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Have you ever been bored of reading or simply had some trouble getting started? I just can't seem to be able to pick up my book and go like I used to, and I'm worried for myself because I recently changed my major to English Literature.
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Aug 12, 2009 02:57
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Get any group of professors decently tipsy--tipsy, mind you, not raging drunk, that's usually a bad scene--and they'll start owning up to the landmark works in their field they've never finished or even cracked open. High on the list in English: Moby Dick, Ulysses, Paradise Lost, and any given Shakespeare. It becomes a perverse badge of pride, almost. As far as I can tell it's basically impossible to read all the primary material you need to read in order to cover your own field, much less the ever-expanding pile of secondary material, or the works in adjacent fields. Fun to try though.
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Aug 12, 2009 06:41
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Grouco posted:The blog is a great idea! I've already caught myself reading a text and thinking, "drat, I think Brainworm touched on this somewhere in that thread....". And the blog is, at least hypothetically, searchable. quote:Who do you think is the best British novelist after Waugh? I don't know about best, but I can tell you who I like. Martin Amis. It's a little '80s, but Money is a really cool reworking of Merchant of Venice. I don't mean that that's what makes it good. It's interesting and well crafted on its own. But the rewriting, I think, is always important. That's how authors do their heaviest and most impressive lifting. It's another way of "standing on the shoulders of giants." quote:Does anyone in American institutions give a drat about Canadian Lit? They do, but not as a sort of collected national literature. Ondaatje, probably predictably, shows up on syllabi -- the Postcolonial Lit crowd does a lot with him, too. And you'll see Robertson Davies -- particularly the Deptford Trilogy -- in some 20th century Lit. sequences. And people teach Margaret Atwood all over the place, though I don't think Atwood's Canadian place hits classroom discussions much. And Ecocritical theorists love work by Canadian writers -- I see them teaching Stephen Leacock and Alastair MacLeod, for instance. But in terms of Canadian Lit. qua Canadian Lit, I think the only dedicated classes I've seen are on Southern Ontario Gothic. There, you get Davies, Atwood, and Engle (who wrote Bear -- bar none my favorite bestiality-themed romance novel). quote:Rochester or Darcy? Rochester. I implicitly assume that any and all mentions of the word "Rochester" refer to my favorite libertine: John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (a.k.a. Dr. Bendo), erstwhile poet, alcoholic, actress banger,* con man, syphilitic, and heiress kidnapper.** Typical M.P. quote:Oh yea, how much do you Squat and Deadlift? I'm not a big guy (about 5'9"/180) so these numbers won't turn any heads. I'm still on Starting Strength. So for my heaviest set (usually five), I press about 150, bench about 250, squat about 320, and pull about 380 (for three). * Elizabeth Barry. A brave man. ** And later, husband. Apparently with her consent.
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Aug 12, 2009 18:46
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Raimundus posted:Have you ever been bored of reading or simply had some trouble getting started? I just can't seem to be able to pick up my book and go like I used to, and I'm worried for myself because I recently changed my major to English Literature. This happens to me from time to time -- I've actually just finished a two-week spat where I haven't read anything longer than a newspaper article. It happens. The way I get myself back in the habit is just making time. I don't mean making time because I want to read, but filling some part of my day with a block of empty space where I won't watch TV, touch the computer, cook, or clean. Usually, that bamphs me back to reading in earnest, and I find myself making the time more often. So I wouldn't worry. I mean, education is an experience, and if you could have that experience at home in your basement there'd be no point in going to college. Go out and do things, remember that every experience carries a lesson, and make time to read when something in the back of your head tells you that's what it wants. Also -- and this point's outside the scope of your question, really -- reading chops aren't really about putting away as many books as you can as quickly as you can. Not to overload the exercise metaphor, but if you wanted to get stronger you wouldn't spend all day in the squat cage. You'd do your squats, but you'd spend the overwhelming majority of your waking life not lifting -- getting enough rest, eating the right foods, and planning your next steps. Same goes for learning. You read, but you stop reading once you've hit your limit. You rest, eat up, and so on. That's how you keep yourself from getting brain sprain or burning out.
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Aug 12, 2009 20:11
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elentar posted:Get any group of professors decently tipsy--tipsy, mind you, not raging drunk, that's usually a bad scene [...] Better advice was never given. Seriously. I love my profession, but these people, they're scary as hell when they drink. quote:As far as I can tell it's basically impossible to read all the primary material you need to read in order to cover your own field, much less the ever-expanding pile of secondary material, or the works in adjacent fields. Fun to try though. That's about right, I think. Plus, there's really no great value in having read the entire field canon. If I need to know a text, I'll read it and be ready to go the next day. And I can learn most of what I need to know about it, or secondary material, by asking around. So most of the time I'll read according to my interests and projects, ready to answer questions when anyone asks, and ready to ask questions when I find a gap in my training. That, incidentally, is one of the really valuable things for me in this thread -- it keeps pushing me into reading, thinking, and follow up that I otherwise wouldn't do. I mean, I've never written up the hunches I had on The Hobbit or Slaughterhouse Five/Red Badge of Courage to see if they worked, since I never really had cause.
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Aug 12, 2009 20:28
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Brainworm posted:Better advice was never given. Seriously. I love my profession, but these people, they're scary as hell when they drink. What's your opinion on Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?
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Aug 12, 2009 21:40
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I made the unfortunate choice of turning on the last hour of the Today show a couple days ago. Orwell would flip his lid over "staycation", what's your opinion of this abomination?
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Aug 13, 2009 02:26
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Magic Hate Ball posted:What's your opinion on Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? I saw the Kathleen Turner production a few years ago, and I thought it was really good. And it holds up well. I mean, it does what most "inside the culture" pieces do -- gets some important things right and falls over on others. But I doubt the play was meant to be a documentary. Hell, I'm not really sure it was supposed to be an "inside the culture" piece. [For the bit that follows: the only characters in this play are two heterosexual couples. The men, Nick and George, are professors. George is the senior, and married to Martha, the college president's daughter. Nick is married to Honey, a trailing spouse.] But if it were an "inside the culture" piece: Martha, the college president's daughter, wouldn't be much of a political prize -- presidents are really fundraisers, not executives, so there's no good diplomatic reason for George to marry her. Which leads us to the obvious conclusion: Martha was one of George's former students, and showed up at his office like a year after graduation to get over a daddy issue that ended as it does for many a middle-class white girl: marriage to an authority figure. Martha is George's third wife and, say, an aspiring interpretive dancer. So George stays quiet, and makes sure all her stuff stays in one room. He replaces his current wife with a would-be grad student every six years. And the '91s just showed up on the lot, and he's already making down payments. Nick and Honey, they'd be at least half hipster. Honey'd be the kind whose dorky glasses are actually slowly becoming legitimately dorky instead of unconventional-in-a-totally-conventional-yet-still-alluring way. And she'd be sucking down some painfully idiosyncratic booze, like a creme de menthe gimlet, since she's secretly convinced that if she becomes eclectic enough she'll remain interesting and therefore attractive. Like every art teacher you've ever had. Also, she is totally open about her completely imaginary bisexuality. And Nick, he's still cramming himself into his stick-legged Japanese selvage jeans, but pudging out into a merino V-neck that sticks to a skinny-guy fat roll that runs around the top of his waistband. He will, inexplicably, wear Doc Martens and have chin-length hair that he may tie back in a ponytail. Because in grad school, it's always 1993 somewhere. Nick winks when he says "back door," or "moist," like a sophisticated eighth-grader, but is equally offended by both actual and ironic racism. He plays disc golf listens to ska. He dials his cell phone with his index finger and insists on text messaging. He pretends to have great taste in sake. He shaves with hair clippers so it looks like he has permanent stubble. He has a bad tattoo on one shoulder. He has never slept with a black woman. That's what Woolf would look like in the real world. I mean, if you were crazy enough to get these people drunk in the same room.
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Aug 13, 2009 05:44
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An unrelated point: the blog content's now totally independent of the thread content. Most of the readers are goons, so cross-posting ends up being a lot of noise and no signal. So I'm sorry about the static, for those of you who follow on Twitter. This is me, learning from bad decisions.Wolfgang Pauli posted:I made the unfortunate choice of turning on the last hour of the Today show a couple days ago. Orwell would flip his lid over "staycation", what's your opinion of this abomination? I call it "leisure time." And I don't like what "staycation" does, ideologically. At base, it suggests that spending time at home, not working, is somehow equivalent to traveling. My knee jerk reaction was that staying home is necessarily less educational than traveling, but on reflection I think it's just differently educational. Every experience carries its lesson, after all. So no great objection there. What I don't like, though, is "staycation" equates leisure time with "vacation," which is (a) rationed by an employer and (b) a privilege rather than a matter of course. It suggests, in other words, that job duties always have a first mortgage on employees' time, and that an employer has some right to enter conversations about how much time, and what quality of time, an employee spends away from the workplace. That's another way of saying that "leisure time" sounds like a natural right where "staycation" sounds like employer discretion. Not good. I'd rather be funemployed.
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Aug 13, 2009 21:47
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Teachers often ask about an author's position on some social issue. In plays (specifically Shakespeare), how do you glean what the author might have felt about an issue? The only way I can think of is to examine how various characters who act in accordance with one side or another are portrayed and end up in the work (eg. are they portrayed sympathetically? or as a villain? or both?? do they die horribly?). Is this basically what you do?
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Aug 14, 2009 02:08
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Einsteinmonkey posted:Teachers often ask about an author's position on some social issue. In plays (specifically Shakespeare), how do you glean what the author might have felt about an issue? The only way I can think of is to examine how various characters who act in accordance with one side or another are portrayed and end up in the work (eg. are they portrayed sympathetically? or as a villain? or both?? do they die horribly?). Is this basically what you do? I stay away from this kind of interpretation as much as possible, even though I think it's a perfectly valid way to approach a text. The case for these kinds of approaches is that they're interdisciplinary. That's neither inherently good nor bad. It just is. If I'm treating a text like a thesis text (i.e. a text meant to promote an agenda of social or political ideas; for the author to take a position on a social issue), I'm doing at least a couple other things: I'm situating the text in a dialogue over that thesis, and I'm tracing the history of that thesis through traditions of philosophical thought and political and social practice. I'ma trace this through two examples. Invisible Man Say I'm reading Ellison's Invisible Man. Clearly, this is a thesis text -- that is, it argues for a position, and perhaps Ellison's position, about the consequences of American racial practice. It is also clear that American racial practice comes out of long and complex interaction between international political practices, the economics of slavery, philosophical writings on race and human rights, Ford-style capitalism, the rise and fall of the American city, and so on. Conversations about those topics are all valuable, and all help you understand some aspect of Invisible Man. But none of them are, strictly speaking, literary. If you're doing strictly disciplinary English -- and I'm not saying you always have to or always should -- those conversations are outside the scope of discussion, for the same basic reasons that points about the writing style of a History textbook would be generally outside the scope of a History class. So these aren't conversations I often have. They're clearly valuable, but they also clearly have other homes. If discussion of Invisible Man is going to orbit histories and interpretations of American racial thought, practice, and reflection, it belongs in African/African American Studies. If discussion is going to orbit Invisible Man's status as a cultural snapshot -- that is, as both a relation of and a response to a stack of historical, cultural, and political trends -- it belongs in History. That is why those departments exist. Of course there's nothing inherently wrong with bringing those conversations into a Lit. classroom. I mean, interdisciplinary work is valuable because it makes different disciplinary perspectives educationally coherent. But in practice, interdisciplinary work has overdetermined what happens in English classes -- and I mean to the point where students' grasp of the discipline's most basic skills gets hamstrung. Even to the point where some think reading literature is valuable because and only if it has some kind of political relevance. I mean, it's nice if an English student can talk about Invisible Man and race theory, or Invisible Man's articulation with current political and social issues, but essential that he or she be able to talk about how Ellison is responding to Wells. The Wreck This approach also, frankly, leads to easy and sloppy readings that are tough to dig students out of. Take a poem like Rich's "Diving Into the Wreck." One of the things this poem does exceptionally well is ambiguity; in general, we could say that the poem is about exploring and recovering the nature of a complex and unfamiliar thing. And it is also clear that the nature of this thing is left out of the poem. The exploration of the wreck is a process, but the poem meditates on that process in a manner that suggests that this exploration has a metaphysical or existential significance not generally characteristic of scuba diving. So it's possible to read "Wreck" as a poem about getting to intimately know a person, an unfamiliar culture, or even poetic tradition. And that's exactly the point. The poem, in leaving this specific part of the relationship undecided, is implicitly stating that some significant portion -- if not the whole -- of human experience involves exactly this kind of process: getting at the thing itself, not the myth of the thing, through deliberate and uncertain exploration. In practice, though, introducing Rich's biography kills careful reading of the poem. All of a sudden, because Rich was a feminist, her poem must necessarily be entirely about the recovery of a deep and complex female history that's been submerged in the male ocean, or something. And this is a reading that the poem goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid -- Rich knows who she is, what people think of her, and how they'll read the poem as a consequence, which is why the eighth stanza looks the way it does. Gender is an issue here, but it's clearly a more complicated issue, and not one that necessarily frames the entire poem. Point is, the implicit assumption that a piece of literature may, or must, have an agenda, and that expressing such an agenda is necessarily the most significant thing it does, can -- and sometimes does -- actually break the text. I can't even imagine how someone would read this post if they assumed, because of the details of my biography, that it were somehow about organizing community-based educational processes or dating small-town single mothers.
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Aug 14, 2009 20:19
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Brainworm posted:Robertson Davies What's your take on Davies, by the way? I read The Deptford Trilogy at the suggestion of a friend and found it pretty fascinating (especially the the first one), but I think a good deal of it went over my head.
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Aug 14, 2009 20:39
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ironypolice posted:What's your take on Davies, by the way? I read The Deptford Trilogy at the suggestion of a friend and found it pretty fascinating (especially the the first one), but I think a good deal of it went over my head. I could echo that. I read Deptford as an undergrad and haven't returned to it, though at the time I liked it a great deal. I could, oddly, say the same about other trilogies: Auster's New York and Dos Passos's USA. Though I've just started working my way through USA again, mostly because I was interested in all the crap I'm about to write. USA, if you don't know it, has an especially interesting academic history. The first thing -- and I'm not sure how relevant this is -- is that it's deeply sympathetic to labor movements like the IWW, but also decidedly anti-communist. Second, it found its way to High School and College reading lists really quickly and really pervasively -- my parents, who went to a one-room schoolhouse in Ohio farm country, read it, as did nearly every student of their generation. It was the Great American Novel for something close to two-thirds of the Twentieth Century. Then, through the 80s, the book totally loving disappeared. I mean, it went from something everybody read to something nobody read in like one generation of students. I was curious enough about it that I went though my college's reading list (the one our majors use for their comprehensive exams) to check our own history. USA went from a definitely-must-know-inside-and-out work to being completely off the list the 1978 and 1985 revisions. I think that's probably typical. If I were being politically reductive, I'd say it has everything to do with the late '70s collapse of the US labor movement and the larger rewriting of American (economic) history that took place during the '80s, but really I've got no idea. Maybe a corresponding wave of retirements. So I'm reading through it and looking for what's what. Anyway. Great trilogy. Bizarre academic history.
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Aug 15, 2009 17:45
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Brainworm posted:If I were being politically reductive, I'd say it has everything to do with the late '70s collapse of the US labor movement and the larger rewriting of American (economic) history that took place during the '80s, Tangentially related to this. Are you in a union? Are many/any US academics unionised?
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Aug 15, 2009 18:17
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Combustible posted:Tangentially related to this. Are you in a union? Are many/any US academics unionised? I'm not in a union of any kind, though there are colleges and groups of colleges with faculty unions. But that statement takes a huge asterisk. Basically, a college's faculty union is much like a student union -- an institutional organ for collective governance, rather than a legally-recognized group with a defined set of rights to collective negotiation. In other words, there exist groups called "unions" that participate in college and university governance by representing the collective interests of faculty. But they're not "unions" in the sense that, say, the NEA or the UAW are unions. Their institutional place is roughly analogous to what other colleges call a "faculty senate" or what my college, by dint of its religious tradition, calls "faculty meeting." The "why" behind this is complicated. The first place to start is with the NLRB, which has repeatedly ruled that college faculty are management, and so can't form a legally-recognized union. It make some sense to call tenured and (some tenure-track) faculty "management" because part of their job is governance of the college. But it makes less sense to include adjunct, part time, and contract (temporary) faculty as "management," since most colleges exclude them from formal governance. The second half of this is tenure, which provides processes analogous to those generally provided by unions. Of course there isn't collective negotiation, but most of the other structures -- representative or "two-sided" grievance, criteria for when, and under what conditions, employees can be removed -- are part of tenure practice. The third half of this is a bit more complicated, and involves college faculty's relationships with the NEA, which are generally deeply contentious. One part of this contention is structural. The NEA represents faculty, staff, and some students at some colleges, but under-represents these groups in its governance -- in practice, none of these groups make it to the NEA's Representative Assembly, and the NEA has traditionally made concessions on their behalf for the benefit of its larger constituencies. The larger part of this is more-or-less practical and historical, and plays out partly as a consequence of NEA's governance, and partly through the NEA's attitude toward other unions in education. A good, recent example is the NYU grad student strike. Basically, NYU grad students unionized under the UAW in something like 2002. That's not as odd as it sounds. The UAW represents TAs and RAs at Berkeley, UCLA, and UMass, too. Anyway. A couple years later, there was a breakdown in contract talks and the NYU Grad student union (GSOC) went on strike. NEA members started crossing the picket line, working as adjuncts so NYU could start terminating GSOC contracts.* As a result, GSOC members were left unemployed and the strike eventually broke. Foreign grad students who lost their TA/RA positions also lost their student visas, and were deported. Whatever else you can say about this, it understandably produced a generation of college professors who don't much like the NEA. Or, more to the point, the NEA's longstanding pattern of similar behavior has produced generations of pro-union faculty who are anti-NEA. NYU wasn't the first place the NEA's crossed picket lines. This means that the faculty who'd normally be in favor of unionization often aren't. UAW aside, unionizing in education generally means joining the NEA, and there's some feeling that this membership wouldn't be useful. * The NEA was the only union whose members did this, if that matters.
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Aug 15, 2009 21:10
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Your post on the inbred dating habits and fashion senses of academics makes me curious: have you come across any other interesting trends in the academy? (Chemistry professors are bitter alcoholics, English professors especially can't dress to save their lives -- you excepted, of course!)
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Aug 15, 2009 22:00
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Could you recommend any books on rhetorical analysis, trope, scheme, and figure of speech identification? I can point out the basic stuff like anaphora, epanadiplosis, chiasmus, etc., but I'm not nearly as competent as I'd like. Reading PL is really driving this deficiency home.
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Aug 15, 2009 22:55
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Grouco posted:Could you recommend any books on rhetorical analysis, trope, scheme, and figure of speech identification? I can point out the basic stuff like anaphora, epanadiplosis, chiasmus, etc., but I'm not nearly as competent as I'd like. Reading PL is really driving this deficiency home.
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Aug 15, 2009 23:11
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Grouco posted:Could you recommend any books on rhetorical analysis, trope, scheme, and figure of speech identification? I can point out the basic stuff like anaphora, epanadiplosis, chiasmus, etc., but I'm not nearly as competent as I'd like. Reading PL is really driving this deficiency home. You want Edward P.J. Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. It is pretty much the standard for classical rhetoric texts (I think it's in its fourth edition, if that's any indication of its longevity). Sure, there are probably newer treatments, but this one is still the most commonly assigned one I see and for good reason. Corbett also wrote a short book called Style and Statement that is very good and might be more in line with what you're looking for. It is basically chapter four of Classical Rhetoric and focuses mainly on the topics, schemes, and tropes. It's more of a "pocket guide" than a textbook, which means you can probably find a copy used for under $5. It isn't as detailed as the other, but I use it regularly as a quick reference (just as a note, I'm working on a PhD in rhetoric and only know about 3/4 of the schemes and tropes off the top of my head--it just isn't worth it to memorize all of them when you can just look one up. This opinion might change as comps approach, however). Also, Silva Rhetoricae is the best online resource for classical rhetoric terms and whatnot. Pair it with a good primer on rhetorical analysis like Patricia Roberts-Miller's Understanding Misunderstandings and you're set! You could also just slog through Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics (everyone should at least once). The Last 04 fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Aug 16, 2009 |
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Aug 16, 2009 00:50
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Grouco posted:Could you recommend any books on rhetorical analysis, trope, scheme, and figure of speech identification? I can point out the basic stuff like anaphora, epanadiplosis, chiasmus, etc., but I'm not nearly as competent as I'd like. Reading PL is really driving this deficiency home. Wolfgang Pauli posted:Add chiaroscuro to that list. My high school English teacher (who was thankfully very well read) would namedrop this all the time, but I've never really seen the term itself used outside of visual art. I like what 04 had on classical rhetoric. Corbett's the go to text there, I think. But if you want to go broader -- work with literary vocabularies that extend beyond classical rhetoric -- there are really two kinds of books. You've got references that define both classical and non-classical terms (like "chiaroscuro" or "masque") and give you useful examples and histories, and you've got books that help you talk about these forms and techniques' effects on the text. I think Cuddon's Dictionary is, hands down, the best comprehensive reference for literary terms and theory there is. This is the place to go unless you want to work exclusively with some subset of rhetorical devices (e.g. Classical, French, 20th c., etc.). The competition, e.g. the Bedford, is pathetic, with the possible exception of the Oxford Companion to the English Language, which is even more comprehensive but totally schizoid -- it includes entries on authors, for instance, and on practices like abbreviation. It also has entries more suited to linguistics. It's seriously like someone took a few different, tightly-focused, Oxford references and mixed the entries together. The second kind of book, though -- the kind that helps you learn to read for and interpret tropes and schemes -- is tougher. Mary Oliver's Poetry Handbook does some of this, as does Turco's Book of Forms and Strand's Making of a Poem, but these last two (though more comprehensive) really focus on poetic forms. Thre's no one book I know of that's as comprehensive as you'll want, I think. Were I building a course unit on that kind of reading and interpretation, I'd bolt Turco to Hollander's Rhyme's Reason and Hoagland's Real Sofistikashun, and practice, practice, practice.
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Aug 16, 2009 01:20
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Brainworm posted:Were I building a course unit on that kind of reading and interpretation, I'd bolt Turco to Hollander's Rhyme's Reason and Hoagland's Real Sofistikashun, and practice, practice, practice. I've heard good things about Real Sofistikashun. Do you think it's worth a look (I imagine so, since you'd use it in a course)? I guess a better question is "Exam copy or worth the purchase?" I'm teaching poetry in the spring so I'm on the lookout.
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Aug 16, 2009 01:42
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So, you mentioned that your school has a religious background. I'm wondering how your personal religious views do/do not jive with those of the school. Is that an issue, or weird at all?
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Aug 16, 2009 02:54
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So, have you read and what do you think of Watchmen. Or, if that, how is it viewed in the 'academic' community? I've read reviews that go into extensive detail about the symbolism and amazing use of dialogue and narration combined with the visual medium. I don't know if you've read it, but its on the Time's 100 books of the 20th century, so I imagine you're familiar with it.
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Aug 16, 2009 06:07
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Getao posted:Your post on the inbred dating habits and fashion senses of academics makes me curious: have you come across any other interesting trends in the academy? (Chemistry professors are bitter alcoholics, English professors especially can't dress to save their lives -- you excepted, of course!) I don't think they break down by division all the time, but there are trends. At least I think there are trends. Just for instance: I've dated women in Psychology -- not here, but at some of the colleges around here. To a person, they were crazy. I don't mean the stand-up comic / GBS "bitches be crazy" crazy. I mean full on Anne Heche "being from the fourth dimension here to teach the world about love" crazy. In the Humanities, there seems to be a sort of fetish for expensive glasses. Even people who generally dress like poo poo -- and I'm talking like the polyester toga look -- can be in the bonkers glasses club. The Humanities also seems to be the home for people who dress ethically. I work with a guy whose ecological commitments mean he only buys clothing secondhand, which I can understand but don't exclusively practice.
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Aug 16, 2009 14:26
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What do you think of anonymous publishing? My friends and I got into a debate about this a few nights ago. I said it was better to write anonymously and have the work stand on its own rather than have people delve into the author's/poet's life to find meaning in the text (as people are wont to do, like you mentioned with the Rich poem). My other friends said that it's an excuse to attention whore--you're not creating independent works so much as you're begging to be "busted" and have a whole shitstorm about it.
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Aug 16, 2009 16:55
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The Last 04 posted:I've heard good things about Real Sofistikashun. Do you think it's worth a look (I imagine so, since you'd use it in a course)? I guess a better question is "Exam copy or worth the purchase?" I think it's good but, more important, it seems to be the only book of its kind. Most poetry books are really namings of parts that walk students through namings of parts -- you know, "this is a metaphor" or "this is a sestina." But RS's extended grouping style treatment is, I think, a bit more rubber on the road. It models readings rather than just naming parts, and groups literary devices in ways that I think make more sense for those approaching poems as novice readers. Also, it's cheap and reader-friendly.
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Aug 16, 2009 18:55
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What should I know about Richard III before seeing it?
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Aug 16, 2009 19:47
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Funktor posted:So, you mentioned that your school has a religious background. I'm wondering how your personal religious views do/do not jive with those of the school. Is that an issue, or weird at all? I'm not religious, so there's that. But my college was founded by a peace church, so those values -- plain speaking, pursuit of social justice, egalitarianism, collective decision making -- fit well with the ways I think things ought to work. So I haven't yet had a value-driven conflict at the college. In fact, I've had something like the opposite. I come up with an idea, and it's nontraditional -- it gets at the College's values from a different direction -- and all of a sudden there's broad-based support. That's weird. And sort of a coda: I turned down jobs at some pretty diverse State Universities. I don't think I'd enjoy near the freedom of movement there that I do at my college, largely because the State U. and I wouldn't be in rough agreement about our institutional mission. Here, it's no problem. Should we teach free classes for poor students? Absolutely. Should we consider contributions to the local community -- say, guest teaching at a High School -- for tenure? Absolutely. So my setting up those kinds of programs makes me valuable to the college. Which is good, because I'd be doing them anyway. At State U, that kind of stuff would never get off the ground, and my doing them would be a career liability.
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Aug 16, 2009 21:54
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Good to know. And actually, the graphic novel question is a good one. Have you read/taught any? Thoughts?
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Aug 16, 2009 23:50
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drkhrs2020 posted:So, have you read and what do you think of Watchmen. Or, if that, how is it viewed in the 'academic' community? I've read reviews that go into extensive detail about the symbolism and amazing use of dialogue and narration combined with the visual medium. I don't know if you've read it, but its on the Time's 100 books of the 20th century, so I imagine you're familiar with it. I read it about ten years ago. There are things I like about it, but I don't remember anything in it that I'd call amazing. The best narrative moment, I think, is the raft sequence -- that's one of the few places I've seen a comic do something that can (a) only be done in comic form and (b) seems worth doing. The layering of the narrative there is thoughtful, and I think that technique of thick narrative has more potential than Watchmen exercised. But the rest is typically modern comic storytelling, basically driven by thin reflection on two-dimensional and loosely allegorical characters -- what one of my friends who edits at Marvel calls "deconstructing the costume." Watchmen might be the first comic to do this in a sustained way, but I'm not sure that's anything to flaunt outside the comics world. I mean, it's a good comic, no question. But compare it to a novel that does about the same thing -- say, Hemon's Lazarus Project -- and it's clear where Watchmen misses opportunities. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Aug 17, 2009 |
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Aug 17, 2009 00:00
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This thread is keeping me from my MA dissertation on Ian McEwan, who is, mind you, probably the best British writer since the 70s. The best post-war writer in the English language is obviously J.M. Coetzee. Anyway, good thread! I'm gonna do a year of teaching high school, and writing a PhD proposal during that time. As for my high school students I say this: It is never too early for Foucault and Barthes!! Also, OP: vegan 
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Aug 17, 2009 01:15
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Spectacular thread Brainworm, it makes me wish I had gone into (or at least taken more) English in University. Unfortunately like many others I was somewhat disenchanted with High School English when it was time to decide on a major. Your comments on how it's often poorly taught certainly ring true with me. Down to my actual question though: I recently finished Don Quixote after about 3 months, and was wondering if you could give me your general impressions. Everything I have read - including the opening essay by Mr. Bloom - heaps praise on it. I found the writing was very good, and taken individually pieces of the book were brilliant, but the reason it took me so long to finish was that I didn't find it at all compelling. Once I put it down I had no desire whatsoever to pick it back up. Am I missing something here?
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Aug 17, 2009 04:04
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Every professor at my school serves as an academic advisor for a section of students majoring inside that department. Do you do anything like that?
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Aug 17, 2009 04:09
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Brainworm posted:I can make a stronger case for essays, though. Especially critical and investigative essays. Chuck Palahniuk's Stranger Than Fiction is a great example of how writerly investigative essays can be. And I think we can all agree that Chuck Klosterman's criticism is best read as a creative act in a way that, say, bell hooks's criticism isn't. Ah, I just wrote an essay about the literariness of critical theory and the space this opens between Literature (fiction) on the one hand, and Theory (non-fiction), on the other. You might agree with me, and I would quote from it, but it is not published (yet) so that probably wouldn't be a good idea. The basis for it is this lovely quote by one of my favourite critics of all time, Jonathan Culler: quote:There are many tasks that confront contemporary criticism, many things that we need if we are to advance our understanding of literature, but if there is one thing we do not need it is more interpretations of literary works. edit: It is interesting to see, bye the way, that most people coming from high school are truly amazed by this thread, and didn't have any idea what goes on in English departments around the world. Brainworm is doing a good job here in educating the masses, and being a grad-student I probably would've liked him as a teacher, but this stuff is pretty standard: it happens everywhere, it's your basic day on an (undergraduate) English programme. This thread hasn't even branched, I think, into debates about critical theory, post-post structuralism, or in Brainworm's case Cultural Materialism and New Historicism. What I want to say is, if you like this stuff, get into English at a good university. Everyone will be a Brainworm, only some even more experienced  I'm at the University of Leeds, bye the way. oliwan fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Aug 17, 2009 |
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Aug 17, 2009 11:30
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anima_maxima posted:What do you think of anonymous publishing? My friends and I got into a debate about this a few nights ago. I said it was better to write anonymously and have the work stand on its own rather than have people delve into the author's/poet's life to find meaning in the text (as people are wont to do, like you mentioned with the Rich poem). My other friends said that it's an excuse to attention whore--you're not creating independent works so much as you're begging to be "busted" and have a whole shitstorm about it. As Brainworm has already said, using the author to find meaning is a difficult affair. In fact, the majority of literary criticism in the academy has tried to steer away from the author since the seventies. There is a famous and very influential essay on this by Roland Barthes, called 'Death of the Author' (1968). The wikipedia entry is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author wikipedia posted:In his essay, Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity — his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes — to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: Also see 'What is an Author' by Michel Foucault, it's also mentioned on that page. There are some who challenge this, but authors weren't allowed in critical essays anywhere I have studied. The theme has also been investigated by many literary authors, bye the way. Nobel prize winner J.M. Coetzee is very concerned about this -- almost all his novels deal with it on a certain level. His latest, 'Diary of a Bad Year', is a genius example of this, but 'Foe' might be the best, although that is not as easy to pick up: you basically have to be a Defoe scholar to get everything from it. oliwan fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Aug 17, 2009 |
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Aug 17, 2009 12:13
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anima_maxima posted:What do you think of anonymous publishing? My friends and I got into a debate about this a few nights ago. I said it was better to write anonymously and have the work stand on its own rather than have people delve into the author's/poet's life to find meaning in the text (as people are wont to do, like you mentioned with the Rich poem). My other friends said that it's an excuse to attention whore--you're not creating independent works so much as you're begging to be "busted" and have a whole shitstorm about it. It seems like the issue in that debate is partly context, rather than strictly anonymity. I mean, even when someone publishes anonymously, there's a context, and that context has interpretive consequences. Just for instance, I'm writing this thread anonymously. But let's say I get sonnetin' quote:The first night we went out, when I got home Now, context inflects this. It might matter that you know I'm a Renaissance scholar and up on the minutiae of sonneteering tradition, so you'll look more closely for the reversal in the couplet. It also might matter that this is on the SA forums, where the kind of sexual desperation most sonnets express finds, well, contextual company -- that might make you think the awkwardness and semi-indecision aren't terribly exaggerated. It might matter that you know, or can infer, my gender from the other thread content, since that spins line 12. And there might be other relevant thread content, too, or content in other forums or by different SA writers that, you could argue, inform my decision to publish this poem here. Point is, anonymity doesn't stand a work on its own -- it just redefines the contextual matter that someone can use to read the poem from outside. At the same time, there's an assumption at work in your friend's argument. Most stuff that published anonymously, nobody gives a poo poo who wrote it. I mean, if I published my last book anonymously, that's hardly attention-whoring. We're talking about a book that'll maybe sell 2000 copies. Of course that's academic press, but I think we can agree that, unless you're already a well-accomplished author (or issuing death threats), anonymous publications don't create s create shitstorms. Or even poo flurries. Mostly, they're just there. All that said, there are lots of good reasons to publish anonymously. I'm exercising some of them right now, actually. There's no risk of my opinions getting confused for College policy, or of anyone playing the "who's that person he mentioned" game. My opinion stands apart from my professional reputation, such as it is. Maybe most important, I can claim that I never intended to be associated with anything I said here, if it comes to that. FAKE EDIT: Also, on "death of the author": This goes back further than Barthes. It's either chapter two or three of The Verbal Icon that gets into the "intentional fallacy" -- the categorical statement that an author's intent, or probable intent, is out of bounds when interpreting a work. That's not a dead author, exactly. More like an author in a leper colony.
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Aug 17, 2009 14:07
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That's pretty helpful, actually. Thanks for the example. 
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Aug 17, 2009 14:35
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Brainworm posted:Now, context inflects this. It might matter that you know I'm a Renaissance scholar and up on the minutiae of sonneteering tradition, so you'll look more closely for the reversal in the couplet. It also might matter that this is on the SA forums, where the kind of sexual desperation most sonnets express finds, well, contextual company -- that might make you think the awkwardness and semi-indecision aren't terribly exaggerated. It might matter that you know, or can infer, my gender from the other thread content, since that spins line 12. And there might be other relevant thread content, too, or content in other forums or by different SA writers that, you could argue, inform my decision to publish this poem here. Hm, I don't think I could get away with a reading like this in a paper. For instance, just assuming the speaker's gender because you know the gender of the author seems quite problematic.
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Aug 17, 2009 14:44
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oliwan posted:Hm, I don't think I could get away with a reading like this in a paper. For instance, just assuming the speaker's gender because you know the gender of the author seems quite problematic. Of course it is. But that's not exactly this case. Remember, in this specific situation the basis for the belief that I'm male is part of the text surrounding the poem, not a matter of conventional biography or movement outside the text proper. That is, the authorial relationship we've got is: Me (unknown) -> Brainworm (claims to be some guy/poem's "author") -> Poem's narrator. So describing a relationship between the poem's narrator and Me (whoever's doing my breathing), that's problematic like you said. Describing a relationship between the poem's narrator and Brainworm, though, is just describing correspondence between different narrative frames of a single "work" (this thread). It's like the situation of Eliot's "Waste Land" (poem) and his self-provided Notes (thread). The Notes are interpretively significant regardless of whether they're factually correct (that is, whether "Brainworm" tells you about me and whether "Brainworm" tells you about the poem are separate issues). That's why the poem appearing in this thread is something different from that poem appearing, in conjunction with my biography in, say, the Norton. Hello context. EDIT: Hyphenectomy. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Aug 17, 2009 |
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Aug 17, 2009 20:06
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Brainworm posted:Of course it is. But that's not exactly this case. Well yes, if you consider the whole thread as the 'work', then that is obviously true. I don't think that was very obvious though. Bye the way, it's 'The Waste Land', without hyphen. As a student of modernism, seeing it spelled wrong just hurts
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Aug 17, 2009 20:20
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