, except from other specialists. Non-specialists may be interested in reading or using your material, but they are unlikely to add to it. (I’m thinking, for instance, of the posts on The Little Professor about Victorian anti-Catholic texts: this is just not a topic on which many people can, or would, chime in, though now I know where to go if I want to learn something about them.) But if your offerings are general enough to interest a lot of people, they may lose their value in establishing a community of expertise, or in contributing to the development of your professional work. And if, as in some of the cases I linked to in my earlier post, they tend towards current events and political controversies, they may not be the kinds of conversations you are keen to participate in, especially publicly, or especially if you’re not American and don’t follow all the latest headlines.
  3. Further to that last point, I’m starting to notice a divide in blogging between two kinds of literary sites, which I would roughly divide into ‘bookish’ and ‘academic’–and the academic ones really don’t seem that literary, in the sense of talking about, well, literature, as opposed to politics, philosophy, theory, and criticism. (I know, I know: talking about literature always involves politics, philosophy, and theory, etc….) I ‘m thinking especially at this point of The Valve, subtitled ‘A Literary Organ,’ after all. The bookish ones seem quite contemporary in their focus, so for those of us who spend most of our time reading loose baggy monsters from the 19th century, well, once again but for different reasons, we aren’t really equipped to jump in–and there too, I don’t see that much discussion, to return to my first point. A third category would be the ‘academic specialty’ site, like Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog or The Long Eighteenth, or Blogging the Renaissance, all of which do seem to represent a virtual community offering its members fellowship and mental stimulation–but within established boundaries (that is, I don’t see them as trying to bridge any gaps between specialists and generalists–which is not to say that I think they should, just to observe that their aims seem rather different than the aims of The Valve).

I realize these remarks are rather rambling (it’s been a long day) but I wanted to get some of them down, not least because I volunteered to give a short talk in my department next month, sort of a ‘show and tell’ about academic blogging and I’m trying to pin down my impressions. I’d be curious to know what others (especially but not exclusively other bloggers) think about how well blogs do or can work for fostering dialogue, or about how much (or whether) commenting matters to the value of blogging. I’d also be happy to learn of other models of academic or literary blogs.

October Fatigue Syndrome

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It all seems so easy and exciting and then the assignments start coming in and it’s almost SSHRC season and students need letters and things pile up….I have several topics in mind that I’d like to write up proper posts on if I had more time and energy, but I’ll have to settle for the thumbnail versions for now.

  1. Blogging as a spectator sport. I remain enthusiastic about the potential blogs show for generating scholarly conversation, but now that I follow some blogs fairly regularly I am noticing that those that actually get much discussion going in the comments section are heavily dominated by a fairly small handful of contributors, most of whom seem to know each other very well and thus to be engaged in their own special game of point-counterpoint. I’m not saying that nothing of interest or value goes on, and I’m sure there’s no intent to be exclusive and that what I’m seeing is partly the result of the particular blogs I’ve taken to watching. But it’s all a bit claustrophobic in its own way, and off-putting for newcomers, or at least for me. It’s kind of clubby, which seems ironic given the medium. Others offer a pretty steady stream of mildly to very interesting comments, reviews, or opinions, but again, not much goes on in the comments sections, although apparently they have hundreds of readers. (I’m not taking into account in these observations blogs that proffer primarily personal anecdote or that mostly collate links from elsewhere, or those that define themselves as literary or bookish, rather than academic, several of which I also now keep an eye on and enjoy. I’m thinking here about blogs that try to realize the idea of academic community idealized in some of the meta-discussions I’ve read.) All of these blogs are also American, and they reflect a particularly intense interest in relationships between academic work and the American political scene which is, of course, perfectly legitimate but not as compelling a context for people on the outside (following some of these threads has brought back unpleasant flashbacks of some of my own graduate school experiences at Cornell, back when ‘culture wars’ was not a historical reference…and in my imaginary longer version of this post, I meditate a bit on the differences between Canadian and American universities and wonder why there seem to be so few Canadian academics who blog).
  2. Undergraduate relativism, as discussed, for instance, in this little Chronicle piece. It is true that undergraduates are uneasy having evaluative conversations about art. I challenged my class today to argue for or against the inclusion of Lady Audley’s Secret on our syllabus and though there were several remarks about books that are good to read vs. books that are good to study, nobody seemed to have much stomach for saying it just isn’t very well written. In the longer (imaginary) version of this post I add a bunch of qualifications about defining “well written” and acknowledge reasons for including things in courses beyond aesthetic or formal ones (historical ones, for instance).
  3. Mark Kingwell’s off-hand proposal for a grade-free university at the end of this Globe and Mail article. It’s true that plagiarism is in the air (I know of three cases already being pursued in my department alone this term, and no doubt there are more), and for sure he’s right that if papers weren’t worth marks, there would not be much point in cheating on them, but how exactly he envisions the system working, especially given how fixated students are on credentials, rather than on the substance of their education, I have no idea. He mentions offering exams at the end of term for those who can’t do without evaluation. Does he imagine something like a British-style tutorial system the rest of the time? Assignments that we comment on but don’t put grades on?

About Academic Blogging: A Round-Up

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As a relative newcomer to blogging, I’ve been especially interested in thinking and learning about reasons for academics to blog, so I’ve been collecting links to articles and posts on this topic (or ones that would stimulate thought about it, one way or another). I thought I’d put the list up here, as it takes time to prowl around and find them in blog archives and so on. I’d be happy to be pointed to others (I’m sure there are many). All of these, of course, include links to other related posts or sites.

  1. “Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine” (John Holbo, The Valve, March 31, 2005)
  2. “Academic Blogging and Literary Studies” (John Holbo, Crooked Timber, April 18, 2004)
  3. “Why Blog?” (Miriam Jones, Scribbling Woman, November 3, 2005)
  4. “The Blogosphere as Carnival of Ideas” (Henry Farrell, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 7, 2005)
  5. “Against Phalloblogocentrism” (Scott McLemee, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 3, 2007)
  6. Scott Eric Kaufman‘s Blogging Panel Paper (presented at the 2006 MLA Convention)
  7. “Bloggers Need Not Apply” (‘Ivan Tribble,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, July 8, 2005)
  8. “They Shoot Messengers, Don’t They?” (‘Ivan Tribble,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2, 2005)
  9. “Can Blogging Derail Your Career?” (Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006)
  10. “Blogging!” (Michael Berube, July 25, 2006)
  11. Workbook (April 3, 2006)
  12. “Why I Blog Under My Own Name (and a Modest Proposal)” (Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland, College Park)
  13. “Historical Scholarship and the New Media” (Panel featuring Tedra Osell, Scott Eric Kaufman, Brad DeLong, Ari Kelman)
  14. “I’m Nobody, Who Are You?” (Tedra Osell discusses pseudonymous blogging in the context of 18thC periodicals; posted at The Long Eighteenth)
  15. Discussion on “In the Middle” of Michael Berube’s Midwest MLA Address (November 13, 2006)
  16. “Theorizing Blogging, Theorizing Theory” (Amardeep Singh, The Valve, April 19, 2006)
  17. Tim Burke, Easily Distracted (“The Trouble with Tribble,” “Publishing Presentation on Academic Blogging,” “Berube Stops Blogging“)

I would also be interested in hearing from any academic bloggers who happen across this post what level of interest or awareness there is in blogging in among their colleagues in their home departments. Are blogs and blogging seen as fringe activities, in relation to conventional modes of scholarly research and communication, or are they moving towards the mainstream? Are your colleagues skeptical, curious, enthusiastic, uninterested?