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This has been fun so far, I need to remember to check A/T once in a while. As for general-purpose books, secure tenure first. That's why it's there.
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Aug 1, 2009 01:35
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Brainworm posted:Also, what's a just reward for your ideas? Well, me personally, I could really go for some feedback on my application portfolio sometime November-ish. I know that's a busy time at colleges with exams though, so no worries if you can't. Really the important thing is that more books would be out there for those that need it! I didn't mean to imply that you're the type to worry about The Man, but it's cool that you're doing the free classes and things like that! It's especially reassuring that the college was able to be talked around to it. Now for a totally unrelated question - what's your opinion on the role that the Oprah Book Club plays in deciding what is read in the US? On the one hand it seems odd that it (she?) is the determiner of what so many people read, but on the other hand sometimes stuff like Faulkner gets chosen and thousands of people who never would have read As I Lay Dying are suddenly giddily talking about it. It seems like an extension of the Book Of The Month clubs earlier in the century which played a similarly inflated but significant role.
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Aug 1, 2009 04:43
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reflir posted:I'm a philosophy grad student myself, and some of the most fun I've ever had writing a paper was one where I explained Leibniz' conception of free will by comparing it to and illustrating it with examples from Harry Potter. 1) This is the best use of Leibniz I've ever heard. 2) You might want to check out the University of Pennsylvania's CFP list. There are periodically chances to publish on Potter, usually as chapters in collections. And (not to sound too elitist) the bar for these is like speedbump level. In short: You could totally publish this, even though it might feel like the publication equivalent of bringing Mike's Hard Lemonade to the Roller Derby. Get those talents out in the world, son.
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Aug 2, 2009 13:32
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Paladin posted:Well, me personally, I could really go for some feedback on my application portfolio sometime November-ish. I know that's a busy time at colleges with exams though, so no worries if you can't. I can totally do that. Depending on where you're applying, though, you might want to do this earlier than November -- places have cut staff, which means applications will get processed slower, which means application deadlines will probably be slightly earlier. Anyway. PM me whenever you want to start working on this stuff. quote:[...] it's cool that you're doing the free classes and things like that! It's especially reassuring that the college was able to be talked around to it. They're not talked into it yet. I'm still doing the soft sell. quote:Now for a totally unrelated question - what's your opinion on the role that the Oprah Book Club plays in deciding what is read in the US? On the one hand it seems odd that it (she?) is the determiner of what so many people read, but on the other hand sometimes stuff like Faulkner gets chosen and thousands of people who never would have read As I Lay Dying are suddenly giddily talking about it. It seems like an extension of the Book Of The Month clubs earlier in the century which played a similarly inflated but significant role. It's an odd thing. I think OBC's selections have been admirable if not downright ambitious. And that's remarkable if OBC readers are anything like a cross section of O's audience -- it takes some weight to get large groups of non-academics behind Faulkner. And OBC's been good and needed exposure for a few authors -- Jonathan Franzen's a good example. So I can't fault that, unless I'm going to assume that OBC has some obligation to promote every author of Franzen's caliber. At the same time, it would be interesting to see whether there's some larger rationale behind OBC's collected choices. I don't think such a rationale is necessary, since there's no need for OBC to declare that they're doing anything other than choosing books that they think O's audience will like reading. But this kind of rationale can be a useful start to interesting discussions. If I have a reading list that says "all of these books rewrite Shakespeare," we've got something solid to talk about. There's long-term coherence. There are opportunities for, say, local book clubs to invite guests or speakers (like their friendly neighborhood Shakespearean). In short, this kind of rationale is a way for book clubs to focus their discussions and articulate with the outside world in ways that OBC currently does not. And that gets me to what bugs me a bit about OBC. It's not really a book club, in the sense that it's not really a discussion group. I think the culture of OBC suggests that readers meet to talk about the books they're read, but (and I could be wrong about this), OBC really doesn't provide any guidance for that discussion. That's important. A book club shouldn't just give people good books to read. It should help them become readers more capable of enjoying their reading.
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Aug 2, 2009 14:33
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Whelp, the new semester approaches. Anybody else groaning at the thought of starting? I'll be fine once we get going, but I've gotten used to waking up at obscene hours and spending my days reading and writing. That being said, anybody working on projects for the semester that they're looking forward to? We're teaching Macbeth this time around in our Intro to Theatre classes because it's part of our season (I'm also playing Ross). In addition, I'm providing dramaturgy for the production as part of my research assistantship, so I'm tracking down resources for that now. We've talked a little bit about Macbeth, but I'd like to hear some more opinions on that as well. Any ideas on teaching this toward a gen ed class? Bored state university students who tried (and failed, in this case) to take a blow-off class? General apathy, an aversion to Shakespeare. What are some takes on the play?
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Aug 2, 2009 19:19
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I'm taking a Shakespeare class this Fall so I'm already banking on using this thread as an additional resource. 
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Aug 2, 2009 23:05
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You've talked about understanding the motivations of a book's characters. What about authors that don't go in for psychological realism?
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Aug 3, 2009 13:39
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bartlebee posted:Whelp, the new semester approaches. Anybody else groaning at the thought of starting? I'll be fine once we get going, but I've gotten used to waking up at obscene hours and spending my days reading and writing. I, as usual, feel totally unprepared. It's a byproduct of Just-In-Time course planning; if you're doing it right, there's always a moment where you're like "holy poo poo. I'm not going to finish this." And then you do. quote:That being said, anybody working on projects for the semester that they're looking forward to? We're teaching Macbeth this time around in our Intro to Theatre classes because it's part of our season (I'm also playing Ross). In addition, I'm providing dramaturgy for the production as part of my research assistantship, so I'm tracking down resources for that now. Ooh. I'm team-teaching a year-long course with a guy in the Theater department. We've got about a half-dozen students acting as a production company for a Spring production of Othello; we (the other teacher and I) pulled in a little grant money so the PC can cast a professional actor for Othello and (probably) Iago. The arc of the project is like so: During the Fall semester, the PC's going to be doing a pile of historical and dramaturgical research, and crafting a sort of prospectus on what the think this production should look like and why. Then, in the Spring, they're using that document to supervise production. I'm stoked about this. We've got Business and Management students in (budgeting, publicity, etc), Religion, African and African-American Studies, Theater, English, and so on. This is what I think about when I think about interdisciplinary work. And then I've got this whole free-for-credit-Summer-courses deal cooking. If I can sell this to the faculty and the board, I'll be in a good place. I hate seeing students wash out because of financial aid gaps, and I like showing people why and how colleges are unlike businesses. quote:We've talked a little bit about Macbeth, but I'd like to hear some more opinions on that as well. Any ideas on teaching this toward a gen ed class? Bored state university students who tried (and failed, in this case) to take a blow-off class? General apathy, an aversion to Shakespeare. What are some takes on the play? OK. I'm in a bit of a rush, but check this out. The Scottish Play is all about bringing the audience into sympathy with a psychotic mass murderer. This is, of course, a psychotic whose exploits just happen to be well-suited to his environment. It makes him a sort of perfect machine for doing what he does. That's not the engine for sympathy, exactly, but it helps. Even though Macbeth's environment may not have made him what he is, there's no question that it valorizes and benefits from what he does, which makes his situation politically complicated. In that sense, TSP is worth reading alongside American Psycho, which is essentially the same story; I think of American Psycho as TSP written from Macbeth's point of view. Whether this is intentional or not, it's a great window into the play. Anyway. Sympathy. That's why Lady M is in the play at all. Macbeth isn't just a psychotic mass murderer. He is capable of human emotion and human motivation, albeit in strikingly selective terms. And we can pity the extent to which he's manipulated by both Lady M and his own delusions, even if we can't properly empathize with that aspect of his character. He's also one of many Shakespearean characters who murders someone who is almost but not quite his father, so it's worth comparing his situation, and probable motivations, to Hamlet's and Brutus's. All three of these characters are in more or less the same boat; they may or may not have deeply complicated personal reasons for dispatching a pseudo-father who happens to be head of state. That Shakespeare is so fond of this plot suggests that he tried to perfect something in it, in which case TSP represents something close to that conflict in its final form. Last: The biggest leap I think intro students can make in terms of scriptreading is thinking in terms of motivations rather than emotions. A good and popular exercise for getting at the difference is to ask students to deliver the first line of Merchant: Antonio's "In sooth/truth, I know not why I am so sad." The line opens up when you ask students to say it like they're, say, trying to end the conversation rather than expressing some generalized "sadness." Once students clear that hurdle, they've got a basic and reliable tool for interpreting a play. Without it, they might as well pound nails bare-handed.
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Aug 3, 2009 17:47
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Brainworm posted:Last: The biggest leap I think intro students can make in terms of scriptreading is thinking in terms of motivations rather than emotions. I think this is true of reading any good writing. Your boy E.B. White said, "Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent." Motivations are more interesting anyway.
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Aug 4, 2009 01:16
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Another question on Lear: I've read what you think of the characters, but what I don't get is the jester. Why does he poke so much fun at Lear's impotence? Is it because he never produced a son? At one point the jester calls him a "shelled peascod". He's benignly abdicating the throne to whoever'll kiss up to him the most. How is that unmanly, or hell, uncommon?
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Aug 4, 2009 02:17
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Having sons and passing on the genetic line is a big deal in Shakespeare: watch how Aaron's attitude changes completely in Titus after his son is born, how Titus treats his sons because he's got a ton of them, and how Lady MacB can push MacB around about his masculinity because they're lacking a son (also see all the body politic imagery that's packed into the play after an impotent, damned man takes the throne of Scotland). The jester by profession is allowed to say whatever he wants (after all, he's always joking, right?), but is usually a reliable fellow. Brainworm, care to share any resources/required reading for someone who is thinking about focusing on pedagogical theory? Madame Psychosis fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Aug 4, 2009 |
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Aug 4, 2009 02:25
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emys posted:You've talked about understanding the motivations of a book's characters. What about authors that don't go in for psychological realism? Well. Assuming you're talking about psychological realism in the broadest possible sense, and that we're not talking about genres where realistic characters aren't part of reader expectations (e.g. parody, farce, situation-driven comedy, romance novels, etc.), what you've got is a failure. Like L. Ron Hubbard's "Old Doc Methuselah" stories. In the broad sense, "psychological realism" means that a character has fathomable motivations that differentiate him or her from other characters. These motivations don't need to be revealed -- well-told stories generally don't -- but they need to be there. A reader needs to be able to ask "why is character X doing thing Y?" and provide him or herself an interesting answer that has some basis in the text. The key word in that last sentence is interesting. For purposes of this discussion, plots are never interesting. For one thing, there's precious little variation between them. For another, plot is always a one-shot. Plot elements like e.g. suspense that keep reader interest only work the first time through. Last, plot is never emotionally arresting. You can do whatever you want to a character, but unless the reader has some relationship with that character, the things done to him don't carry any weight. So let's come back to that question: Why is character X doing thing Y? Let's say our character is Billy, a whey-faced seventh grader, and that he's dressed in a pink bunny suit, holding a photograph, and calmly, deliberately masturbating. So why? A Bad Answer: It was previously established by the opening monologue that this is part of a complicated ritual that summons the sky-dragon Falcor, who will help Billy return the sword of Xanthor to the Stone of Justice before it falls into the hands of the black-hearted insect king, Zorak. A Good Answer: I don't know. But he's holding a Polaroid of his mom, and right before we got into this weirdass scene, he was cleaning his room and found a scorched-looking Flaming Lips record. That's probably why "Free Radicals" is playing in the background. Apart from the plot/character distinction between the good answer and the bad one, there are a few other things worth noting. The story behind the bad answer is just going to unfold. There will of course be obstacles to overcome, but we're eventually going to have to put up with a few hundred pages of Falcor. And it's worth nothing that any deviations from it give psychological depth to Billy (e.g. he's totally off his poo poo, there are no dragons, and his mom's going to get back from the grocery store any second, see him in the living room, drop her bags, and force-feed him a handful of pills while she cries uncontrollably). The second, good, answer doesn't give us any idea what's going to happen next. It tells us that something's got to happen eventually, because Billy's behavior isn't either normal or sustainable. He's spinning out, somebody's going to notice, and they're going to set some kind of conflict in motion. This kind of plot develops rather than just happening. Point is, we don't know why Billy's doing this. Maybe he thinks he's Wayne Coyne. Maybe his mom died in a housefire and this is the form his grief is taking. Maybe both. But the way Billy acts suggests something to us about what's going on inside his head, even though we might not figure out exactly what it is. That's the basis for almost any piece of good storytelling; without it, all you've got are "wouldn't-it-be-cool-if" ideas: wouldn't it be cool if an advanced Soviet submarine decided to defect? Wouldn't it be cool if somebody cloned dinosaurs? Wouldn't it be cool if people could time travel, but, like, only in their minds? You get the idea. These don't make a good story unless they're populated by psychologically accessible characters -- the real story is why the Soviet captain decides this is the time to defect, why our scientist wants to clone dinosaurs, or why our lead character visits the same seemingly-inconspicuous future moment over and over again.
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Aug 4, 2009 14:15
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Brainworm posted:I'm pulling from traditional rhetoric, which divides most deliberate novelties of speech into schemes and tropes. Thanks! Brainworm posted:I hear what you're saying. And what I'm about to write addresses a widely-held assumption that I think I see in it. If it doesn't touch what's behind your post, please forgive it. But the matter's been weighing on my mind. So write a book that's like this thread. "I explain Shakespeare so that you, the chucklefuck masses, can understand it and appreciate its magnificence." It's easy for professionals to assume everyone else knows a lot about the professional's area of expertise. But it's almost never the case. Reading Shakespeare can be tremendously enjoyable but not many of us have the tools required to enjoy the reading. Everyone (many people) has to read Shakespeare, but it's generally done in HS english or in a college survey course in a way that turns people off (see, e.g., this thread). Write a book explaining why Shakespeare is great in a way that both the kid in tenth grade and the guy who majored in chemical engineering understand. You might do this using just one play (say Hamlet) or multiple works, I'm not sure it matters.
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Aug 4, 2009 18:55
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Brainworm, Allow me to repeat my thanks for this thread. I've got three very unrelated questions, if you can tackle any of them: 1) Do you have any thoughts on William Boyd? 2) Way back you shared your opinions on the structures of American vs. British undergraduate degree programs, as well as your thoughts on general education and what it would be in an ideal world. Would you care to offer insight into what you think the ideal graduate program would be like? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think programs in North America are typically much longer and require grad students to teach, whereas in the UK programs are shorter and are more research-based. If this is the case, could it be that the American system produces better teachers/lecturers, the British system better researchers? I'd appreciate any thoughts in general. 3) Back to style, and in particular, clarity. No unnecessary words, right? Let me know if that means always throwing out the words bolded in the following: All of their ideas were great. The broad that he dumped. If it does, could you explain why it is that the sentences with the bolded words included seem correct (enough)? If 'no unnecessary words' is a rule of sorts, why is do we let it slide so much?
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Aug 5, 2009 01:47
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Hobo By Design posted:Another question on Lear: I've read what you think of the characters, but what I don't get is the jester. Why does he poke so much fun at Lear's impotence? Is it because he never produced a son? At one point the jester calls him a "shelled peascod". He's benignly abdicating the throne to whoever'll kiss up to him the most. How is that unmanly, or hell, uncommon? That's a good question, and I think my answer's going to press some semantic games into service. So here they are: Lear is about dignity. I know, I know. I keep saying that plays aren't about abstract ideas like "death," but I'ma make an exception here because: Dignity is always a negotiation, and what it tries to negotiate is social place. That is, you have some idea of who you are, what your social place is, and how you should be treated according to that place. "Dignified" treatment accords with what you think you're due, and "undignified" treatment does not. In that sense, "dignity" is not something you either have or lack. It's a negotiation over where you belong. I use this "social place" and "where you belong" language deliberately, because in Shakespeare's England social place is partly a consequence of geography. You're not just, say, a Duke. You're the Duke of Gloucester. You're not a King. You're the King of England. Lear giving away his kingdom and calling himself a King is like me retiring but claiming I'm a professor. This is basically what Lear doesn't understand, or at least what he acts as though he doesn't understand. The issue that the Fool takes up with Lear is that Lear abandons his kingdom, and trusts his "dignified" treatment to his still being "a king," as though this were an inherent attribute rather than a social position. The conflict, in other words, is that Lear abandons a clearly defined social place, and feels his dignity is insulted when others either accidentally or deliberately misunderstand the place he thinks he deserves. This is the tenor of the Fool's jests: Lear has abandoned the thing that makes him what he is. But the Fool makes it clear that a King isn't a King unless he's King of someplace. A King without a kingdom is an "O without a figure," a "shelled peascod" -- that is, an ultimately and completely empty title. This idea -- that social place and geographic place are intimately related -- is why you see so many itinerant characters in Lear. That's how these negotiations of social place play out: the characters without a social place are wanderers (e.g. Lear and his company, Kent, Gloucester, Edgar), and the characters who achieve social place (by fair means or foul) are firmly located (Edmund, Cornwall, Albany). Of course the play goes out of its way to complicate this idea. Lear has a kind of nobility about him even when he's no longer a king, and Cornwall and Edmund (and Regan and Goneril) clearly don't meet the obligations their places lay on them. That's why we have a real conflict instead of a one-man senility parade. Where this meets sexual impotence is more flexible. I've never read this at the center of the Fool's ragging Lear, though it could of course be another facet of Lear's inability or unwillingness to meet the obligations of his crown.
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Aug 5, 2009 02:58
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Madame Psychosis posted:Brainworm, care to share any resources/required reading for someone who is thinking about focusing on pedagogical theory? I can't speak to pedagogy just in general -- when I go there, I'm a tourist. It's not where I live. But I can talk about where to find good stuff on writing and lit-centered pedagogy for college-level students. First off, you've got journals. College English and College Composition and Communication are good ones to start with, and they're available on JSTOR. CCC also has an annual conference (CCCC), which goes to some lengths to be accessible to non-presenters, grad students, and interested professionals. This is where I think you'll find the most theoretically-oriented discussions, though they'll mostly focus on writing classrooms and centers. Then there are books. MLA has bunches of teaching books out, the most recent of which is the Approaches to Teaching... series, which is generally quite good -- it does a solid job of introducing pedagogical theory and yoking it to classroom practice. I think the series makes a good starting point even if you're more interested in the theory than its application, since the theory discussions are tangible and well-documented -- the footnotes are like a short reading list. These'll focus more on teaching lit. As a Shakespeare person, I've also got to mention interviews. There are tons of these -- with actors, directors, production company folks -- that focus on what techniques they use to get actors and directors to learn a play. That's an odd, extra-academic sort of pedagogy, but there's a ton of it. A good starting point is Playing Shakespeare, a sort of sustained, collective. self-guided interview with the RSC as it stood in 1980, where Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Judy Dench, Ben Kingsley, etc., talk about the processes they use to interpret Shakespeare for the stage. There's not a lot of theory proper in these, but I've found them incredibly useful for both developing and describing classroom practices. That, in turn, is part of how I refine the theory I get from other places. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Aug 5, 2009 |
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Aug 5, 2009 03:23
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Halisnacks posted:1) Do you have any thoughts on William Boyd? I read Any Human Heart when it first came out -- that was when I was early on in my grad work if I remember right. I vaguely remember liking it but also remember thinking it read like a bastard union of Pale Fire and Forrest Gump. So I'll have to re-read before I commit to anything on it. I know he's also got some reputation as a scriptwriter, but I've got nothing on that. quote:2) Way back you shared your opinions on the structures of American vs. British undergraduate degree programs, as well as your thoughts on general education and what it would be in an ideal world. Would you care to offer insight into what you think the ideal graduate program would be like? [...] It'd be nice to think that the US system produces better teachers, but because of the ways the teaching usually works, I wouldn't stand behind the idea for a second. In general, teaching in the US grad system is a way of paying your way through -- in English, with the average time to completion being around eight years, paying with cash or loans is unthinkable. One problem is that universities think of this kind of teaching like it's working a McDonald's deep fryer, and they train, pay, and supervise their grad students accordingly. And grad students are, I think, mostly complicit in this. They're happy to do a lovely job as long as nobody's watching, and (for the most part) nobody is. I'm out of time right now, and I'll have to switch machines to finish this post. But the point for right now, anyway, is that I think a better US grad program needs to address at least these three things: cost, time to completion, and the graduate teaching environment. EDIT: An Ideal Graduate Program So we've got these three problems, and I think they have consequences that are tough for people on the outside to appreciate. Just for instance, reproductively speaking, eight years to degree completion means that the job search/first book/tenure sequence comes at a terrible time. This is probably also one reason that the MLA stats suggest the women, on average, take about a year longer to finish their degrees than men; you've got a population of people who want families, and decide to start them before they go on the job market. One solution to a couple of these problsm is running courses parallel to other kinds of work instead instead of sequencing them. Right now, programs have grad students do coursework (2 yrs MA + 2 yrs PhD), then qualifying exams (1 yr), and then the dissertation (2-3 or more yrs). And you start seeing serious attrition once coursework ends, since that's when the program shifts from regular and scheduled work to self-governed research. So I'd rather see the coursework and the research happen in tandem: you finish your MA, and then immediately start reading for your qualifying exams while taking courses in your QE fields. That way, classes also keep people visible and on schedule. Same goes for the dissertation. Run classes in parallel. Keep people on track. Probably the best thing I did while I was working on my dissertation was start a group where each member had weekly writing goals. So I'd build that into the dissertation coursework. That way, grad students could write on a clear schedule, have regular readers for their work, get advice on publication, and so on. I'd also like to see some part of coursework -- preferably a small course every semester -- dedicated to teaching workshops. This doesn't have to be a pile of work. I'm thinking an hour or so a week where TAs share what they're doing in each class, profs talk about what's working (or not) in their sections, and the like. This at least suggests to grad students that teaching's worth talking and thinking about. So overall, you've got grad students doing something like one large and a couple small classes every semester, and in tandem with their teaching and research. I think that's achievable, though it might mean sacrificing a couple field classes if the time to completion's going to be closer to five years than eight. And that's fine. I've never met anyone who wished they'd done more coursework. That's not a terribly well-articulated or ambitious program, but there it is. Keep people in coursework from beginning to end, so that they've got a community for exam reading and dissertation writing. Make some regular part of this coursework about teaching. And use this parallel work to cut time to completion. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Aug 5, 2009 |
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Aug 5, 2009 04:05
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Hey Brainworm, great thread! From what I can tell, it sounds like it's been a few years since you've finished the PhD and I don't think you mentioned a post-doc (correct me if I'm wrong). How much do you feel you've grown since grad school, in terms of your experience, knowledge, and general capability and competency in the field?
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Aug 5, 2009 06:54
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Halisnacks posted:3) Back to style, and in particular, clarity. No unnecessary words, right? Let me know if that means always throwing out the words bolded in the following: I'd cut the motherfuckers. This isn't a grammatical issue, it's a stylistic one. That doesn't make it a matter of preference. It's a matter of skill. A skilled writer will cut unneeded words from his or her prose out of habit, and ruthlessly. But most writing has more immediate problems, so nailing a sentence's single extra word is generally too picky to be helpful, especially in sentences like your examples. There, the extra words aren't impediments to clarity or killing the sentence more quietly. They're like remoras on an otherwise healthy shark. But consider writing that's constantly overworded: He was a man who was frequently ambitions, not uncommonly exercising vanity, and often given to adventurous experiences like skydiving. The needless words accumulate. They get irritating, like beach sand in your swimsuit. That's more the point of "Omit needless words." It's not to govern the content of individual words in individual sentences as much as it's to shape habits of writing and revision.
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Aug 5, 2009 21:08
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Thrombosis posted:Hey Brainworm, great thread! I figured I'd quote this. I caught myself cutting them again. quote:From what I can tell, it sounds like it's been a few years since you've finished the PhD and I don't think you mentioned a post-doc (correct me if I'm wrong). How much do you feel you've grown since grad school, in terms of your experience, knowledge, and general capability and competency in the field? I finished in May of '07 and went straight into my current job, which means I'm just now getting ready to start my third year. Since grad school, I think I've made some big leaps. Nothing helps you learn a subject like teaching it, especially when that teaching is in one of your outrigger fields (for me, that's Restoration Lit, which I hadn't done anything with since my qualifying exams). So in terms of that kind of competence -- a sort of broad-based understanding of my fields -- I'm much better off than I was two years ago. Some things have suffered, though. Mostly my own reading. I don't know whether you've actually tried this, but if you can make uninterrupted time -- time where you don't answer the phone or email or otherwise distract yourself -- you can do a frightening amount of work in, say, eight or nine hours. It's staggering. In grad school, I could make relatively large and frequent blocks of this kind of time. Say, one or two eight or ten-hour days a week. Now, during the academic year, I can maybe do this on a Saturday. Which means I give up what I'd normally do on Saturdays, like leisure reading, leisure writing, or cleaning the bathroom. So now my bookshelves are dusty and my shower curtain's always mildewed. But to be fair, some of this isn't strictly the job. Back in '07, I was in a relationship that turned long distance once I moved to the Midwest. If you've ever managed a long-distance relationship as an adult, you know it takes a stunning time commitment -- we're talking weekends in the car twice a month, plus an avalanche of hour-long phone calls where you're trying to stop someone from crying because she's out of coffee and it's almost midnight and she can't afford the car you told her she wouldn't be able to afford when she bought it six months ago. This burns up reading time like you wouldn't believe. But on the other hand, that time crunch exercises the skills. I can prep a class faster than most people dice onions, and my writing's taken on unnerving speed. Research, that's also quicker. I'm now at a point where I can formulate, research, and draft an article in something like twenty hours. Grad school Brainworm couldn't touch that.
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Aug 5, 2009 21:44
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Brainworm posted:Let me get it out in one go: Paul Muldoon's a fantastic guy and a motherfucker of a poet. I'm not surprised you feel like you're being toyed with in his poetry, because that's exactly how he sets it up. This is simply a breathtaking purview. I have an amateur's appreciation for poetry, and I mostly base my judgement of a poem on how it hits me. If I can feel the poem in the back of my throat and in the corner of my eyes I know it's a drat good one. Muldoon's poetry is, as you said, a motherfucker, and sometimes I'm beating my head against a wall trying to get through his work, but sometimes, when I do, the payoff is like sex. But I'm mostly like a chimp, opening pages and seeing which of them smell most like bananas and howling with joy when I find one that suits my appetite. Having said this, it seems that there is a calculus to poetry that determines the trajectory of a poem, a measure of meter and feet that determines the parabola of a poem's arc as it slams headlong into my sternum. I've got a lot to learn anyway. Thank you for this - I think in some ways your are my Isaac Newton. A sharp veer to the left now - you mentioned earlier that you are vegan. As am I. I've got my reasons, as a vegan has to, but I hate the taste of proselytization in my mouth left any time anybody asks me the dreaded "Why are you a vegan" question. I mean, people ask, I will answer, but I'm not vegan in order to turn everyone vegan. Anyway, I would love to hear your answer to "Why are you vegan" and how you handle being questioned about it. Thanks darling.
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Aug 6, 2009 02:18
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Mr. Wonderful posted:A sharp veer to the left now - you mentioned earlier that you are vegan. As am I. I've got my reasons, as a vegan has to, but I hate the taste of proselytization in my mouth left any time anybody asks me the dreaded "Why are you a vegan" question. I mean, people ask, I will answer, but I'm not vegan in order to turn everyone vegan. Anyway, I would love to hear your answer to "Why are you vegan" and how you handle being questioned about it. I don't argue for my veganism on rational grounds, even though a rational case is a lock based on sustainability alone. Whatever else cows and chickens are, they're also massive energy sinks and terrible pollutants. From a purely rational standpoint, you shouldn't drink milk or eat eggs for the same basic reasons you shouldn't drive a Hummer. Both are petrochemically and ecologically wasteful. Of course those "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts" are hollow. I don't like it, but people have the practical right to burn as much oil and pollute as many rivers as they like. I'm not sure why our diet should be the exception. More to the point, people don't decide what to eat on any kind of rational basis, anyway. And they don't decide what to eat based on some kind of morality. Nobody goes to McDonald's and wonders whether it's better for their soul to get a Big Mac or a Filet o' Fish. So I can't tell someone why I'm a vegan. It's the wrong question. It assumes that I, unlike everyone else, exercise some rational and morally-concerned process when I decide what to get out of the fridge -- if I did that, vegan or no, I'd already be too much of a crackpot to be worth listening to. So I'm a vegan for the same reasons other people are omnivores: custom, deeply ingrained habit, cultural affiliation, and a host of other things that pass for preference. That is, I can list all kinds of reasons why a vegan diet is rationally and morally preferable to a conventional American one. Rationally, it's a lock. It's a dead loving issue. We have a limited amount of oil, and we need it for more important things than growing cow and chicken feed. Factory farms seem gratuitously cruel, even if you're the kind of person who thinks that people have the God-given right to treat animals however we like -- I mean, I have the right to kick a stray dog, but kicking the dog and not kicking the dog aren't morally equivalent. And everybody knows the other arguments, too. We've all heard Alec Baldwin narrating the PETA videos. But I couldn't tell you why I'm a vegan. It doesn't solve any of those problems, for one. And for another, I do about a million horrible things every day. If the best case I can make for being a good person is that I'm eating broccoli instead of steak, I might as well stay quiet. So that's about how I answer, if anybody asks. Maybe not at that length. But the basic points are always about the same: it's "I don't know, because you're asking the wrong question." Or, more to the point, "the way you've asked the question makes me a crackpot no matter how I answer, so I'm going to reframe it in a way that builds common ground." I mean, I'm not going to convince anybody to change the way they eat, so I settle for convincing them that I'm thoughtful and nonjudgmental.
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Aug 6, 2009 03:58
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Thanks for the detailed response! I ask because I'm currently a PhD in English myself (Early Modern drama) in the dissertation stage and I often still struggle with ease of knowledge and general conversations in the field. I doubt I could pull off some of the detailed responses you've given in this thread. It seems like teaching will help my fluency a lot down the road since it'll help to put everything into context -- I'm finding it difficult to pull together all of the various threads I've picked through in the course of my research. Anyway, thanks again and good luck with the coming term!
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Aug 6, 2009 06:35
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Brainworm posted:I can totally do that. Awesome. I will be in touch once my portfolio is together. Other Question - is there anything else I need to read before I dive in to Tristram Shandy? Any context I need other than an awareness of the time period?
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Aug 6, 2009 07:20
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You've said that you're against high school reductionism and teaching nothing but symbolism and themes and Gatsby, but your counterpoints focus on character and plot. How do you approach a work's theme or idea or message or whatever you want to call Aristotle's third element? *edit* Also, where does the "is" go when you're negating something about an object? "It's not" or "It isn't"? Wolfgang Pauli fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Aug 6, 2009 |
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Aug 6, 2009 07:46
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How would you feel if your students took notes that you have written and submitted to note sharing sites like http://www.sharenotes.com ?
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Aug 6, 2009 09:44
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Thrombosis posted:I ask because I'm currently a PhD in English myself (Early Modern drama) in the dissertation stage [...] Excellent. If you don't mind my asking, where are you and who are you working with? I could have PMd that, I guess.
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Aug 6, 2009 14:05
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Paladin posted:
Nothing big. It's not supposed to start making sense until you're pretty deep in, so just enjoy the ride.
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Aug 6, 2009 14:07
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Wolfgang Pauli posted:You've said that you're against high school reductionism and teaching nothing but symbolism and themes and Gatsby, but your counterpoints focus on character and plot. How do you approach a work's theme or idea or message or whatever you want to call Aristotle's third element? Mostly, I don't. There are other ways to frame talk about "idea" and "theme," though, and I've done it in this thread as best I can. We can talk about texts that are "thematically" similar or different in the context of influence, like The Stand and Watership Down. We can talk about what drives the action in the text, like economics in Robinson Crusoe or The Hobbit. Those are all "idea" or "theme," just closely confined. I keep things confined because we otherwise slip into talking about history, philosophy, religion, or some other elements of context. I mean, it's great to know about colonialism, and you can learn about colonialism by reading Heart of Darkness. You could even learn about the 20th century consequences of colonialism by reading Achebe or Dangarembga. But that's doing History and Political Science and African Studies. Some English folks are keen on that kind of cultural studies approach, and I've used it in some of my writing, but it's really not me. On my bad days, I think it's a bit of a cop out, actually, since it's much easier to talk about a poet's situation than how a poem does whatever it does (both by itself and in relation to other poems). The first one, you can do with Wikipedia. quote:*edit* Both of those are "it is not," just contracted differently. So it depends on how many syllables you want. "It isn't" is nicely stressed, though: you've got a spondee followed by an unstressed syllable, which makes it a nice start to, say, any line of iambics, e.g. "It isn't that your rear end is getting soft..." But apart from that, I can't imagine preferring one to the other by rule.
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Aug 6, 2009 14:58
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eddylau posted:How would you feel if your students took notes that you have written and submitted to note sharing sites like http://www.sharenotes.com ? I'd very much like to follow the MIT model and make all my course content publicly accessible -- syllabi, notes, assignments, even whatever readings I could convince publishers to let me redistribute. But I've no reason to think that anyone aside from my students would want my course materials, and we've got an open-source system that handles this nicely. The thing is, Sharenotes looks a little skeezy. They traffic in papers, for one. Second, they allow the selling of course material, which is infuriating. I have absolutely no problem with anyone giving away any of my course content, since I'd gladly give it away myself. But selling course materials is disrespect bordering on blasphemy. I mean, if you're in a nonprofit or state college classroom, you're there, financially speaking, for a few reasons: One is that you pay tuition, or have it being paid on your behalf. The second is state support; even out of state tuition is indirectly subsidized through tax breaks, institutional grants, and so on. The third is philanthropy. Any nonprofit college is essentially a charity, though this is more true at Liberal Arts colleges than others. Even if you're paying full tuition, the College is covering a substantial part of the cost of your education (here, it's about a third). This money comes from donors. I can't speak to state schools or private R1s, but at most Liberal Arts colleges with a clear social mission, you'll find that the overwhelming majority of faculty and staff are donors (here, it's about 95%). I kick about a third of my paycheck back to the college to help subsidize tuition, and that's not rare. The fourth is also philanthropy. Most private, nonprofit colleges rely on extensive donations of time, though (again) this is more true at Liberal Arts colleges than private R1s. I mean, we're a wealthy college -- wealthier than most -- but this place could not run if our mission didn't inspire people to volunteer. Point is, just about any college student is the recipient of substantial aid, either from government, private donors, or the volunteer labor that helps the college run. So selling course materials, I don't even know what class of bad that is. It'd be sort of like a street vendor selling meals he gets from soup kitchens. And at this college, philanthropy and its ethics are a big deal. A student selling notes, rather than giving them away, is showing a deep disrespect for both the College's charitable mission and my own. Were I at X State University, I wouldn't much care. State colleges run on policy. Here, I'd consider barring a student from my class on a first offense. Second offense, I'd move for expulsion.
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Aug 6, 2009 16:58
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I've read this read from cover to cover and it's just fantastic, thanks. Awhile back somebody asked you what you thought of Brannagh's Hamlet and I'd like to hear this as well if you didn't already mention it. If you did I'll go back through the thread. I'm also kind of interested in what college was like for you if you didn't go to high school. How old were you during your undergrad? You've pretty much discussed all of my favorite Shakespeare plays and luckily I do live in a town with a Shakespeare festival so I'm going to catch Hamlet in a few weeks. I'll chime in later when I've gone back over the plays so I have some questions but I am going to take your suggestion about dating women with body glitter and caesarean scars.
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Aug 7, 2009 02:30
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Have most of the women you've dated been academics? Could you have a relationship with someone you couldn't relate to on some scholastic level (making dirty Chaucer jokes, etc)? What was your social life like during grad school?
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Aug 7, 2009 04:05
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Brainworm posted:Excellent. If you don't mind my asking, where are you and who are you working with? I could have PMd that, I guess. I don't have plat, but you can contact me at troblo22 at hotmail dot com to chat. Thrombosis fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Mar 15, 2010 |
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Aug 7, 2009 06:01
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What books do you recommend reading for someone who wishes to be an English major?
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Aug 7, 2009 11:32
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Lazaruise posted:What books do you recommend reading for someone who wishes to be an English major? Pretty much anything as long as you keep reading.
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Aug 7, 2009 14:16
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How much of the St John's Reading List have you read? I've been considering giving this a shot, starting with Aristotle and Plato and the playwrights (should be appropriate, since I have an Ancient Phil class on top of a shitload of Theatre next semester).
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Aug 7, 2009 16:00
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Mr. Banana Grabber posted:I've read this read from cover to cover and it's just fantastic, thanks. I might have mentioned it, but not in any detail. And I'm too lazy to dig back through and see exactly what I said. In short, I think Branagh consistently proves himself when he brings Shakespeare to the screen, not least because he brings contemporary critical readings to his productions -- you can see the influence of Rabkin's reading on his Henry V, and I think you can see Hendrick's satirical Hamlet in Branagh's production. It's not that other film productions don't do this, but that Branagh seems to translate it into his productions especially well. His Hamlet is comparatively, very, very good. I can't think of another film version that I clearly prefer, which is sort of a backhanded compliment. Shakespeare on film's no embarrassment of riches. Apart from the length of the film -- an uncut version of Hamlet practically needs a miniseries -- I think my biggest complaint is Branagh as Hamlet himself. The thing about Hamlet is that he's young; this is sort of an interpretive crux, since he's just back from Wittenberg (which would make him something like 18 or 19), but mathing out the scene with Yorick puts him at something like 30. I give more weight to Wittenberg, since it's pretty easy for a manuscript or typesetting error (or incomplete revision)* to mess up the precise dating in the graveyard scene. A young, uncertain, educated, clever Hamlet seems more consistent with the text than a well-into-his-years Hamlet. I mean, Claudius was elected to the throne for a reason, and a young Hamlet explains that. Hamlet's friends are all from childhood or school, and a young Hamlet explains that, too. The list goes on. Point is, I see a Hamlet who's clever and able, but inexperienced -- an odd combination of being unsure of himself while at the same time having an unjustified confidence in his own abilities. That's how Claudius catches him out faking insanity in Act III, for instance, and part of why he handles Ophelia so clumsily. So Branagh's a great actor, but he can't play 19. He looks like a hero in a black cape, which (from a purely visual standpoint) makes me wonder why he doesn't pull a Laertes, storm the castle, and confront Claudius directly. The same, incidentally, is true of casting Olivier or Gibson. Hamlet doesn't scheme because he likes it (although he starts to, which is part of what makes him so interesting); he schemes because he doesn't have any other choice. He's not strong or secure enough to be Laertes, and that's part of what drives him to crisis. quote:I'm also kind of interested in what college was like for you if you didn't go to high school. How old were you during your undergrad? I was about 14 at the beginning, and close to 20 at the end -- I waffled a bit, wasn't full-time early on, and did some grad work in there, too. But I was an arrogant prick of a teenager, and never intuitively good at getting along with people I didn't already know well. I mean, most adolescent males have crises of ego, but when I turned fifteen I spent months practicing how I could better get along with other people. I'm talking about lists of guiding queries, like this one. I've kept it in my wallet for something like a decade: Index Card in Brainworm's Wallet posted:On First Meeting a Person So yeah. I had a few dozen of these set up like flash cards. They're all this socially stunted. You'll notice the categorical assumption that anyone who meets me must want something from me, for instance, and that I had to check a tendency to tell people what I was thinking, even if I was just talking about something completely different with someone else. An odd side effect of this (both the early college and this deliberate social training) is that I've spent almost my entire romantic life dating college students -- I didn't start fishing any other ponds until a couple years ago. Bars, that's a whole other world. That probably makes my career look all kinds of creepy. * The conventional wisdom is that Hamlet was drafted in 1598 or '99, first staged in about 1600, and then revised in 1601 or '02 (even though Q1 and Q2 don't show up until '03/'04).
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Aug 7, 2009 20:36
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Grouco posted:Have most of the women you've dated been academics? Could you have a relationship with someone you couldn't relate to on some scholastic level (making dirty Chaucer jokes, etc)? I don't often date academics and I prefer not to. Which is odd, at least for an academic. Colleges get a little incestuous. I was going to say that there are lots of reasons for this, but really there are only a couple. The big one is that I'm not like most academics, even at this College. I mean, I'm like them in ways that matter professionally, at least most of the time -- I experiment more in the classroom than most, and I write and publish more and different material than other Shakespeareans or people at my College. Apart from that, anyway, I think I'm professionally in bounds. Socially, personality-wise, or in terms of soft skills, we're on different planets. I don't see many of my co-professors in the gym, and when I do, they're practicing bizarre treadmill and Nautilus rituals. I don't think that's just here. I'm the only academic I know, professor, grad student, or otherwise, who spends any time in a squat cage. Not that gym time makes a relationship. It's sort of a synecdoche. And a nice transition into big difference number two: academics are not good-looking people. Bad diets, too much or too little sunlight, an often cavalier approach to the most basic elements of hygiene, inexplicable wardrobes, these things all take their toll. A PhD doesn't mean I'm into slipping barrel-waisted polyester slacks off some well-educated tumbleweed. There's not a woman on Earth whose Chaucer jokes are going to make me less superficial. The last thing is that I think good relationships are complimentary, which doesn't necessarily make them symmetrical, which in turn means I don't seek out women who think like I do. One of the best relationships I've had was with a kind and pretty social worker. I was going to write that she wasn't very clever, but thought that might get taken the wrong way. She wasn't. But that's just an attribute, like being blonde or rich or tall. I mean, if you get along well and the sex is, like, six-dimensional, who cares about hair color? quote:What was your social life like during grad school? Not great at first -- it took me a couple years to get used to the culture which, briefly, is neurotic. I'm not the kind of person who, um, experiences stress. I either do a thing or I don't, and it sucks or it doesn't, and I either abandon it or fix it. Life is that simple. Grad school society, though, mostly involves not doing work, worrying about not having done it, using some dysfunctional coping mechanism to Chevy it out, then abandoning responsibility for whatever's wrong with it so you can start not doing the next thing. Once I figured that out, I started drinking with everyone once a week or so. But I tried to keep one foot outside the University -- I was part of a landlord's association after I bought some campus-adjacent rental property, part of a small business owner's association, and (later on) dated my way through the single doctors at one of the local hospitals. And I've always been big on volunteer and civic work, too, though that's mostly been organizing more than, say, stocking shelves at the food pantry.
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Aug 7, 2009 21:51
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Lazaruise posted:What books do you recommend reading for someone who wishes to be an English major? That's a big question and a long list. I'd narrow it to books you want to start by reading. Somewhere in this thread I gave a list of starter criticism -- Bloom's Western Canon was in there, along with a few others. That list of books is a good place to start. Another good place to start is poetry, since it builds attention to language in ways that e.g. novels generally don't. An old Norton Anthology will get you someplace, and Penguin's newer anthology (100 Greatest Poets) is OK, too, and somewhat cheaper. Bloom's poetry anthology is also good, but his is remarkable for its introduction, which is fantastic. If you want to read novels or plays, I'd start by choosing pairs that respond to one another. You can do this with poetry, too, but influence there is more of a tangle. I'ma suggest Paradise Lost and Frankenstein, Robinson Crusoe and The Hobbit, Macbeth and American Psycho, or Gatsby and Less Than Zero/Rules of Attraction. You could pair others, but try to stay away from books that are too explicitly rewrites, like ones that retell a story from a minor character's perspective (e.g. Grendel or Wide Sargasso Sea). That's interesting, but it's not rewriting in the same ways those earlier pairs are.
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Aug 7, 2009 22:35
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Brainworm posted:academics are not good-looking people. Bad diets, too much or too little sunlight, an often cavalier approach to the most basic elements of hygiene, inexplicable wardrobes, these things all take their toll. Having gone through grad school, would you say that the awkward, unattractive academic is that way to begin? Or is it a sort of 'badge of honour' that one earns through their PhD studies? e.g. 'Now that I know so much about critical theory x, I'm above smelling good.' 'I'm so busy working on my dissertation that I can't learn how to manage my newfound baldness in a becoming way. And gently caress if I'll give a poo poo.' Also I know you were generalizing, and it could have to do with samples, but the faculty at my alma mater were a decent-looking bunch. And most of my TAs (MA or PhD students) were downright hot. But yeah, that's just as anecdotal as your experience.
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Aug 7, 2009 23:26
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