“Move it or lose it”: on stagnation and (im)mobility

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

DALHOUSIE-UNIVERSITYCraig Monk’s column in the latest University Affairs really struck a chord with me. Energized by the presence of a new colleague, he reflects on the challenge of “elud[ing] stagnation” in academic work. Hiring often happens in cycles, and right now at many places (Dalhousie included — or at least in my faculty at Dalhousie) there’s no new (full-time) hiring going on at all, with the result that there are no infusions of fresh ideas or enthusiasm that aren’t compromised by uncertainty. In addition, as Craig points out, “tenure limits lateral mobility”; while he is a wholehearted supporter of tenure (as am I), he recognizes that even as it protects the core of our work and values as academics, it also makes some kinds of positive change difficult to effect. “It would be nice to work,” he observes, “in a field that eludes stagnation.”

Security and stability in one’s jobs are wonderful – and increasingly rare – things to have. No tenured academic can help but feel both incredibly lucky and incredibly privileged. Like Craig, more than anything I value the autonomy that comes with these advantages: “I have never,” he notes, “felt pressure to teach only certain texts, and I built a research program around satisfying my curiosity.” That same description of why this is such a great job also hints, though, at why it is also a challenging one. A great deal of the work is self-motivated, and to do it well requires not just curiosity but also enthusiasm, creativity, and energy.

I see very little evidence in my daily work that tenured faculty live up to the stereotype summed up in the term “deadwood.” The path to tenure is too hard and uncertain and requires too intense a personal commitment to requirements that you have to really care about to do at all, never mind successfully. In my experience, academics are driven — by passion, by interest, by ego, by a need for constant affirmation … by many things, none of which magically dissipate when tenure is finally won. But that drive needs fuel, and I think Craig is right that stagnation is a risk, especially when economic conditions are difficult, class sizes are rising, resources are scarce, colleagues are not replaced, and students seem more interested in credentials than education. Add to these pragmatic concerns the constant messages humanities faculty get (from outside as well as inside the university) that our work is not valuable and our expertise is dispensable, and it can be difficult to sustain the enthusiasm that generates excitement and new ideas in the classroom or in our writing.

I’m particularly prone to feeling stagnant in spring (or what passes for it here). It’s not just the dreary grey weather, though that’s certainly part of it: after all these years, I still get painfully homesick around the time the cherry blossoms start to come out in Vancouver. For some years after I came to Dalhousie I continued applying to jobs in the hope that I could be closer to my family. Realizing that this was never going to happen was very depressing for me and made me feel quite trapped. One of the cruelties of academic life is that you become less mobile the more experienced you are — until and unless you cross the magical threshold and become a contender for something like a Canada Research Chair, or take a turn into administration, though even then moving to a particular location is hardly something you can make happen. I do try not to brood about this any more, but I’m reminded of my immobility every spring when students start reporting on the results of their various applications: as they move on to new programs and new jobs, very often in different cities or even different countries, I find myself wistfully telling them “send me a postcard – I’ll be here, where I always am!”

office

Anyway, because literally moving is not something I can any longer work or hope for, I have tried to find ways to avoid stagnation while staying in the same place, and the paradoxical thing is that while tenure is a major impediment to the former, it provides crucial protection for the latter because it gives me the freedom to experiment. I’m not that interested in the particular changes Craig mentions (such as secondments, exchanges, cross-appointments, advising, recruitment, administration). What I have done, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by accident, is reinvent myself as a scholar and professor. Dreaming up new courses is one obvious version of this. I also took a big turn in my research interests in the years just after I got tenure and my monograph came out, away from gender and historiography, where I’d been focusing since graduate school, and towards literature and ethics. This meant a gap in my publication output, but the work was very rewarding and led not only to a couple of articles but also to significant changes in my pedagogy. Then in 2007 I started blogging, not realizing how much of a change this would ultimately lead to in the way I conceptualize both academic work in general and my own professional life more particularly. More than anything else, my work with Open Letters Monthly (though it’s not clear that it will help me advance professionally) has helped me feel that I am not standing still — that while I may sit at the same desk in the same office I’ve had since 2001, I have moved on in some ways that really matter.

Still, a little more literal change might also be refreshing. I recently learned that a colleague in my faculty is leaving for a position somewhere else (yes, a rare example of lateral mobility!). I wonder who’s in line for his office.

Incalculably Diffusive? The Impact of the Humanities

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment
From the Novel Readings archives, a response to early reports on the UK’s “Research Excellence Framework.” Collini’s critique (and this post) came out in November 2009 (sadly his piece now appears to be behind a paywall). UK academics can no doubt update us on how far his concerns have proven justified.

BalliolAt the TLS, Stefan Collini has a trenchant critique of the British government’s “Research Excellence Framework” for research funding in the universities. A key factor will the assessment of “impact”:

approximately 25 per cent of the rating (the exact proportion is yet to be confirmed) will be allocated for “impact”. The premiss is that research must “achieve demonstrable benefits to the wider economy and society”. The guidelines make clear that “impact” does not include “intellectual influence” on the work of other scholars and does not include influence on the “content” of teaching. It has to be impact which is “outside” academia, on other “research users” (and assessment panels will now include, alongside senior academics, “a wider range of users”). Moreover, this impact must be the outcome of a university department’s own “efforts to exploit or apply the research findings”: it cannot claim credit for the ways other people may happen to have made use of those “findings”.

Collini’s main interest is in the “potentially disastrous impact of the ‘impact’ requirement on the humanities”:

the guidelines explicitly exclude the kinds of impact generally considered of most immediate relevance to work in the humanities – namely, influence on the work of other scholars and influence on the content of teaching

Collini points out a number of profound “conceptual flaws” in the proposed process, among them the assumption that all disciplines across the university can and should be assessed in the same way, and the pressure on researchers to devote their time not to the “impact”-free zones of writing and teaching in their areas of specialization (because influence on work in your field, for instance, does not count as “impact”) but on marketing. His concluding peroration:

Instead of letting this drivel become the only vocabulary for public discussion of these matters, it is worth insisting that what we call “the humanities” are a collection of ways of encountering the record of human activity in its greatest richness and diversity. To attempt to deepen our understanding of this or that aspect of that activity is a purposeful expression of human curiosity and is – insofar as the expression makes any sense in this context – an end in itself. Unless these guidelines are modified, scholars in British universities will devote less time and energy to this attempt, and more to becoming door-to-door salesmen for vulgarized versions of their increasingly market-oriented “products”. It may not be too late to try to prevent this outcome.

Though I agree it is essential to make the argument about the intrinsic value of “the humanities,” it seems at least as important to challenge (as he does) the mechanisms for measuring impact, because the “end in itself” argument risks perpetuating popular misconceptions about the insularity of humanities research, when in fact it is quite possible to argue that our impact on the wider world (particularly, but not by any means exclusively, the cultural world) is already substantial, but probably too diffuse to be measured even by the “thirty-seven bullet points” comprising the “menu” of “impact indicators.” Two academic articles I read recently provide some supporting evidence for this claim.

fingersmithHere’s Cora Kaplan, for instance, in a recent essay in The Journal of Victorian Culture:

Sarah Waters has a PhD in literature . . . ; she has said that her research on lesbian historical fiction suggested to her the potential of an underdeveloped genre. In its citation and imitation of their work, Fingersmith paid generous tribute to Victorian novelists; it also has a considerable indebtedness to feminist, gay, lesbian and queer critics and social and cultural historians of Victorian Britain. It would not be too frivolous to see Fingersmith – together with other examples of fictional Victoriana – in their synthesis of the detail and insights of several decades of new research on the Victorian world and its culture as one measure of the ways in which Victorian Studies has developed over the last half century. (JVC 13:1, 42)

And here are Patricia Badir and Sandra Tomc responding, in English Studies in Canada, to calls to take the humanities “beyond academia.” Offering a polemical summary of “what the humanities in general, fueled by highly esoteric post-structural theory, have accomplished in the way of widespread social and cultural contributions over the last twenty years,” they begin with the premise that poststructuralism began as a “theory propounded by a tiny priesthood of high intellectuals”:

But this priesthood had acolytes–graduate students at first, then, by the mid-1980s as “theory” inevitably made its way into the classrooms of ivy league professors, undergraduates. The undergraduates . . . did not uniformly move into Ph.D. programs, thereby assuring theory’s continued enclosure in a specialized community. They moved into a variety of illustrious professions and industries, including, most significantly, America’s powerful and ubiquitous culture industries. . . . [T]he Hollywood of today is ruled by ivy league degrees, most of them earned in the 1980s or 1990s, and most of them . . . heavily larded with humanities courses–courses in English, film studies, American studies, gender studies, history. These people were taught by their professors to value certain kinds of aesthetic objects. As they assumed positions of authority in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they began to patronize films and filmmakers that meshed with what they had been taught was cutting-edge culture. The signature films of the early 1990s . . . featured the “politically correct” identity issues and self-referential formal experimentation lauded in the postmodern classroom: Thelma and Louise; Philadelphia; The Crying Game; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; The Piano; Pulp Fiction; The English Patient. In television, . . . the transformation to postmodern forms has been even more radical: Buffy, the Vampire Slayer; The X-Files; Alias. . .

“One could make the same argument,” they go on, “for the field of journalism,” and they go on to do so, and to the “massive industry” in “‘literary’ objects” including not just books but adaptations. To calls that the humanities address the interests of “civil society,” they reply that “the humanities have, in a large measure, already shaped contemporary civil society”: “the fashions we are being asked to follow are our own.” (ESC 29:1-2, 13-15). I’m sure it’s easy to argue about which are the “signature films” of the 1990s, but the general case that specialist research in the humanities makes its way into the wider world by way of our classrooms seems presumptively strong–but that is just the kind of “impact” apparently discounted by the Research Excellence Framework.

I’m sure more (and perhaps more concrete) examples could be provided by most academics looking at intersections between their own fields of specialization and the world “outside” the academy. A concerted campaign to demonstrate the “impact” of humanities research might do as much good as insisting also that, whatever its “impact,” the work is valuable in itself. And it should probably be carried on not (just), as with my two examples, in the pages of academic journals, but as publicly as possible–in the TLS, but also through blogs, letters to the editor, talking to our neighbours–you name it. Many thousands of our students are out there somewhere, too, who could surely testify to the “impact” of our work, not just on their cinematic tastes, but on their thinking, reading, and voting lives. After all, the REF may be specific to the UK, but the narrow version of utilitarianism it represents is not.*

*Narrower than J. S. Mill’s, certainly: “Next to selfishness, the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation. A cultivated mind – I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties- finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it; in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind, past and present, and their prospects in the future. It is possible, indeed, to become indifferent to all this, and that too without having exhausted a thousandth part of it; but only when one has had from the beginning no moral or human interest in these things, and has sought in them only the gratification of curiosity.”

This Week in My Classes: Feminism and Fatality

Rohan Maitzen12 Comments

richThis week in my section of Intro to Literature we’re starting a unit organized around women writers and feminism. We’re starting this week with some poetry — Adrienne Rich’s “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” and “Diving Into the Wreck,” Margaret Atwood’s “You fit into me,” Marge Piercy’s “The Secretary Chant,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” Next we’re working through A Room of One’s Own, and then we close out the unit — and the term — with Carol Shields’s Unless.

I decided to lead off yesterday with some introductory comments: a bit about the history of feminism, and a bit more about feminism and literature, with a focus on ways feminist critics have challenged and revised the literary ‘canon’ as well as on some of the ways feminist critics taught us to read differently. Am I alone in feeling an uncomfortable blend of diffidence and defensiveness when introducing these kinds of questions? I have had just enough comments over the years, on course evaluations and in class, from students who are offended by what they feel is an unnecessary or unwelcome emphasis on gender issues that I know there will be some resistance (whether or not it’s spoken aloud) to the idea that this is something we ought to talk about. The attitude I’ve heard expressed most often is that the time for all that is over and so it’s quaint but annoying to read a writer such as, say, Sara Paretsky (whom I teach often in Mystery and Detective Fiction) drawing overt attention to inequality and making openly polemical statements. (A variation of this is approval of Paretsky’s detective, V. I. Warshawski, because she’s a feminist but doesn’t make a really big deal about it — which isn’t true, actually. And there’s always a minority that enjoys V.I.’s outspoken politics and unapologetic attitude.) Once a student complained in an evaluation for a course on the 18th and 19th-century novel that the class was biased towards feminism, a bias clearly revealed by the preponderance of women writers on the syllabus: as it happened, that year the reading list for the course in question was split 50/50 between women and men, so I could only conclude that the bias was perceived because our male writers also raised pressing questions about women’s roles. In Intro a couple of years ago, a student (again, anonymously in his or her evaluation) protested that “the prof was such a feminist” — which struck me as odd because that year I honestly couldn’t think of what would have been the trigger for this complaint. It doesn’t take very many such remarks, however ill-founded or oddly calculated they seem, to make one aware that teaching feminism (or as a feminist) is a tricky business.

I believe (though I may be wrong about this, of course) that I do not approach gender issues or feminist interpretations in an aggressive or polemical way. However, it’s rare for these topics not to come up in my classes because they are so fundamental to my own critical apparatus — and, of course, for courses in Victorian literature, they are central to the material itself. One thing I don’t feel is apologetic, then. My guess is that just talking openly about gender issues and feminism simply comes across as polemical to people who aren’t used to, or are resistant to, having that conversation. (That probably explains the intro student’s comment above, as well as my own obliviousness to what exactly I’d done “wrong.”) Basically, these students just need to get over it!

roomHowever, I do want to make our class discussions productive and inclusive, especially for this class of (mostly) first-year students, many of whom may not have had explicit discussions about feminism and literature before, so I fretted quite a bit about exactly what to say and what tone to take on Monday. One thing I pointed out is that politics broadly understood have been part of our discussions all year: we just haven’t identified what we’re doing as political criticism. And I noted that we’ve already talked about the challenge of literary evaluation, and about canonicity. We’ve also already worked on texts that are all about women’s position in society: “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for example, and “A Jury of Her Peers.” So we’re doing more of the same. Now that we’re doing a whole cluster of works with this focus, though, it makes sense to create a more explicit framework, both for what the authors are doing and for what we are doing. I hope I hit the right note in my introductory remarks. We’ll see how it goes. One of the particular challenges (something I’m going to address specifically tomorrow) is that a lot of the works we’ll be reading are angry ones — including A Room of One’s Own, though the anger there is very, very carefully managed (but is it entirely hidden?). I think anger can be off-putting: it makes the reader a bit squirmy, as if they are being blamed or attacked. It’s hard to like an angry person! The tendency (which I have been unable, despite my efforts, to quell completely) to prefer speakers or characters who are “relatable” makes anger a problem for a lot of students. My hope is that we can make it a useful problem — because after all, what does it mean to tell someone not to be angry, or not to listen to someone who is angry — especially if they have good reason for it? Angry women, of course, always get a particularly hard time.

I’d be interested in hearing from other people about their classroom experiences with feminism. Some of you probably teach (or have taken) courses much more completely and explicitly dedicated to the topic: classes on feminist theory, for instance, or feminist philosophy. I expect the population of such classes is more self-selecting so perhaps the awkwardness I sense (or am I just projecting?) does not arise.

In 19th-Century Fiction we are finishing up The Mill on the Floss this week. Tomorrow we’ll discuss the ending. I’ve collected a string of quotations from various critics onto a handout which I hope will provoke plenty of discussion…some of it about feminism! Reading “Diving Into the Wreck” over today for class, I found myself thinking that it resonates uncannily with the ending of The Mill on the Floss — not just in being watery but in being difficult to explain.

“Middlemarch in Six!” Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments
This is the first in what I plan as a regular series of re-posts from my archives. It seems appropriate to lead off with a review that was not only one of my earliest posts (it first went up on the blog in January 2007) but one that lays out some of my reasons for blogging in the first place. It is quite interesting (for me, at least) to see how I was thinking about blogging and criticism at the time, and to reflect on how things have changed in my writing life since then. When I wrote this post, I was venturing out of academic writing for the first time and quite uncertain about where my experiment might take me. One of the tasks I set myself, therefore, was to explore “books about books” written for non-academic readers, to find out what they were like and whether I might learn from them about how to write differently, or for a different audience, myself. Hornby’s was one of the first I read, and remains one of the ones I’ve liked the best. I’ve tweaked my review just a little to clarify its timing and reflect changes in the format of Novel Readings.
Another reason I chose to revisit this particular post is that just recently, Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room reviewed The Polysyllabic Spree along with Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind; you can read her very thoughtful review here. It turns out we liked and noticed (and quoted) some of the same things.

hornbyspreeIn addition to the reasons laid out in the introduction to this blog (see ‘About Me,’ above), I wanted to try writing up informal notes on my reading because of my ever-increasing dissatisfaction with the kind of writing about books I am expected to do professionally, namely academic literary criticism. Although I believe that academic criticism has its own kind of interest and value, as an avid reader I often find it frustrating and bizarre when the conversation about a book becomes remote in both form and feeling from the conversation I think the book itself is supposed to be a part of. My own area of academic expertise, for example, is the Victorian novel, and if any one quality could be said to be typical of so many books so widely varying in subject and style, it would be a sense of engagement with the world–not that they aspire to represent it mimetically (any reader of Victorian fiction knows there is nothing naive about what often gets called its ‘realism’), but that these books challenge their readers to think and care about all aspects of social, political, economic, and romantic life. “Dear reader!” Dickens concludes his polemical anti-Utilitarian novel Hard Times. “It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be!” And of course his “Let them be!” is a call to action, not to complacency or passivity: let the world be the way you and I can imagine it to be, better, more just, more loving, more humane. But current literary criticism communicates little of this urgency, and none of Dickens’s humour, or, as he would have it, fancy.

My concern is not so much that literary criticism is often written in difficult, obscure prose (after all, every specialization requires its own jargon)–although I have finally achieved the courage and professional security to adopt Nick Hornby’s poetry-reading philosophy for my own reading of criticism and theory (“If something doesn’t give you even a shot at comprehension in the first couple of readings, then my motto is “F–k it” [p. 91, my polite hyphens]). My objection is more that we have distanced ourselves so completely from ordinary conversation about books that we have become irrelevant to all readers but ourselves. Of course, there are some exceptions, academics who have produced the textual equivalents of cross-over albums. But most of us know that when we write and publish even our most supposedly ground-breaking article, it is destined straight for the dustbin of other scholars’ footnotes. Most of us are presumably OK with this result, or there would be a revolution. Or perhaps the necessity of publishing such material to secure and keep our jobs and our professional credibility drives doubts away. But Dickens, to stick with my example (not least because he is one of Hornby’s favourite examples as well), certainly hoped his words had more life in them than that.

All this is by way of saying that I wanted to experiment a little with writing in a different way about books, a way that would reflect my experience of reading them and thinking about them in a more immediate, personal way than academic writing allows without letting go altogether of the analytic habits built up by years of professional training. Surely there can be an informed, educated conversation about literature that allows, for one thing, for judgment, for values, for affect, for liking and disliking. And, of course, there is such a conversation–indeed, there are many such conversations today, just not in the pages of academic journals. One contribution that I have just finished re-reading is Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree.

I first read sections of this book last year, when a graduate student passed it on to me thinking (rightly) that I would enjoy Hornby’s infatuation with David Copperfield (thanks, El!). Since I began thinking about alternatives to academic criticism, partly through my work on 19th-century literary reviewing, I have begun looking for examples of contemporary writing about books that achieves something like the balance I am interested in between analysis and immediacy, and going back to Hornby’s collection this week, I think he gets fairly close. Unlike those in Sara Nelson’s So Many Books, So Little Time, for example, Hornby’s commentaries, though engagingly personal and idiosyncratic, focus primarily on the books and not on himself. He attends to questions of craft, though my academic side wishes he would introduce some technical terms here and there for greater precision, and he thinks about the books in terms of the means they use to their ends while still considering also the value of those goals. For all his breezy style, he has a knack for summary judgments, as when, after recounting a particularly horrific detail from a rape scene in Pete Dexter’s Train, he objects that it seemed to have happened “through a worldview rather than through a narrative inevitability” (97). For me, the great charm of this collection is its combination of these moments of intense literary and moral scrutiny with irreverence and humour. Who says you can’t be both serious and funny? I loved his idea of the “Cultural Fantasy Boxing League” in which, he supposes, “books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. ‘The Magic Flute’ v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six…” (58). Of course!

But Hornby really won me over when he articulated what I think book lovers everywhere feel: the extent to which our own libraries are extensions or reflections of our identities. This is why we recoil from well-intentioned and practical advice to ‘clear some space’ on our existing bookshelves to make room for new purchases! “I suddenly had a little epiphany,” he says, as he files away some volumes: “all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. . . . with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not” (125).

“Buried Treasure”: Disrupting the Archives

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

Arcimbolo LibrarianIn the article by Robert Cottrell of The Browser that I linked to in my earlier post on blogging and intellectual curiosity, there’s a section on the way “we overvalue new writing, almost absurdly so, and we undervalue older writing.” His comments about this really resonated with me. I’m sure I’m not the only blogger who watches posts scroll off into the ether and wishes there were some way to counteract the relentless downward pressure of the form itself — “a thin new layer of topsoil gets added each day or each week,” as Cottrell puts it, while “what’s underneath gets covered up and forgotten.”

Of course, the older posts are still “there,” in some sense, but once they scroll off the bottom of the page, their invisibility can make them seem irrelevant. But book reviews do not lose their interest or value over time — not, at least, if they are conceived of as conversations with other readers rather than marketing or promotional tools tied to publishers’ calendars. Precisely because a lot of book bloggers read on their own schedules, following their own whims, though, these conversations are particularly diffuse, unpredictable, and difficult to re-discover: more than once I’ve read a book that I know some of my blogging friends have talked about before, but I’ve been stymied by the inefficiencies of turning up who it was who said what when, and thus my own thinking is corralled and my post goes up link-less. Tag clouds and category lists are helpful as far as they go, but if you follow more than a handful of blogs, that’s not very far. And what about posts that went up before you started following someone, so you don’t even know that you should look for them? It’s bad enough that I’ll never have time for all the material I know is out there, but what about the unknown unknowns?

Some bloggers, myself included, do have an index of one kind or another to help counteract the present-centeredness of the form. I’ve tried to make mine user-friendly by organizing it into themed pages (see the tabs across the top). I know I appreciate this kind of explicit visitor’s guide when other bloggers do it (here’s Ana’s ‘Review Index,” for instance, at Things Mean A Lot; here’s Litlove’s, from Tales from the Reading Room; and here’s Jenny and Teresa’s at Shelf Love.). Still, the form of blogging – and really of all online publishing – means that we are most likely to pay attention to whatever’s on the top of the front page. As Cottrell says

You can call up a year-old piece as easily as you can call up a day-old piece. And yet we hardly ever do so, because we are so hardly ever prompted to do so.  Which condemns tens if not hundreds of thousands of perfectly serviceable articles to sleep in writers’ and publishers’ archives, written off, never to be seen again.

It doesn’t have to be that way! What we need are more overt prompts, that’s all, and we can do this, as Cottrell points out, more easily than ever before. “I suspect that the wisest new hire for any long-established newspaper or magazine,” he proposes,

would be a smart, disruptive archive editor. Why just sit on a mountain of classic content, when you could be digging into it and finding buried treasure?

At Open Letters Monthly, we have actually begun putting a piece or two from our extensive archives onto the main Table of Contents for each issue, usually essays or reviews that somehow complement our new ones or that have renewed relevance. Here at Novel Readings I’ve re-run pieces from my own archives a few times, usually in the summer when the pace of new blogging is slow. I’ve usually felt a bit sheepish about this, but since reading Cottrell’s essay I’ve decided that not only is there no shame in it, but there’s actually value in it. By putting old (or, to use Cottrell’s more positive term, “classic”) content out in front again, I can make sure it isn’t “written off” – that it finds new readers and maybe even starts new conversations. And so I’m going to start re-posting pieces on a regular basis. I’ve never been a “new post every day” kind of blogger anyway, and I don’t intend to reduce the amount of new writing I do, but I will supplement it with “buried treasure.” Because my posts generally fall into two broad categories – academic and literary – my idea is that every week I’ll re-post one thing of each kind. If this starts to seem like too much, I’ll cut back to a “classic” piece of each kind in alternating weeks. And if I end up thinking that a lot of what’s buried deserves to stay there … well, then I’ll have to rethink this whole topic and should probably also think about why I blog in the first place!

Stay tuned, then. And if you’re sitting on your own mountain of classic content, consider bringing some of it out into the fresh light of day. Some of us might have missed it the first time, after all!

Intellectual Curiosity: True Confessions Edition

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

wordpressEven as I wrote my previous post about how disengagement from online discussions strikes me as evidence of a lack of intellectual curiosity, I was nervously aware that in my own ways I too am disengaged and incurious. For example, I almost never attend my department’s weekly colloquium. I used to go faithfully every Friday. My initial falling off coincided more or less with the arrival of my children and the attendant complications of having to get to the daycare before it closed — that, and not liking the poor kids to have longer days than I did, since of course you have to drop them off before work as well as pick them up after. And for a tired working parent, 3:45-5:00 Friday afternoons is a particularly difficult time to do one more work-related thing that’s not strictly required. It was still possible to go, of course, and sometimes I did, while other times my husband went to the corresponding event in the philosophy department.

But the truth is, I didn’t really miss it, and I have not gone back to anything like regular attendance. I don’t doubt — and don’t mean to impute anything about — the quality of presentations. Every talk I’ve been to (and, I’m sure, every one I’ve skipped) has been erudite, polished, and professionally delivered. Nonetheless, the experience of attending such academic talks is one I don’t usually enjoy very much or feel I benefit very much from, and so when I miss them, I don’t usually feel I’m missing out,  any more than I feel I’m missing out when I play hooky for a while from a conference I’m attending to go to a museum. The honest if shameful truth (and I really am kind of ashamed of it) is that I have real trouble staying interested at a lot of academic talks, just as I have trouble getting or staying interested in a lot of academic criticism. I used to feel a lot more angst about this than I now do: I was sure (especially when the first symptoms of this disengagement came over me in graduate school) that the problems all lay with me. It didn’t help that some of my peers in graduate school, and at least one of my professors, pretty clearly thought so too (it takes a while, I can tell you, to recover your confidence after a professor has declared you “intellectually calcified”). I struggled very hard to care about critical debates that seemed so urgent to others  (if, to me, so obscure and often incomprehensible); now I believe that, though I was and am, no doubt, dull in some ways, I might have been sharper if I’d been working on different material.

Anyway, theoretical obstructions have been one cause of (or excuse for) my disengagement. Now that I don’t have to worry about certain kinds of academic discourse, I don’t even try. I even gave away my volumes of Foucault and Derrida, my Judith Butler and my New Historicism reader. They may be interesting to other people, but to me they were neither interesting nor, as far as I could ever tell, useful for the kind of critic I have turned out to be.

It’s not just abstraction (or abstruseness) that is an impediment for me, though (and I don’t think actually that most of the talks I don’t attend are particularly theory-headed). I think it’s the combination of their specialization (really, hyper- or micro-specialization) and their format that turns me off. The pressure to specialize leads, among other things, to quite a lot of what I think of as “pickle” criticism (see the long footnote to this post; see also this thought-provoking post from D. G. Myers about “an end to readings”). It also reduces the portability of the ideas in most papers: rarely does such a narrowly focused reading give me something I can take away and use. I might still find it intrinsically interesting, informative, or just entertaining, but the odds of that are reduced by the standard presentation style, which is to read a very carefully constructed paper full of rhetorically deft bits all intricately related to each other. I’ve seen reasonable arguments made for this format, particularly for literary interpretations (which do, indeed, turn on precise turns of phrase both in the original text and in the analysis). I’ve seen it used very well, and that’s exactly the kind of paper I’ve typically given myself (though I do try to write it for speaking, as a lecture, rather than a document). It can be a very alienating experience, though, at least for me, to hear someone read a very dense text aloud on a very narrow topic. Though I am committed in principle to the value of open-ended inquiry, and I would never want my own interests to determine what projects are or aren’t pursued, that doesn’t mean I always want to sit for 90 minutes and listen to all the gory details. My notes and doodles often begin hopefully and responsibly enough, but too often they deteriorate. Recently I flipped through the little notebook I bring along to talks and saw, in big block letters across the page, “WHY???” I don’t know what exactly prompted that particular silent outburst, but clearly, at some point, I had let go of the rope.

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So why should my colleagues spend their time in the blogosphere if I can’t show up regularly for our colloquium or manage an entire conference day without some time out? What right do I have to chastise other academics for their lack of intellectual curiosity, given how far I now indulge my own failure to find things interesting? I think that’s a fair question because it reminds me that in both cases we are making cost-benefit analyses: we’re asking what we will get out of a given activity. Many of my colleagues (though certainly not all!) do go every Friday, and they seem able to engage with almost any paper they hear. I admire them — and I’m entirely sincere in saying so. I also envy them. My own career path would have been much more straightforward, and my general level of anxiety lower,  if I felt the same.  But I don’t!  Maybe I should, or should keep trying (trying harder). But why? I have been in this profession for 23 years — longer, if you count my undergraduate years. Though I can’t predict what any specific paper will be like, I have a good general idea of how this whole process works. I make informed guesses, not about which papers will be good ones of their kind, but about which ones I want to attend as well as which ones (for one reason or another) I ought to attend. I don’t scorn people for continuing to present formal papers; I don’t shrug off the value conferences have for other people despite my own indifferent experiences of them; I don’t call for an end to our colloquium because on the whole I don’t find it professionally valuable, however much I might enjoy individual papers. I guess all I’d like is for people not to take for granted that this way of doing things is the only (or even the best) way to share our work with each other.

I feel as if I should say, for the record (though the presenters themselves are not blog readers, as far as I know) that the last two colloquium papers I heard were super — engaging, original, and thought-provoking! One was my fellow-Victorianist Marjorie Stone on “Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ on YouTube:  Contemporary Popular Culture, Erotomania, and Psychology in the Dramatic Monologue”; the other was the brilliant and funny Len Diepeveen on “Smudges and Shiny Things.” (Speaking of Len’s paper, if any of you know of any paintings of shiny things with smudges on them, he’d like to hear from you.) There’s another talk coming up quite soon that I really wish I could go to but can’t because of a scheduling conflict. My not showing up is not a judgment of anyone in particular! Sometimes I’d rather hear from you about your work in some other way, though. In fact, I bet I’d rather read about it on your blog, if you had one.

Blogging and Intellectual Curiosity

Rohan Maitzen17 Comments

birds to fishInger Mewburn, a.k.a. the Thesis Whisperer, has an interesting post up at PhD2Published about academics and social media in which she asks a question that I have often wondered about too:

While I can understand not writing a blog (sort of) I really can’t understand people who don’t read blogs, take part in Twitter or otherwise take part in the scholarly dialogue which is happening online.

She addresses the “how do you have time for social media?” question that I expect every academic blogger (or tweeter) has encountered. (Mewburn links to this post on that specific issue.  I agree that this question always seems to express “some kind of unspoken criticism.” Like the other question I often get about “how do you have time to read so much?” it also assumes a strict distinction between “real” work and other things I do that Pat Thompson notes is hard to make for her own newspaper reading.) The bottom line is that we all have time, or make time, for the things we believe to be valuable. So the harder question is why many academics still don’t consider spending time reading blogs (or being on Twitter) to be valuable:

I don’t have to point out the benefits to the converted. The question I have for you is, how many of your colleagues are doing the same? And more importantly – why don’t they? It’s a question that is beginning to fascinate me and one which I don’t have a ready answer for.

She has a theory about the source of the resistance: “have I become the cool kid?” I don’t really have an opinion on whether that theory is plausible! I find it hard to think of myself as “cool,” that’s for sure. But I share her general puzzlement, because I am so excited and fascinated by the voices and perspectives and information I encounter day after day thanks to the time I spend reading the blogs in my RSS feed or following up on links from – or eavesdropping on, or exchanging ideas with – the diverse people I follow on Twitter. Now that I know how much of intellectual value is out there, I can’t imagine shutting myself away from it. Sure, there are risks: the only thing worse, after all, than having nothing good to read is having far, far too much good material to read than you’ll ever have time for and having to make, again and again, the conscious effort to turn away from “that tempting range of relevancies called the universe” to the one “particular web” I’m supposed to be spinning myself.

Maybe it’s just a pragmatic fear of being overwhelmed in that way that holds some academics back. That’s not the general impression I get from the derisive way some of my colleagues still talk about Twitter or blogs, though: for them, the lack of engagement does seem to bespeak contempt, disbelief that there could be any merit in spending one’s time with such frivolity. (How they don’t realize the implicit insult to me when they say such things baffles me! Do they think I’m an idiot, then, to bother with all this?) Then there are those who overestimate the technical effort involved, or who don’t know about basic tools like Google Reader that simplify the process of sorting through multiple sources. There’s also simple inertia: people have a certain way of doing things, a certain workflow, a certain relationship to their reading and their computers.

Whatever the inhibitions or prejudices involved, I think they all hint at an unfortunate lack of intellectual curiosity. Like Mewburn, “I can understand not writing a blog” (in fact, I’m on record saying I really don’t think every academic should blog), but I can’t understand not exploring the world of blogs (academic or otherwise) if only to find out if one’s skepticism is justified, or not signing up for Twitter for a while to find out how a well-curated community  there might complement or even enhance one’s other professional (or personal, or intellectual) exchanges.

Some support for my conviction that there’s plenty (indeed, too much) worth reading online comes from something else I read online today (thanks to a link I followed from Twitter), an essay by Robert Cottrell, editor of The Browser. Here’s how he describes his job:

I read all day. Were it not for the demands of sleep and family life, I would read all night. My aim is to find all the writing worth reading on the internet, and to recommend the five or six best pieces each day on my website, the Browser.

 Here’s Cottrell’s general conclusion:

The amount of good writing freely available online far exceeds what even the most dedicated consumer might have hoped to encounter a generation ago within the limits of printed media.

Cottrell estimates that only 1% of what he finds is really great stuff, material of real value to the serious general reader. Since I read only a tiny fraction of what he does, I’m not in a position to argue. I would say that of the material I read, the proportion of good stuff is (happily) much more than 1%, but that’s probably because a lot of the links I get are already filtered, either by my own curation efforts or by sources including The Browser. About that 1%, he is eloquent: “the 1 per cent of writing by and for the elite is an embarrassment of riches, a horn of plenty, a garden of delights.” And where are the “scores” of worthwhile pieces coming from?

Some of it comes from professional journalists, writing for the websites of established publications or on their own blogs. But much of it – the great new addition to our writing and reading culture – comes from professionals in other fields who find the time, the motivation and the opportunity to write for anyone who cares to read. I am sorry that the internet gifted this practice with such an ugly name, “blogging”, but it is too late to change that now.

As a gross generalisation, academics make excellent bloggers, within and beyond their specialist fields. So, too, do aid workers, lawyers, musicians, doctors, economists, poets, financiers, engineers, publishers and computer scientists. They blog for pleasure; they blog for visibility within their field; they blog to raise their value and build their markets as authors and public speakers; they blog because their peers do.

Given the skepticism with which blogging is still met within the academy (and, for that matter, outside it as well), it was gratifying to see its value acknowledged like this. Yes, “blogging” is an ugly name, and the form itself is no more a guarantee of high quality than any other. But blogs have enormously enriched our intellectual and cultural conversations as well as our academic ones.  I think Mewburn is right that it’s time to stop being defensive. She suggests asking “What do you have to give? How can you make a difference?” I would add, “What do you want to know about? What conversation would you like to have? What are you curious about?” Maybe that will help my skeptical colleagues feel excited, rather than dubious, about what they’re missing.

Do your academic colleagues read blogs? Are they on Twitter? Do you think that skepticism towards new media or social media has subsided now that blogging has been around for a while? I don’t notice much of a shift here since I started blogging in 2007. Maybe there’s a smidgen more respect for what I’ve been doing, if only because I’m still doing it.

Is Cormac McCarthy a Terrible Writer?

Rohan Maitzen50 Comments

roadFor the record, I don’t think so. In fact, I think he’s brilliant. Mind you, so far I’ve read only The Road. [Update: now I’ve also read No Country for Old Men.] Still, though I had my doubts when I began it for the first time, by the time I finished it I was under the spell of its strange, difficult, deeply poetic language. I’ve been reading and rereading it as I work through it with my class, and for me it just gets better—I find McCarthy’s prose weirder and more interesting and more affecting on each pass.

At the same time, paradoxically, as I reread it I’ve also been very aware that my admiration is a decision on my part, and that it’s one that could quite conceivably have gone the other way: I can see perfectly well that the same prose could be experienced as awkward, pretentious, and affected. I’m not sure I can objectively justify my own belief that it is written with integrity and redolent with artistic significance. There are certainly moments in the novel that I don’t like, sentences I can’t make sense of or that seem to me near misses, if not outright failures. “The snow fell nor did it cease to fall” is one. The last sentence of this passage is another (I’m quoting the whole bit to give it its best chance):

He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms soaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.

But despite the bits that make me stumble or wince, The Road reads to me like writing that matters, that deserves to be taken seriously. I don’t mind the sentence fragments, or the eccentric punctuation (though I do find the absent apostrophes distracting). I enjoy the dense vocabulary and the occasionally florid imagery. I find the oscillation between severe minimalism and poetic expansion exhilarating. This week I did an exercise with my class on “found poetry” in the novel. One reason I thought it would work is that we accept or forgive irregularities and difficulties in verse to a degree we don’t, typically, in prose; reading The Road as poetry freed us up to appreciate its peculiarities without fretting too much about lucid intelligibility or standard syntax. Consider the novel’s first sentence, for example:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

Or, just a bit further along,

Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease.

The cadence of the lines makes poetic sense of them, doesn’t it? I also think they’d sound just right read in an Irish brogue – again, it’s something about the rhythm, the rise and fall and slight excess of them. Yet I can see how they could strike another reader as mannered, almost self-aggrandizing: look at me, writing!

I haven’t done a systematic survey of critical responses to The Road, but what I have seen shows judgments divided over just this problem of whether the writing is good (even brilliant) or bad (awful, even). In the NYTBR, Janet Maslin is appreciative:

Since the cataclysm has presumably incinerated all dictionaries, Mr. McCarthy’s affinity for words like rachitic and crozzled has as much visceral, atmospheric power as precise meaning. His use of language is as exultant as his imaginings are hellish, a hint that “The Road” will ultimately be more radiant than it is punishing. Somehow Mr. McCarthy is able to hold firm to his pessimism while allowing the reader to see beyond it. This is art that both frightens and inspires.

In The New Republic, James Wood argues that McCarthy’s “dumbly questing, glacially heuristic approach matches its subject, a world in which nothing is left standing. . . . Short phrasal sentences, often just fragments, savagely paint the elements of this voided world.” He doesn’t find it entirely successful:

The second register is the one familiar to readers of Blood Meridian or Suttree, and again seems somewhat Conradian. Hard detail and a fine eye is combined with exquisite, gnarled, slightly antique (and even slightly clumsy or heavy) lyricism. It ought not to work, and sometimes it does not. But many of its effects are beautiful — and not only beautiful, but powerfully efficient as poetry. . . .

Yet McCarthy’s third register is more problematic. He is also an American ham. When critics laud him for being biblical, they are hearing sounds that are more often than not merely antiquarian, a kind of vatic histrionic groping, in which the prose plumes itself up and flourishes an ostentatiously obsolete lexicon. (Blood fustian, this style might be called.)

Closer to home, one of my colleagues said she is convinced McCarthy is a genius (to be strictly accurate, she was speaking about Blood Meridian, but the stylistic features she described sounded very familiar). But wise Colleen at Bookphilia maintains that The Road “is bad because the writing is bad and because the plot in no way makes up for this deficiency”, and others express the same opinion with less economy, as in this blog comment I turned up while idly googling opinions on the apostrophe issue:

 I just tried to read this book and had to put it down after around thirty pages due to the absolute atrocious writing style and complete disregard for language structure. Fragments, overuse of conjunctions, lack of multiple different kinds of punctuation. Overall it makes the book a very slow read due to having to re-read passages multiple times.

Language structure is there to aid communication, it should not be modified willy nilly by some hack author as a literary device in a way to inject what he is unable to convey through language. In this case all you have is a clumsy, choppy, piece of sub-par writing.

And speaking of language, the text reads like it was written by a freshman with a thesaurus. There is excessive use of bizarre adjectives and over-description. Simple sentence structure with over use of a inappropriate descriptors just reeks of poor undergrad writing.

 Or there’s this post:

McCarthy’s writing is full of incomplete sentences and anastrophe, completely lacks quotation marks, and frequently embeds dialogue in the middle of paragraphs. What truly annoys me, though, is McCarthy’s inconsistent use of apostrophes for contractions. Each of these conventions is a barrier to straightforward reading (though I finished The Road in only a few hours). If they made me stop and think about the language, characters, or plot, I wouldn’t object, but they’re merely distracting.

We’re looking at the same evidence but drawing very different conclusions. I wish I could assert confidently that I’m reading right and the naysayers are ill-informed, mistaken, or obtuse. I do think that fixating on non-standard grammar, unfamiliar vocabulary, or other technicalities is a superficial way to evaluate the quality of literary writing. And McCarthy’s odd prose did make me stop and think—not so much about “the language, characters, or  plot,” but about the themes and values of the work, and also about the role of language itself, in making meaning and in creating aesthetic and emotional effects. Can I do better, though, than saying “it worked for me”? Can the haters really get past “it didn’t work for me”?

This is the reason I think debating “literary merit,” or ranking or rating books, quickly becomes an exercise in either folly, futility, or bullying. If you’re going to ask “but is it any good?” you need to flesh out the question: good at what? for what? for whom? There are myriad ways a novel can be. A much more interesting discussion will come from asking “what does McCarthy’s prose do?” or “what are the connections between McCarthy’s literary strategies and the central ideas of The Road?” then from asking if he is a good or a bad writer. Why would you even ask those questions, though, if you didn’t think the work was worth spending that kind of time and thought on? By assigning The Road to my class, I’ve implicitly endorsed it as good writing, haven’t I? And, to return to where I began, I think it is good writing. Good at what? Good for what? Well, one of the things it is unequivocally good at, or good for, is provoking discussions about good (or bad) writing.

Update: More Critical Views

Ron Charles in the Washington Post:

even with its flaws, there’s just no getting around it: The Road is a frightening, profound tale that drags us into places we don’t want to go, forces us to think about questions we don’t want to ask. Readers who sneer at McCarthy’s mythic and biblical grandiosity will cringe at the ambition of The Road. At first I kept trying to scoff at it, too, but I was just whistling past the graveyard. Ultimately, my cynicism was overwhelmed by the visceral power of McCarthy’s prose and the simple beauty of this hero’s love for his son.

Jennifer Egan in Slate (the review overall asks thought-provoking questions about the novel’s “literary masculinity”):

There is no limit to the devastation, only new forms of its expression, and McCarthy renders these up in lush, sensuous prose that belies the inertness of its object and keeps the reader in a constant state of longing and alarm.

Gail Caldwell in the Boston Globe:

Unfolding in a spartan, precise narrative that mirrors the bleakness of its nuclear winter . . . even with his lapses into grandiloquence, McCarthy is too seasoned a writer to over dramatize what may be the last drama of all . . . he has written this last waltz with enough elegant reserve to capture what matters most.

Mark Holcomb in the Village Voice:

[McCarthy’s fans] should be satisfied with the current offering’s characteristic helpings of hypnotic, gut-punching prose and bracing depictions of emotional longing (“She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned” )—qualities McCarthy’s detractors seem bizarrely content to underestimate or overlook.

Sycorax Pine:

His prose is plain, but shows the almost baroque love of unusual and archaic language amidst this plainness that I have always heard associated with him (this is my first finished McCarthy novel). At a certain point in the novel, it was teaching me an average of one new word per 8 pages: discalced (unshod!), fire-drake, lave, mastic, rachitic, siwash, skift,claggy, quoits. The boy picks up clichés out of nowhere, it seems, magically resurrecting conventions of language that died in the cataclysms of his pre-speaking life. From time to time, a turn of speech will seep through from our time, revealing the possibility that this is an allegory for our politically embattled world

 Further Update (2/18): A thoughtful dissenter:

In setting The Road in a post-apocalyptic world where plot is beside the point and the two main characters are — given their hazily remembered past, monochrome present, and probable lack of a future —inevitably archetypal, McCarthy overuses the stark-but-somehow-simultaneously-baroque tone that eventually threatens to send all his work off the rails. McCarthy is a writer who could make a casual brunch read like the end of the world, so when he’s actually writing about the end of the world, his grandiosity grows numbing. In this sense, his language fails The Road, distracting from the emotional potency it might have had. (Clearly, there are many who disagree.) [from John Williams at A Special Way of Being Afraid]

And yet another update (2/27): At least two commenters (so far) in this FlavorWire thread are not fans.

“Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing?”: On Audiences and Serendipity

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Bonnard The Letter

Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? (Middlemarch, Ch. XLI)

One of the things I always emphasize to my students is the importance of considering your audience when you are writing. Knowing your intended audience settles a lot of questions about tone as well as style and content: formal or informal, colloquial or specialized, anecdotal or analytical. I usually recommend that they not think of me as their primary audience but aim their writing at another member of the class — a really top-notch, well-informed one who knows the readings and has followed our discussions closely.  You know you don’t have to summarize the plot for this reader. What you can do that such a reader will appreciate is draw attention to a pattern or idea or formal issue that deserves more sustained attention. And so on.

One of the unsettling things about writing a blog is that you can’t be certain who your audience is or will be. Given the competition for readers’ attention, you can’t be sure you even have an audience, much of the time, and most of us will never have a big one. And one of the questions every blogger surely confronts at some point is: how much should I care about this?

I think it’s disingenuous to pretend the question is “do I care?” Of course we care. If we really didn’t care about anyone ever reading what we write, we’d use old-fashioned notebooks — the kind you write in with pens! Writing in public is a symptom of a desire for readers, not because we’re egomaniacs or narcissists (though all writers, no matter their platform, surely need to have a bit of the egomaniac in them, enough to make them believe they have something worth writing down) but because we want to be part of the larger conversation about whatever it is that we are passionate about.

But the fact remains that readers are scarce, and attention (the currency of the internet) is hard to get. If you feel, as you are bound to sometimes, that the big conversation is going on somewhere else, without you, you can start thinking that you should do something, change something, write something, to get attention. You should write deliberately for an audience, and not the audience you actually do have of people who care about you and the writing you’re actually doing, but some imagined audience that would care if only you did something different. And yet, as Kerry  Clare eloquently explains in her recent post “Blogging Like No One Is Reading,” this is a bad idea:

To do the opposite of blogging like no one is reading is terrible advice for a variety of reasons. First, because most of the time, no one is going to be reading, and so there has to be something more than feedback from the outside world to push a novice blogger on. Second, because you’re never going to be able to predict what readers will respond to and what they won’t. It’s the strangest serendipity, and attempts to orchestrate this will absolutely drive you crazy. It will also result in the naked tap-dancing that just looks ridiculous, and never more so than when it doesn’t work and still, no one is reading. And there you are in your feather boa and your silly top hat, when dancing wasn’t even what you planned to be doing in the first place.

You need to write as who you really are, so that you will want to do the writing, and so that you will be pleased about the conversations you do get into, whether with your readers or just with yourself in a follow-up post. As Kerry says, there’s a strange serendipity to it all, and not only would you go crazy trying to orchestrate it, but you can go kind of nuts trying to figure it out when it does happen. Why my most-read post of all time is “How to Read a Victorian Novel” is puzzling to me; that it is my most-read post of all time is, if I think too hard about it, kind of annoying, considering it’s not by any means the best writing I’ve ever done here…but I had a great time writing it, so if it had stayed in peaceful obscurity, I would have had no regrets, and since I believe every word of it, I can only find its popularity cheering.

anthologyI mostly don’t fret too much about the audience for this blog: it’s my space, and I just do my thing, at my own pace. But when I write for Open Letters Monthly, I often struggle more with how to write or who to write for — or just what to write, since there are no limits and no imperatives, thanks to the deliberate breadth of the journal itself and the latitude my colleagues allow their co-editors. Though there have certainly been pieces I have been invited or urged or even pressured to write, I can’t imagine the topic I could propose that they would actively discourage! In puzzling out what project to take on next for Open Letters, I sometimes get caught up in questions about who would want to read what I have to say on a particular book or subject. What audience would I be writing for? Is there an audience I should be deliberately aiming for? Because of my own training and pedagogy, these have always seemed reasonable questions. But to my surprise, the most vehement advice I got from my most ruthless and motivating mentor was: never, ever, think about your audience! That’s the one thing you must put entirely out of your mind!

But how could this be? why is this wrong? I have always wondered. I’m coming to realize that the reason it’s wrong in that case is the same as the reason it’s wrong in blogging: if you’re hoping to second-guess the erratic interests of an amorphous online readership, you’ll end up endlessly second-guessing yourself, and you won’t write well (or, at least, you won’t write your best) or write things you believe in absolutely. Forget the timely hook, the link-bait trend, the ambulance-chasing review. If you have the luxury I have of not having to write anything in particular, then write what you know, write what you care about, write what you’d love to talk about if you got the chance, and write as well as you possibly can. That way if you do get the chance to join in a bigger conversation, it will be one you’re excited to be in. And in the meantime, you’re being your best, and also your unique, writing self — who else would you want to be, and who else, really, would anyone want to read?

I’m feeling buoyed about this perspective on writing because I’ve been caught up in a bit of that strange serendipity Kerry talks about as a result of the essay about Richard III mentioned in this recent post. It’s an essay that had no extrinsic reason at all to get written. My only justification for writing it was that the topic has been dear to my heart since childhood and then turned out to be intertwined with many intellectual strands from my later life as a scholar. It had its roots in a blog post prompted by one of my very earliest encounters with Open Letters. I began working up notes for an essay on this material in the summer of 2011 and got all excited about it (and wrote about it here and here) and then, as I later explained to Steve, “lost faith in the project: it seemed too esoteric to be of general interest.” Obviously, he talked me back into it, and it was great fun (if also a fair amount of work!) getting it into shape and finally published in May 2012. After all that time I had made something I was proud of from an unlikely but, to me, fascinating combination of elements.  That was that, and that was enough! Nobody commented on it, it didn’t get any external links, I doubt it reached a very wide audience — but there it was.

AlltheworldThen last fall they started digging up the skeleton that turns out almost certainly to be Richard III’s. Suddenly there’s a surge of interest in his story, and when people go looking for something to read about it, one of the pieces they find is mine. It hasn’t gone viral or anything, but it has found a new audience, including the author of this Globe and Mail story, and also a producer for CBC who contacted me to confer about ways I might contribute to a potential documentary about the discovery of his remains. I don’t know yet what, if anything, will come of the proposal, but no matter what, that’s twice in a week I’ve had a chance to talk with curious people about one of my pet subjects, and, through them, to share my enthusiasm and my ideas with others. Once again, I’m immensely cheered by the whole process, even as I’m amused at its unpredictability. Fond as I am of the Richard III essay, I don’t consider it the best writing I’ve done for Open Letters. It is among the more personal pieces I’ve done. If I’d really thought about who might read it, maybe I would not have included the hopelessly nerdy picture of my younger self beside Richard’s statue in Leicester! I’m glad I didn’t worry about that, though. Another piece of advice I often give my students is that your writing represents you. It might as well represent the whole you, warts (or 80’s glasses) and all.

One final thought about audiences. Academic prestige (not to mention professional advancement)  is strongly tied to writing for academic audiences. Sure, there’s rhetoric about outreach and “knowledge dissemination” and so on, but my experience is that most academics don’t take writing and publishing outside conventional academic channels very seriously: it doesn’t really count. Just recently a colleague praised my Open Letters essay on Anne Brontë for its interest and originality, then spoiled the nice moment by adding “You should really publish it sometime.” I was genuinely pleased that a specialist found the essay valuable, but I did already “really” publish it. I just placed it — and wrote it — so that it would be accessible to non-specialists as well. I have persisted with this kind of writing and publishing, despite the likely professional disadvantages, because I believe  in it: I believe that one thing (not the only thing) we should do with our expertise is share it widely and show people why we’re excited about it. The CBC producer was explicit that her interest in contacting me came from her reading of the essay, which she described as “fun academic writing” — not, that is, the kind of academic writing she usually runs into, but nonetheless writing she recognized as expert. As I told her, that was music to my ears! The specific attention to Richard III that drew her to this piece was certainly serendipitous, but the existence of the piece in the first place, and its presence out in the open where she could find it, was not, and it’s not just cheering but gratifying to have the value of writing for a different audience affirmed in this way.

This Week In My Classes: Cranford and The Road

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

roadThe honeymoon is over. At the beginning of every term things putter along easily enough while I wonder why I felt so stressed out at the end of the previous term … and then marking starts to come in, and the new assignment sequences dreamed up over the break loom on the horizon and require planning and handouts and Blackboard drop-boxes, and forms for the letters of reference I forgot I still needed to do appear in my inbox, and the thesis material I made my students promise to have ready duly shows up. And that’s about where I am now, staying on top of things but with effort. It doesn’t help that it’s winter (when has winter ever helped with anything?). It takes more energy to do everything in the winter, from driving away in the morning (bundling up, scraping, clearing) to just staying warm (even my LL Bean fleece slipper socks are just not enough this year, down in my basement office with the cold, cold floor).

So that’s how things are going, in a general way. It’s a good busy, mostly, especially the class prep for the novels that are new for me this term: I enjoy figuring out what I want to do with them and trying out my ideas in the classroom. I’m out of time for Cranford now: next time, I think I’ll allow more than four classes, because it feels like our work on it ended too abruptly. But then, I don’t typically have more than six classes on any but the longest novels! I’m going to miss its subtle good humor, which has been a good antidote to the relentless gloom of The Road in my intro class. One of my favorite bits on this read was the Great Pea-Eating Challenge:

When the ducks and green peas came, we looked at each other in dismay; we had only two-pronged, black-handled forks. It is true the steel was as bright as silver; but what were we to do? Miss Matty picked up her peas, one by one, on the point of the prongs, much as Amine ate her grains of rice after her previous feast with the Ghoul. Miss Pole sighed over her delicate young peas as she left them on one side of her plate untasted, for they would drop between the prongs. I looked at my host: the peas were going wholesale into his capacious mouth, shovelled up by his large round-ended knife. I saw, I imitated, I survived! My friends, in spite of my precedent, could not muster up courage enough to do an ungenteel thing; and, if Mr Holbrook had not been so heartily hungry, he would probably have seen that the good peas went away almost untouched.

I’ve always found peas quite inconvenient myself — and not particularly tasty, though I do occasionally serve them now that I’m All Grown Up (my parents could testify that this is a sign of maturity beyond what they would have predicted, given my childhood aversion to most green vegetables). Next up in this class is The Mill on the Floss. It’s not cheerful (well, the first part is pretty funny, but after that … ) but I’m really looking forward to it, especially after having worked up my essay on it for this month’s Open Letters.

In Intro to Lit, we had our first general class discussion of The Road today, and the students seemed quite engaged with it. We warmed up by talking about things like the title (I always start there with novels!) — why “the” road, why not any road in particular (especially considering they have a map), why just “the man” and “the boy,” what seems to have happened, what matters to them now, what is their relationship like, and so on. There’s lots more to talk about, but for Wednesday I want us to focus on the language of the novel for a while. I am aware that admiration of McCarthy’s style is not universal, and I’m not altogether convinced about some aspects of it myself, for all that I find the novel both gripping and moving. It’s a conspicuous style: there’s no illusion of transparency and there are a lot of what could be considered affectations, from the eccentric punctuation (argh! the apostrophes!) to the use of obscure words (obscure to me, anyway — words I had to look up for today’s installment included “rachitic,” “gryke,” and “kerfs”). Most sentences are very short, and indeed many are fragments, but some are longer and more elaborate, even florid. Because the novel is quite suspenseful, it’s easy to read along quickly and not fret the details (I didn’t look up any of these words on my first reading), but that’s obviously not good enough. I think we might try an exercise on “found poetry” in The Road. I think that this would focus our attention very closely on details of wording, including not just meaning but also sound, placement, and relationships to major themes. It would also probably prompt some useful discussion about what we think makes prose “poetic.” So! A handout for a group activity along these lines goes on the to-do list for tomorrow.