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Mr. Spooky posted:That's a good way of thinking of it. Unfortunately (well, for you at least), my dissertation project is thoroughly medieval, and will probably only focus on economics as a matter of fact rather than as a matter of content. I do find it very strange, however, that book history and history of the novel people so willfully blind themselves to pretty much anything written before the interregnum, and the renaissance is currently a critical dead zone for non-cannonical or non-aristrocratic texts in a way that analyses of anything either before or after it isn't. If you've got time, though, I'd strongly recommend looking at some of the Jacobean stuff like Ornatus and Artesia or A Marguerite of America (which ought to be available on EEBO). They're short, they're funny, they read as cleanly as Chaucer, and they're common. If your project still involves pressing on economics, this sort of thing can actually help give you the comforting sense of a 'reading public' that tends to be sorely lacking in early modern historicism. I haven't read either of these yet, but I get into lots of common prose narratives. So I'll check them out. I'd recommend Godwin's Man in the Moon. Turns out moon men love American tobacco. Who knew?
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Jul 2, 2009 13:22
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PrinceofLowLight posted:For instance, part of schizophrenia is assigning significance to any event that stands out. Which is the way you kind of have to approach fiction. So, when one of the detectives on Law & Order is questioning Gary Busey, it's pretty easy to jump to the conclusion that he was actually the murderer. The capacity to think that way exists in everyone, I'm just putting forward the idea that literary analysis is a controlled example of it. That makes some sense, and seems like it would hold true for criticism of just about any art -- the foundational assumption in that kind of criticism is that every detail is at least potentially important. More important, it holds true for Busey. He's my first suspect for anything.
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Jul 2, 2009 13:26
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Brainworm posted:I haven't read either of these yet, but I get into lots of common prose narratives. So I'll check them out. I'd recommend Godwin's Man in the Moon. Turns out moon men love American tobacco. Who knew? Start with O+A. Chapter 1 has titties, and it gets better from there.
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Jul 2, 2009 13:26
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MC Cakes posted:That is not a "no". Your wily engrish does not fool me. I shouldn't have talked around it. No. I've dated students from other colleges, though. That's awkward enough.
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Jul 2, 2009 13:30
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Well the thing is that the atrocities in the Congo actually did get a lot of attention in Britain eventually, and Conrad was involved in that. It's more analogous to writing fiction about human rights abuses in China - sure, some people will see parallels to American "enhanced interrogation" and Guantanamo, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be understood as primarily criticising China. That's a good point. I should have probably covered both bases by saying "European" rather than "English." Either way, HOD's popularity in the HS classroom still seems odd.
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Jul 2, 2009 13:34
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Want to talk to me about Jane Austen? Disregarding the spate of published fanfiction and odd zombie/vampire mashups that have been done to her recently.
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Jul 2, 2009 13:34
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exactduckwoman posted:Want to talk to me about Jane Austen? Disregarding the spate of published fanfiction and odd zombie/vampire mashups that have been done to her recently. Sure thing. The thing everybody forgets about Jane Austen is that she's a satirist. That's easy to miss, because most satires are both two dimensional and venomous, and Austin's works are generally neither. This may be because of the library of moral concerns that Austen inherits from Johnson (Samuel) -- Austen's satire seems more reformative than out-and-out bladed. But e.g. Sense and Sensibility is straight-up burlesque of the sensibility novels that had been popular through the 1790s. I mean, everyone knows this, and everybody reads e.g. Marianne this way. And everybody sees the irony in the passages about, say, Mrs. Jennings or Lucy Steele. But you wouldn't know this given how Austen gets adapted -- you'd think she was a writer of romantic comedies. And I suppose her works are comic and involve romance. But the comedy comes from the fact that most of the characters are patently ridiculous; if they were drawn in broader strokes, you'd call them caricatures. Yet the impression modern readers seem to have of Austen and her characters is that it's the romantic economy, rather than the characters themselves, who are ridiculous. I mean, you should listen to people talk about Emma Woodhouse. The whole point of Emma is that Emma has a completely unjustified confidence in her own abilities, and this leads to a series of disasters in Highbury's marriage economy. Although the damage eventually gets repaired, Emma ends the novel as superficial an idiot as when she started it (although she's Knightley's idiot). I mean, yeah, she feels bad about what she's done to, say, Harriet. But even then, her emotional life is generally petty. She only decides she loves Knightley because she's jealous of Harriet, for instance. That doesn't make Emma an unlikable character, exactly. I can like her the same way I like all the characters on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia -- not for their virtues, but for their predictable and hilarious faults. But of course Emma's never really adapted this way. The age and character differences between Emma and Knightley are played down considerably in every adaptation I've seen -- I mean, he's twice her age, basically old enough to be her father, and he acts like it. That's not something that either the film adaptations (or the fanfiction) seem willing to touch, and my students are always sort of surprised (and a little horrified) to figure it out.
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Jul 2, 2009 14:13
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Okay good, we agree. I can't stand the fanfiction industry that's risen up out of Jane Austen- 'romantic comedy' is exactly right. I saw a PINK WITH SPARKLES edition of Pride and Prejudice. Or, they go the other way, like the recent film adaptations (I'm thinking the 2005 P&P and the masterpiece theater S&S that just came out), which make them into ~high drama~ with lots of rain and brooding looks. Austen is not a Bronte, thank god. The saddest bit is that many readers miss both the delicate romance and the not so delicate (but apparently easy to miss?) satire and just think she's 'boring.' Sure, if you want zombies, Austen is boring... but if you want really carefully drawn characters, even the most minor players, she's excellent. I know most of the books by heart, so I've started watching the secondary characters' development (there is SOME) instead of the primary ones, and it's been pretty interesting. My most recent feelings on Emma are that she's essentially going through the same process as did Mr. Darcy (although she is both MORE class conscious and less repentant). I like to imagine she grows up a bit in the following years, Austen's "ideal marriage" is always one in which each party's character improves the other, or at least one much superior educates the inferior (e.g. Catherine Morgan in Northanger Abbey). Miss Austen was not a feminist as we would have it and should not be read as such. I'm babbling but I love Jane Austen. Thanks for indulging me. 420readPersuasioneveryday.
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Jul 2, 2009 17:15
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Hey, Brainworm, awesome thread. I'd like to know your opinions about academia, particularly in your field. I'm a lowly Lit undergrad, and I've studied Art too. In my (far too many) years at college, I've found the academic community in both these fields horrendously masturbatory, self-praising and, ultimately, useless. Now, I agree wholeheartedly with what you said many pages ago about utilitarianism (if we were to study only what's useful, we would hardly study anything at all, engineers produce useless crap too). But what strikes me as pathetic is the endless, senseless repetition that I see going on in these fields, and the absolute lack of any creation or original thought. A friend of mine (PhD in Linguistics) put it this way: we were talking, and there was a small pink pencilcase on a desk near us. He said, "Academia is me learning how to make this pink pencilcase. I use this knowledge to teach you how to make a pink pencilcase. You use that knowledge to teach Elise how to make a pink pencilcase. Elise uses it to teach Bill how to make a pink pencilcase. And so on. No one will ever really make a pink pencilcase, or even improve its design." This friend of mine ended up getting so pissed at academia in general that he turned to writing and translating -- with me, a lowly undergrad who has been doing both these things professionally for eight years, as his mentor. In a job market that doesn't value intelectualism, art and literature, is it worth it to study something just so that we can teach it? Shouldn't we be doing more with our degrees (writing, creating, actually making new knowledge that will be studied in the future)? What are your thoughts? Do you see this kind of thing often, or is it just me, with my crappy third-world university?
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Jul 2, 2009 22:11
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Crypto Lurker posted:[...] I see this kind of crisis every once in a while, and part of it might be justified. I mean, I work with MFA folks all the time who think that if they'd just stuck it out a little longer they'd be firing ceramics full-time instead of half-timing it for thirty weeks a year. Now me, I think it's worth studying something "just" to teach it, because my artistic medium is the classroom, not the page. Seriously. I really like Shakespeare, Poetry, and the content of the other courses I teach, but that's incidental. So that how I make my pink pencil cases. Out of people. So far as my students are concerned, I know they're unlikely to be pencil case makers -- at least in a Shakespearean sense. They're more likely to hunt rhinos than end up on the stage or autographing books. But as long as they enjoy Shakespeare or Poetry or whatever else I'm teaching, I won't lose any sleep. Learning can be intrinsically rewarding. Even when you're paying college rates for it. I mean, there's a joy to be had in being an interested amateur. I do my Tabata intervals every morning even though I'll never be a competitive athlete again, and I shoot clay pigeons even though I'll probably never go hunting. What I'm saying is, there are lots of ways to measure happiness, and a rhetoric of accomplishment's only one -- and probably not the best.
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Jul 3, 2009 00:45
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Rereading my post, I think I came off as douchebaggy. That was not my intention.Brainworm posted:Now me, I think it's worth studying something "just" to teach it, because my artistic medium is the classroom, not the page. Seriously. I really like Shakespeare, Poetry, and the content of the other courses I teach, but that's incidental. So that how I make my pink pencil cases. Out of people. But that's the thing -- reading what you posted here, I gathered you do make pencil cases of people and ideas. You talked about your cryptozoology stuff, and other research. When I mentioned repetition and not creating new knowledge, I didn't mean just artistic creation, but academic, too. Around here, all I see is people repeating the same things their professors told them. No one has a different interpretation of the texts, no one makes a new translation, no one asks their students for any kind of creative thought. Would you rather have your students parrot every word you say, or come up with their own well-fundamented opinions and angles? My experience in academia is very parrot-centered. It really feels more like learning a trade (professors teach you what to say and do so you can get a stable job) than becoming educated. I admit I'm more than a little bit in awe of college professors and other academics. My dad was a professor his whole life (Physics) and the idea that a person can know so much about something (and impart that knowledge) is mind-boggling. But I always saw him and his colleagues do original research, while in Humanities people play politics and try to get cushy, quiet jobs. Sorry for the rant, and thank you.
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Jul 3, 2009 02:09
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Great, great thread, Brainworm. What do you think is the significance of the third murderer in Macbeth?
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Jul 3, 2009 05:51
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Brainworm posted:Re: breaking bad *record scratch sound* Whaaa....? That makes two non-Nostradamuses here, because I was sure you wouldn't like it. What about the plane crash out of nowhere?. Or the confrontation scene with Walt and his wife? Do you think having your expectations diminished led to your favorable opinion at all? Sorry to interrupt all this talk about important literature and high art with a discussion about AMC programming, but inquiring minds want to know.
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Jul 3, 2009 10:37
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Just remembered a question that's been bugging me since High school: Why the gently caress does the Mariner shoot the goddamn bird?
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Jul 3, 2009 11:50
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Doran Blackdawn posted:Just remembered a question that's been bugging me since High school: Isn't it obvious that the whole point of the poem is that he's justly punished for his lack of respect for nature? The Albatross is hung around the mariner's neck as a symbol of his transgression. Mind, the poem's about lots of other things, too.
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Jul 3, 2009 17:26
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Would you talk a little more at length about your thoughts on Marlowe? I wrote my undergrad thesis on his works and I still can't get enough of the guy. Also, if you've got anything to say about Stoppard, I'd be horribly interested.
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Jul 4, 2009 00:46
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Brainworm, I clicked on this thread on a lark without any expectation of the read being as enthralling as it has been. Being a relatively uneducated rube myself, I have been thoroughly dazzled, impressed, humbled to the point of humiliation*, but inspired. I have a precious Yale Shakespeare collection**, bought forever ago in a fit of delusional intention, which, while great at soaking up dust and filling up space on my bookshelf, has otherwise proved somewhat useless. I actually picked it up and started in on Hamlet last night. One topic I'd love to hear your opinions on regards raising children. More specifically, successful approaches to raising children to love and embrace education as less a thing you do, and more as lifestyle. What did your parents do that set you along your path? And perhaps you could touch on some general mindset/philosophy that would help one become a successful and lovely student. Having never been to college myself, I am shooting a little blindly, and you seem like the archetype of the perfect student/educator. I appreciate your words and time. * I am literally human garbage in a world of Brainworm. ** Barnes and Noble, $20, faux leather bound and tissue paper pages, mostly I get lost when characters say "Fie"
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Jul 4, 2009 02:15
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Mr. Spooky posted:Isn't it obvious that the whole point of the poem is that he's justly punished for his lack of respect for nature? The Albatross is hung around the mariner's neck as a symbol of his transgression. The bird stays hangs around the crew long enough for it to do obvious good, then he all of a sudden kills it. If it was just a lack of respect for nature, he probably would have shot it sooner.
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Jul 4, 2009 12:18
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Crypto Lurker posted:Rereading my post, I think I came off as douchebaggy. That was not my intention. I don't think you came of douchebaggy -- you've got a real question about a real academic environment. Just not one I'm familiar with. I mean, the disposition of the faculty at any given college has a lot to do with the college's mission. Here, for instance, nobody does a lot of research, and what research is done (especially in the sciences) is student-collaborative and for students' benefit. That is, it's done to show students the ropes, not end in a publishable or presentable paper (though that occasionally happens). So it's totally possible you've seen lots of a place that doesn't have a good Humanities environment. God knows they're out there -- I interviewed at at least one. But I'd like to think that these aren't representative of colleges and universities as a whole.
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Jul 4, 2009 21:18
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emys posted:What do you think is the significance of the third murderer in Macbeth? I'm not sure the murder has any significance, exactly. The problem with the third murderer in Macbeth is a consequence of the same kinds of Renaissance practices that give us the occasional baffling or clearly misattributed speech prefix in maybe a half-dozen plays -- "Oldcastle" for Falstaff might be the most famous. That is, we're talking about a combination of worked-over manuscripts and primitive, if not careless, editing and printing. The problem in Macbeth is that there isn't an reason to have a third murderer unless that murderer's someone we know. So most casting choices for the third murderer bring in a literal or implied crony of Macbeth's, usually implying something about the stability of his rule. A favorite is Donalbain (Duncan's non-Malcolm son), which shows that the whole cover story on Duncan's murder is arguably still intact. But I've also seen stranger choices. One of the witches. Lady Macbeth. I think Patrick Stewart's Macbeth made the right decision and cut the third murderer entirely.
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Jul 4, 2009 21:38
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j8910 posted:[...] Oh, I think lowered expectations had everything to do with it. Same reason I liked Cloverfield. But the finale had some cool writing going for it. It wasn't especially realistic writing, but we've already accepted the existence of a Kaiser Soze of meth dealing who owns a string of chicken restaurants and a Nobel-class chemist who teaches high school. Thing is, I'm a sucker for parallel structure. Gets me every time. So what you've got in the finale are two (actually, two and a half) parallel stories about loss: Jesse loses Jane and Walt loses Skyler, and both these losses are a direct consequence of Jesse and Walt's semi-successful meth dealing. And of course Donald's loss of Jane parallels the fears Walter clearly has for his own newborn -- that's the whole point of their meeting in that bar, right? So the plane crash isn't realistic, sure, but it's what brings home the similarities between Walt and Donald's positions. More important, it anticipates the consequences for Walter if he loses either Skyler or his daughter. It's the writers' way of telling us that Walter saying "gently caress my family, I don't need them anyway" isn't an option, and so preserving some kind of tension. There are probably better (read: more believable) ways this could have been done, but overall I think this is a nicely constructed set of parallels. That's mostly where I'm getting my joy out of the finale.
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Jul 4, 2009 21:57
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Doran Blackdawn posted:Just remembered a question that's been bugging me since High school: I wish I could give you a good answer for this. My best guess is that it's a sort of stand-in for those idiotic, impulsive things that you regret for the rest of your life, like a $75 tattoo. That's the best reading I have of it, anyway. I'd avoid slapping a thematic conflict on top of this to make sense of it -- you know, reading it as some kind of "man vs. nature" or "order vs. chaos" play running out on a small scale.
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Jul 4, 2009 22:04
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Do you spend a lot of time writing grants? My supervisors always seem to here in the science world.
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Jul 5, 2009 01:14
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kernel panic posted:Would you talk a little more at length about your thoughts on Marlowe? I wrote my undergrad thesis on his works and I still can't get enough of the guy. Neither can I. (Special Note: I wrote a huge response to this and my Macbook keeled over. So if this seems brief, that might be why.) I mean, there are two things everyone needs to know about Marlowe. Maybe three: Marlowe gave us modern drama. Before any of the great stage writers of the Renaissance, there was Marlowe. He's singlehandedly responsible for changing stage entertainment from morality plays to something like what we have now -- drama not in orbit around a religious message or simple moral or political axiom. Now he does this with characters we don't recognize as realistic, mostly because they're not. Instead, they're superb caricatures. What I mean by this is that Marlowe's caricatures are two dimensional and totally enthralling. Every good supervillain you've ever seen is straight up out of Marlowe, since that's all he writes: Faustus, Barabas, Tamburlaine, Edward -- they're all evil, and their goals for world domination (or something equally ambitious) just exceed their abilities. And I mean barely. They always almost pull it off. Barabas almost double crosses the Turks and the Maltese. Faustus almost gets to double dip -- selling his soul to Satan for a couple decades of riot and then repenting to save his soul. Tamburlaine conquers the world, manages inestimable blasphemy, and just about consolidates his empire before God smacks him down for burning the Koran (that's the sequel -- the original ends with him taking over the world). You get the idea. These are fantastic characters. They are completely unsympathetic, completely depraved, and you root for them for for like ninety minutes straight, like you'd root for the aliens in Independence Day. Marlowe gave us Shakespeare. Shakespeare spent the first half of his career trying to get out of Marlowe's shadow, and it's precisely out of this struggle that Shakespeare builds the modern, three-dimensional, psychologically complex character we credit him for. But Shakespeare starts by imitating Marlowe, and shamelessly. Richard III is nothing if not Marlovian -- he comes on stage, declares his fiendish intentions, executes them, and then comes on stage to do it all again. But Shakespeare fails utterly when he tries to give Richard a conscience, and you can read the rest of his career as an attempt to successfully create likable characters who experience real psychic conflicts. That's the process that gives us Hamlet, Macbeth, Antony, Brutus, and all the rest. And when we get to Lear, we get a final send up of Marlowe in Edmund the Bastard -- a Marlovian plotter in a Shakespearean world. Marlowe's biography is right for all the wrong reasons. The famous quote, "all those who love not tobacco and boys are fools," that's just smoke and minors. It was probably made up during Marlowe's indictment. But that doesn't mean the sentiment behind the quote is at all wrong, at least insofar as that sentiment sticks to Marlowe's poetry and drama. It's a good picture of Marlowe, and doesn;t need abandoning because of some biographical quibble. quote:Also, if you've got anything to say about Stoppard, I'd be horribly interested. I think Stoppard's a competent writer who misses some amazing opportunities. Some time ago, he went to a famous Shakespearean scholar to get some ideas for a plot for Shakespeare in Love. That scholar suggested a bisexual series of love affairs based loosely on the plot of the Sonnets, probably involving Marlowe as either the young man or a romantic rival for the young man. We got Gwyneth Paltrow instead, and a movie that was unarguably solid but not nearly as interesting as it could (should) have been.
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Jul 5, 2009 01:49
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Brainworm posted:The famous quote, "all those who love not tobacco and boys are fools," that's just smoke and minors. It was probably made up during Marlowe's indictment. I laughed.
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Jul 5, 2009 02:06
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What should I know about As You Like It? I'm seeing a Shakespeare-In-The-Park production of it next weekend and I'd like to be able to take away from it as much as possible.Brainworm posted:The famous quote, "all those who love not tobacco and boys are fools," that's just smoke and minors. Aaaaahaha.
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Jul 5, 2009 07:37
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quote:The full title of Romeo & Juliet is "The tragedy of Romeo & Juliet". The fact that they ultimately die is in the title. Good stories are most often about the path you take, not the destination alone. Someone wrote this in another thread. I think the topic was the new Judd Apatow movie. What's your opinion on spoilers? Is Romeo and Juliet a much better reading if you don't know they die at the end? You mentioned to another poster that he should read Titus, but definitely avoid finding any plot information. I'm not entirely sure what I'm asking, so hopefully you can fill in the blanks.
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Jul 5, 2009 09:05
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Mr. Wonderful posted:I have a precious Yale Shakespeare collection, bought forever ago in a fit of delusional intention, which, while great at soaking up dust and filling up space on my bookshelf, has otherwise proved somewhat useless. I actually picked it up and started in on Hamlet last night. Awesome. I'm telling you, that play has changed more lives than mine. If you can read it, you can read anything. quote:One topic I'd love to hear your opinions on regards raising children. More specifically, successful approaches to raising children to love and embrace education as less a thing you do, and more as lifestyle. What did your parents do that set you along your path? And perhaps you could touch on some general mindset/philosophy that would help one become a successful and lovely student. Having never been to college myself, I am shooting a little blindly, and you seem like the archetype of the perfect student/educator. OK. So one huge caveat here. If I come off well in this thread, it's because I'm playing to my strengths. I'm answering questions about my area of expertise, and doing it in writing, which is as close to what I've been trained for as anything. That's another way of saying that I don't know a thing about parenting, and am probably like to misidentify things in my own childhood that made me a good student for the same basic reasons an alcoholic is like to misidentify the things that make him drink. But if I'm going to blame someone for this, it's my father. When I was growing up, he made it his job to give me the most interesting night and weekend projects a kid could have.* Just one example: When I was seven or eight I asked him how an electrical engine worked. This was totally out of the blue, and I'm pretty sure he was doing taxes. It was that time of year. So he flips over the sheet of paper he's working on, bamphs out a couple sketches, and we go out to the garage, where we build a cranky little engine out of some L-brackets, copper wire, and a half-dozen bigass nails, and ran it off the car battery. So he explains how everything works as we're putting it together -- a principle he called "fooling the electromagnets," which still seems pretty apt to me, and says that he's got to finish that paperwork he was on, but he'll be back in an hour to see if I've got a better engine design. Anyway, he'd just-a-little-too-conveniently sketched this deal out so that I could move one of the L-brackets, dig through a couple parts bins, and fiddle the whole getup into a unipolar, permanent magnet engine. Of course I didn't suspect that at the time, and I had a pretty fast unipolar engine going by the time he came back out to the garage. Point is, that was every weekend. Also, he had this sort of irritating habit of asking "so what did you learn?" after everything. Don't get me wrong. It's a good question, but not a real rapport builder when, say, your girlfriend moves out on you. But that might be a little harsh. Point is, he was always at hand with something -- I mean, he taught me how to play chess, rebuild an alternator, solder stuff to breadboards, identify edible plants, sail. Long list for an insurance salesman. And let me think. My mom made sure we were at the library at least twice a week, which was probably good. I whipped through books like a motherfucker and apparently took apart major appliances when I ran out of things to read, so that might have been a less altruistic plan than it sounds. But everything else was pretty normal, I think. Library trips, weekend projects. My sister and I went to public schools, and I don't think we were ever overscheduled. * And I don't think that came easily. My Dad and his brothers were all very good -- almost great -- football players. An uncle of mine played for the Rams back in the day, but quit because he could make more as a bank examiner. Anyway. I'm pretty sure my Dad was looking for a football player, too, and was pretty confused by what he got. Maybe a little disappointed, too, until I got to be a decent boxer in my late teens.
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Jul 5, 2009 12:15
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Rated PG-34 posted:Do you spend a lot of time writing grants? My supervisors always seem to here in the science world. I don't. Grant writing in the humanities is a totally different animal than in the sciences. A big grant in the humanities is $30-40K, and those are infrequent, though I was part of a Teagle foundation one for $300K, but that involves three schools in a five-year longitudinal study. The biggest I've ever written for my own work is for about $15K, which is way more typical. And I had to beat out about 3500 other applications to get it (which is also way more typical). And, in any case, these are almost all for developing new teaching tools rather than doing field study, though you'll see the occasional larger one (~$100K) for faculty development. Point is, grantwriting in the humanities is hardly worth the time unless you absolutely need grant-based funding to do something. For these amounts of money, I'm better off hitting up a philanthropist.
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Jul 5, 2009 14:00
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Magic Hate Ball posted:What should I know about As You Like It? I'm seeing a Shakespeare-In-The-Park production of it next weekend and I'd like to be able to take away from it as much as possible. Basically, Rosalind is the breakout character. Everyone else is just background. And, yes, the play's supposed to be ridiculous. It's a musical, after all, just not in the Broadway style. But it operates according to lots of the same conventions. The characters are basically two-dimensional, their problems are bizarre, and their solutions are improbable. That's part of the joy of the play.
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Jul 5, 2009 14:33
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j8910 posted:Someone wrote this in another thread. I think the topic was the new Judd Apatow movie. What's your opinion on spoilers? Is Romeo and Juliet a much better reading if you don't know they die at the end? You mentioned to another poster that he should read Titus, but definitely avoid finding any plot information. Ignorance is absolutely bliss on this one. Shakespeare basically invented the surprise ending -- there's one in R&J, Othello, Titus, and almost all of the comedies. The thing to remember is that Shakespeare's plays only saw their print forms and print titles well after they were performed -- the contemporary titles, so far as the evidence of "bad" quartos and contemporary records suggest, were much the same titles we use today -- that is, not The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, just Romeo and Juliet. You can see this from the plays designs. Othello has all the markings of a comedy until late in Act IV: "forbidden" love, a comically obstreperous father, a virtuous heroine, her insecure lover, and so on. It's identical to Much Ado (a comedy) in every significant respect. Romeo and Juliet, incidentally, follows the same pattern. There are a billion near misses and near successes in that play, and every disaster is met with a workable plan from e.g. the Friar. There's not reason, reading the play, to suspect that Romeo and Juliet are going to die. You just know they'll meet with "woe," which by the logic of the play could mean the loss of their families and close friends. This absolutely makes a difference, and its one of the things that burns me up about how especially Hamlet gets taught. You can only read and make sense of the play if you don't know what happens next, because the play's built on generating suspense. If you know the plot, it blinds you to the ways that the different characters are plotting, counterplotting, and making decisions, so it just looks like they're wanking around on stage for three hours. Hamlet seems indecisive, Claudius ineffectual, and Polonius senile. So for the love of God, don't read plot summaries before you read a new play. You'll figure out the plot soon enough and have the rest of your life to appreciate how the play gets wherever it goes. But you'll only feel the suspense or experience a surprise when you read the first time. Don't let anyone rob you of that.
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Jul 5, 2009 14:46
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Grad student career question here. I am about to go back to grad school at the place I got my undergrad degrees from. I'm in the English Dept, but what I'm really interested in are folklore and linguistics much more than literature, but that's another story. I'm enrolled in a Ph.D. program (don't yet have a Master's), so unless I transfer, all of my degrees will end up being from this moderately prestigious state school with an excellent faculty. I know this is bad if one wants to be a professor--having all your degrees from the same place, I mean. But there are a variety of reasons I chose to return to said university: personal reasons which I don't really feel like getting into; the scarcity of folklore programs (the main choices are really Indiana, Ohio State, and Michigan, or just the Master's at Berkeley); and the compatibility of my interests, which are Louisiana and the Caribbean, with the school's location and faculty (my mentors include an expert on Louisiana folklore and one on Caribbean folklore, for example). In other words, the main reason to not do it this way would be to not have all my degrees from the same place since that's how you're supposed to play the game.* E.g., if I were to go to Indiana or one of those others, I would end up having to travel back down here for fieldwork and archival research anyway. Or that's what I'm telling myself. So my question is this: by doing it this way, how badly would I be hurting my viability on the job market? I know you said that what you do is more important than where you go; so let's assume moderate success in the publishing area. In terms of what kind of job I want, I'd love to teach on the college level but also do research (which for a folklorist means ethnographic fieldwork with consequent publication).** And I probably want to stay in this general area (Louisiana, preferably south Lousiana). I realize this is a pretty specific question, especially since folklorists are really their own little marginalized niche in academia, and that you may not be able to help me... but what's your off-the-cuff assessment? * And yes I know of the arguments that I would exposed to different professors with different angles and live somewhere completely different that would broaden my experience etc. ** There is public-sector work for folklorists too. In other words, you don't have to be a professor to get to do fieldwork; however, for professors it does tend to be more academically/theoretically oriented. Conceivably I could teach at e.g. a community college and do public sector work on the side, but I'd much rather be at a university; I'd be teaching folklore instead of freshman comp or whatever, and the fieldwork would be more to my liking I think.
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Jul 5, 2009 18:22
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Mr. Wonderful posted:One topic I'd love to hear your opinions on regards raising children. More specifically, successful approaches to raising children to love and embrace education as less a thing you do, and more as lifestyle. What did your parents do that set you along your path? And perhaps you could touch on some general mindset/philosophy that would help one become a successful and lovely student. Having never been to college myself, I am shooting a little blindly, and you seem like the archetype of the perfect student/educator. This wasn't directed at me and I'm hardly an expert, but I've found that it's curiosity that drives that love of education. Obviously this entails that you should encourage their questions in any way you can, but it also means giving them plenty to ask about in the first place. So I'd say: answer any question they ask. If you can't answer something straight away, or they're not satisfied with your answer, sit down and work out a better, acceptable answer with them. As for the source of questions, the two obvious routes are practical lessons - such as those of Brainworm's dad - and books. Reading a lot as a child is something I've found to be almost universal amongst the academically-successful people I've met. Read to them as often as possible - hell, every night - until they can read themselves, and then provide them with a continual flow of literature that challenges them. New words, new ideas. New things to ask about. e: This bit is based on nothing but my own experiences, but try leaving encyclopedias lying around the house. Especially in the toilet. They'll get bored, flip it open to a random article - neutron stars, DNA, the Glorious Revolution, Uganda - and christ, even if they can't grasp half of it, it's still fascinating.
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Jul 5, 2009 20:16
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Loving the thread, Dr. Worm. A couple questions: 1) Maybe this is a long shot, but I've got a bit of an odd perspective here. I'm a recent math Ph.D. and starting a career in mathematics academia. It seems to me that, as things like calculus don't have any bearing on the lives of at least half (at a very generous guess) of the students we require to take calculus courses, the reasons we require those courses lie elsewhere: a general familiarity with analytical thought, and aptitude at mathematical reading and writing. Holy crap that was the most convoluted sentence ever. My question is, do you have any thoughts on how to teach students the reading and writing of science and math? 2) I read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist back in high school over a decade ago and I'm not sure I really got that much from them at the time. I was thinking of taking another stab at Joyce. Do you have any advice or recommendations? What should I know going in? What books should I try? How should I approach them? Etc. Thanks so much, keep up the awesome thread!
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Jul 5, 2009 21:09
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Funktor posted:1) Maybe this is a long shot, but I've got a bit of an odd perspective here. I'm a recent math Ph.D. and starting a career in mathematics academia. It seems to me that, as things like calculus don't have any bearing on the lives of at least half (at a very generous guess) of the students we require to take calculus courses, the reasons we require those courses lie elsewhere: a general familiarity with analytical thought, and aptitude at mathematical reading and writing. Holy crap that was the most convoluted sentence ever. My question is, do you have any thoughts on how to teach students the reading and writing of science and math? at a slight tangent - it's concerning math education as a whole, rather than reading/writing - this might appeal to you: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
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Jul 5, 2009 21:20
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manguero posted:Grad student career question here. As long as you're in a good program and as long as you have good reasons for your decision, I don't think going straight through will hurt you at all. Lots of folks triple up on Harvard, Penn, etc. and nobody seems to mind, and good non-Ivy state programs are at least as rational a choice. The only chances I think you're hurting are your chances of getting a tenure-track job at that or a closely-related school, which would be really slim anyway. I'd expect that you might have to field some questions about why you chose to stay at the same program during interviews at some point down the road, but (again) as long as your decision makes sense and you've got a good scholarly record behind you, I doubt it'll matter.
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Jul 5, 2009 22:22
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Funktor posted:1) Maybe this is a long shot, but I've got a bit of an odd perspective here. I'm a recent math Ph.D. and starting a career in mathematics academia. It seems to me that, as things like calculus don't have any bearing on the lives of at least half (at a very generous guess) of the students we require to take calculus courses, the reasons we require those courses lie elsewhere: a general familiarity with analytical thought, and aptitude at mathematical reading and writing. Holy crap that was the most convoluted sentence ever. My question is, do you have any thoughts on how to teach students the reading and writing of science and math? I don't, but Susan Szczepanski does. She (and I think Penelope Smith) have been running some really interesting work using writing to teach math-centered analytical skills. I'm not in my office right now and so can't pull up any of their work, but if you can't find something they're published, PM me and I'll put you in touch with them or their WAC coordinator. quote:2) I read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist back in high school over a decade ago and I'm not sure I really got that much from them at the time. I was thinking of taking another stab at Joyce. Do you have any advice or recommendations? What should I know going in? What books should I try? How should I approach them? Etc. I started with Portrait of an Artist and everything seemed to work out fine -- I think JJ has a tougher reputation than he really deserves. Cormac McCarthy is at least as formally experimental. But there's a great Joyce companion, Reading Joyce by David Pierce, that might be worth a look.
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Jul 5, 2009 22:34
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Thanks Brainworm, I'll look them up. Coffeetable, that Lockhart article is true, sad, and heartbreaking. Doesn't help me teach college calculus, though 
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Jul 5, 2009 23:03
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Brainworm posted:As long as you're in a good program and as long as you have good reasons for your decision, I don't think going straight through will hurt you at all. Lots of folks triple up on Harvard, Penn, etc. and nobody seems to mind, and good non-Ivy state programs are at least as rational a choice. Thanks a lot; this is good to hear. From local professors I've heard things from "You'll be OK" to "You reeeeeeally need to transfer at some point", though the ones that matter (and know something about our field) fall in the former group. Great thread by the way. (It's part of the reason I finally got an account, actually.) I'll be TA'ing Shakespeare in the Fall (though I don't really want to--remember I'm an aspiring folklorist/linguist) so hopefully what you've shared here will help me with that. And you know, I'll probably end up enjoying it.
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Jul 6, 2009 03:38
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Did you take a break after undergrad? If so, what did you do? Would you recommend it?
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Jul 6, 2009 10:57
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