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elentar posted:Err? This is probably a media theory/postmodernist thing again, but I can hardly turn around in the library without hitting Burroughs these days--Frederic Jameson in particular flings him around. You have a point with him edging out of dialogue with "writers in general," but I think mostly because his dialogue with other media was so persistently rewarding, and goes on through Ballard, Pynchon, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Moore... Yeah. I meant that Burroughs doesn't do a lot of looking back. That writers now look back at him is interesting, but I'm not sure it means a whole lot. I mean, there are tons of excellent and oft-referenced writers -- people in what I see as Burroughs's position -- that don't canonize. Think Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, and Hall Caine. In the end, people adapted Stoker because they could do something with Count Dracula, and so Dracula landed in the canon (or a canon), even though Stoker's not otherwise an exceptional writer. And people later called Dickens the novelist of his generation, and maybe for all time. But any reader of the time, or even a couple generations after, would have called Caine the best of these three. And now nobody knows who Hall Caine is. Chance or accident or God's own hand made him not to last. What I'm saying is, I can see Ginsberg lasting because he screws himself to the past, specifically Milton. And Ginsberg or Burroughs -- or any of the other beats -- might find a canonical home if they're well-rewritten. But that's a future past telling, since the generation or two after an author hasn't been a reliable predictor of what sticks long term. Witness Hall Caine. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Nov 3, 2009 |
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Nov 3, 2009 02:32
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bartlebee posted:I had seen a couple of other posts about this, but I thought it worth bringing up again. I'm finishing my MA in Theatre at the end of next semester, and I'm taking some time off before I begin an MFA (a MFA?). I'll have two years experience teaching introductory theatre, and three or four years worth of script writing workshops, so I feel comfortable teaching introductory script analysis as well. What does the adjunct/community college circuit look like, as far as job placement? Is that even an avenue worth looking down? I'd be interested in seeing if I could find a course or two to teach at a community college once I get settled (depending on where we decide to move), and I was wondering if this something to look into. It's absolutely worth looking into. I'm not sure that Theater departments are large enough for regular adjunct work -- they're usually quite small, even at large universities -- but your degree and experience could get you a shot as a sabbatical replacement. I think that's preferable to adjuncting, anyway. And depending on your experience, these programs often need e.g. set design and other professors/supervisors on a per-semester basis. The community college Theater action is going to vary widely. Traditional (read: vocational) community colleges haven't usually had much interest in the fine arts. Or, really, in anything past Associate's Degrees. We're talking about buildings where cafeterias double as auditoriums. But the newer generation of statewide community college systems might very well have Theater classes, though likely not majors, since they take extra- and co-curricular stuff more seriously. Also, Theater often hires MFAs unless there's a Theater grad program -- that's where they sometimes ask for PhDs. So your MA sets you up comparatively well. Certainly well enough to adjunct, and probably well enough to compete for one and three-year contracts.
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Nov 3, 2009 03:11
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Hi Brainworm, I just came upon this thread and it's great! Thanks so much for your input. I just finished up my bachelors and have been seriously thinking about pursuing a PhD (in English). So I just had a couple of questions. 1) Did you have to move far from your family and friends for school and work? If so, how did that affect your relationships with them? Looking back was it worth moving away (if you had to move far) from them? 2) I am interested in two very very specific fields (modern american drama, twentieth century american political literature). With very little interest in other fields. When you obtained your job, were/are there certain courses that you could choose/create? Are there required courses that you have to teach and if so, what are they? 3) i know you said that you work at a teaching institution, but how much of your job is actually research? Also what are your requirements in order to make tenure? 4) Lastly, how much time do you spend grading papers and preparing lessons? Thanks so much for all of your valuable input!
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Nov 5, 2009 01:00
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Hinglish posted:Hi Brainworm, I just came upon this thread and it's great! Thanks so much for your input. Excellent. Glad you like it. quote:So I just had a couple of questions. I did, and (as we all know) long-distance relationships are difficult whatever the type. The friends I had as an undergrad are largely not my friends now, excepting a couple, Mark and Cory, who moved to the East coast the same time I did. And now that I'm back in the Midwest, those friendships take serious maintenance. So was it worth it? Of course it was. Part of this might be the kind of culture I come from -- growing up in the Midwest means you follow your opportunities, because the people who stick around wherever for family and friends, well, they're in the crab bucket. And I'll even take it one further. One thing I regret is that, as a younger and dumber man, I listened to my then-girlfriend when I chose grad schools and stayed dumb enough to listen to a different then-girlfriend when I applied for jobs. The first time around, I turned down Oxford to try my luck in the states, since TG1 didn't want me to leave the country for grad school. The second time, I turned down campus visits and job offers from U. Sydney and American U. Dubai because TG2 didn't want me to leave the country for work. Everything's since turned out well, and I may have made good decisions in both cases, but I made them for the wrong reasons. quote:2) I am interested in two very very specific fields (modern american drama, twentieth century american political literature). With very little interest in other fields. When you obtained your job, were/are there certain courses that you could choose/create? Are there required courses that you have to teach and if so, what are they? The thing to keep in mind here is that my college is a corner case. I get to develop courses largely according to my expertise and interest, and while there are courses I "have" to teach, like poetry and our mis-named "Introduction to Literature" (which sounds like a penalty box, right?) I can teach them with whatever texts I like. There are some Gen Ed. courses that have harder requirements (X amount of writing instruction), but I don't find them onerous. That said, this only works because I'll rework my Shakespeare course so it can cross-list in Film Studies, do serious development so I can teach courses that are more properly Folklore or Popular Culture, or relearn my statistics so I can bring in grants that need me to run e.g. regression analyses, or so that I've got a shot at being a decent administrator when the time comes.* Being a good academic, even at an R1, means that you need breadth. You can choose how that breadth looks, and how it happens, but I think you'll find that the difference between an unremarkable academic and a successful one has everything to do with how much their job description has changed from the time they were hired to the time they finished their career. That's a good measure of how willing and able they were to meet the needs of the college whenever those needs needed meeting. quote:3) i know you said that you work at a teaching institution, but how much of your job is actually research? Also what are your requirements in order to make tenure? We, like most colleges and universities, don't have explicit tenure requirements (X number of books, X articles, X conferences); those kinds of requirements are usually only present in departments, divisions, or colleges that are deeply dysfunctional (like, say, where somebody has sued over tenure denied). In general, though, most colleges and universities will expect a book before tenure. Some will expect more; at "top" R1s with light teaching loads and pre-tenure sabbaticals, the expectation is now a book from a prestigious press, plus a book under contract or a similar weight in articles. The reason this isn't set out explicitly is that being explicit means mutual obligation. No department worth anything wants to tenure someone who has a terrible but publishable book-plus-whatever, who causes personnel or student or governance problems, or who clearly intends to stop doing anything after tenure. quote:4) Lastly, how much time do you spend grading papers and preparing lessons? Honestly, I've stopped keeping track. Some classes I can teach with minimal (30 minutes/class) prep. Shakespeare's a good example; I don't need to re-read Hamlet in its entirety the night before I teach it. But that also requires tremendous front-loading, usually during whenever I'm designing the syllabus and assignments. Just for instance, the first time I taught Shakespeare I basically imitated the course I took as an undergrad. I didn't have another clear starting point. The second time meant digging through my notes, the student evaluations, various articles on pedagogy, and so on to figure out what the problems were with this kind of course and how to fix them. That, by itself, took a week. And for this year's Shakespeare, I'm running the same process. It takes so long because I keep detailed notes on what changes I'm making, why I'm making them, and what I expect them to accomplish. That gives me a clear way to assess outcomes. But what I can tell you for sure is that course planning and grading will take as much time as you allow them. I figure I owe the college about sixty hours a week, and it turns out my work all fits into that bucket. But if I allowed fifty or forty, it would take that long, too. But then I'd have to give up e.g. my own assessment practices or my book-a-year publishing habit. * I was going to put a joke about an accidental lobotomy here, but I'm serious. The market for Shakespeareans is small, and it's possible that I'll someday need to leave this position -- maybe we bring in bad administration, the place changes, or I absolutely need to live in California. So experience to compete as a grant writer, a dean, etc. makes sense, even though it's not my first choice of careers.
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Nov 5, 2009 19:53
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Great thank you so much! I'm sure I'll have more questions in the future 
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Nov 8, 2009 23:47
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Please explain 'The Death of the Author' to me in a way that doesn't make me want to spit on Barthes' grave and euthanize English scholars.
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Nov 9, 2009 01:39
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the balloon hoax posted:Please explain 'The Death of the Author' to me in a way that doesn't make me want to spit on Barthes' grave and euthanize English scholars.
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Nov 9, 2009 02:26
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Defenestration posted:Why should Barthes have to make you feel good about reading him? I'm not saying he should make me feel good but there must be a middle ground between "I feel good about this" and "I can't believe Barthes is arguing for English scholarship as a giant intellectual pissing contest whereby grafting subjective opinion onto a text is both legitimate and encouraged." Even if your subjective opinion is wonderfully researched and argued you're a jackass if you project onto a text rather than draw from it.
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Nov 9, 2009 03:54
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A similar question: In epistemology, there's some debate whether it's more valid to read a scientific hypothesis directly out of the data and see if it works, or to take a pre-concieved notion and apply it to the data and see if it works. Scientists have collectively shrugged their shoulders and went "Eh, whatever works." Is there a significant consensus on what "works" within the context of English literature?
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Nov 9, 2009 05:47
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Hullo, Brainworm. I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind giving me your general thoughts on Measure for Measure? It's come up a few times in the thread, but really only in passing, and I'm curious what you think about it other than that it's got a lame ending.
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Nov 10, 2009 00:03
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Brainworm, what are your thoughts/insights on Love's Labor's Won and Cardenio? Also, just because I don't comment on your blog doesn't mean I don't read it! Keep writing your entries! 
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Nov 10, 2009 02:37
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the balloon hoax posted:Please explain 'The Death of the Author' to me in a way that doesn't make me want to spit on Barthes' grave and euthanize English scholars. I'll do my best, but you should know that I'm very much on the Barthesian(?) side of authorship. There are certainly people who violently disagree with me about the role of authorship and what it means for readings. But they're wrong. The first thing you should know is that there isn't much new in "Death of the Author." It's basically Wimsatt and Beardsley's "Intentional Fallacy" (the second or third chapter of Verbal Icon, which every aspiring critic should read). Both argue that the meaning of a text is ultimately independent of an author's intent in writing it; put another way, an author does not own a text, either directly or by proxy. An author doesn't get to say "I wrote this text thinking it was about stoats," and have this be the final word on the issue, any more than I can foreclose on readings of Hamlet by saying that Shakespeare had a lifelong interest in stoats, so Hamlet must in fact be about them. A useful analogy here is an experiment, with the author as the experimenter. He or she can run the experiment (or, in this analogy, produce the text), but doesn't -- and shouldn't -- have control over how the data the experiment produces will be interpreted. I mean, that I intended to produce a silicone-based rubber substitute doesn't imply that I didn't actually make Silly Putty, and that it should be used for car tires instead of children's toys; that I intended to write a poem about love doesn't imply that I didn't actually write one about stalking. It's common, especially among novice readers, to think that this means that readings of a text are consequently totally unbounded, that a poem can mean anything. A moment's reflection suggests that this isn't true. A reading of whatever text must ultimately account for the words on the page, which is another way of saying that a text, and its relationships to other texts, places some heavy constraints on possible meanings. For instance, you can't write a sonnet that is not about love, intent or no, any more than you can say something other than gravity causes things to fall. That's not a part of the convention you can break, though of course you can write about loves that are hilariously unconventional. And the reader is likewise bound. He or she can't identify a poem as a sonnet and then say that it's about something other than love. It simply is not an option. It goes with the form, as surely as a b isn't an x. So even if I toss out fourteen lines that just say "Cylon" five times, I've written a love poem. It's an unconventional love poem, maybe difficult, certainly idiotic, but my choice of conventions, like my choice of words, has inescapable consequences. So that's what "Death of the Author" means. Reading is about the words on the page, just like an experiment is about the data. It doesn't, or shouldn't, matter who the author is for the same basic reasons it doesn't matter who designs an experiment. The text is the same either way.
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Nov 10, 2009 03:14
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Hobo By Design posted:A similar question: In epistemology, there's some debate whether it's more valid to read a scientific hypothesis directly out of the data and see if it works, or to take a pre-concieved notion and apply it to the data and see if it works. Scientists have collectively shrugged their shoulders and went "Eh, whatever works." Is there a significant consensus on what "works" within the context of English literature? I think either one can work. But administrators and board members really don't like hearing that, say, you're reading aimlessly to make an article-worthy textual connection. Just on the side, I think that's my better process. Notions I cook up never end up being complicated enough to account for what's really out there.
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Nov 10, 2009 03:20
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Fast Moving Turtle posted:I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind giving me your general thoughts on Measure for Measure? It's come up a few times in the thread, but really only in passing, and I'm curious what you think about it other than that it's got a lame ending. Well, we call Measure for Measure a "problem play," meaning that it's one of three (along with Troilus and Cressida and All's Well) that seem to operate as specific examples of a more general social problem. It's both traditional and useful to say that in this respect the problem plays anticipate Ibsen, who makes a career out of the "specific instance of a general problem" approach to drama. What makes Measure interesting in this respect is that there are more than a few candidate problems. The most conspicuous for modern readers is the "legislation of morality" issue that drives the whole Isabella/Angelo conflict. But there are other problems, too. At the political level, there's an issue of justice and what was then called "equity" -- the application of law that recognized that the letter of the law might be too lenient or too harsh in many cases, and so in the interest of justice mandated that law be interpreted by an authority rather than mechanically and evenly applied. Incidentally, this is a common Renaissance concern; Spenser allegorizes it in Book V of Faerie Queene, where Artegal and his robot sidekick, Talus, roam the English countryside slaughtering illegal toll-bridge proprietors and enforcing the finer points of erosion control and maritime law. A second political problem's represented by the Duke. He has a set of contradictory obligations to Vienna. On one hand, he's charged with enforcing fornication laws. On the other, nobody (meaning almost nobody) wants him to actually do this. This is eerily reminiscent of the way Americans feel about religious conservatives -- you know, I'm not against gay marriage, but it's good to see people standing up for traditional values. The inevitable result of these contradictory priorities is deception. If people want two contradictory things, the only way to make them happy is to lie your rear end off.* And then there's Isabella, who has a similar set of contradictory obligations. There's of course the obligation to her holiness or chastity, which Angelo's lust sets against her obligation to her brother. The choice she makes here (not sleeping with Angelo to save her brother's life) forces even more deception. Slapping all those together, if you can, means you've got a problem that looks something like this: doing justice means exercising judgment ("equity"), but in the face of deeply contradictory legal priorities, judgment actually means deception, since both compromise and non-compromise solutions choose too many losers to be sustainable political strategies. In my mind, this is the only way the ending makes sense; it's the logical conclusion to a set of unresolvable outset problems Vienna's handed the Duke. He can't not enforce the fornication laws, because that's abdicating his political responsibility. But he can't (or Angelo can't) enforce them, either, since that clearly leads to mercy not being granted (as Isabella for her brother), or for mercy being granted as a traded favor (as with Isabella and Angelo). And deception and trickery don't solve this problem, either. They just force the Duke to make a different set of equally unsatisfactory decisions about marriage, i.e. move "fornication" indoors by making arrangements that look legal but that, again, nobody actually likes. So by the end of the play, all the political transactions have really accomplished is replacing one problem (marriage's sanctity undercut by consensual sex) with one that's suspiciously similar and just as bad (marriage's sanctity undercut by non-consensual marriage). * If you're a student, a good object lesson is your college; having rules but not enforcing them is really the only workable way to manage e.g. alcohol.
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Nov 11, 2009 02:58
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Doran Blackdawn posted:Brainworm, what are your thoughts/insights on Love's Labor's Won and Cardenio? As far as I know, there are only two extant mentions of Love's Labors Won from the period. The first and most well known is from Meres's Palladis Tamia which lists LLW among notable Shakespearean comedies. The basic possibilities seem to be that LLW is either (a) a lost play, or (b) an alternate title for a known play. Based on the Palladis alone, (b) seems more likely than (a). The First Folio did a good job of picking up whatever drama Shakespeare wrote -- it only definitely leaves out Pericles and Kinsmen, which don't seem to have been successful plays. Nobody like Meres mentions how good they were, and I think even a generous audience would be disappointed to see either of them at Shakespeare in the Park. What I'm saying is that it makes some sense that Heminges and Condell, in putting together the First Folio, would go to some effort to find and include a popular or well-loved play like LLW. And it's unlikely that the King's Men would lose or forget such a play, since popular favorites saw continuous performance and periodic revivals. There aren't extant quartos of LLW, either. That reasons to about the same place. A popular play, or a play by a popular playwright, generally saw Quarto publication. And Shakespeare's reputation means that his quartos have survived better than anyone else's. So in order to assume that LLW is really lost, you've got to assume both that the King's Men forgot it existed, and that it didn't see print through the same processes Shakespeare's other plays did. Given just one of these, the play's recovery is easy if not probable; Heminges and Condell realize they don't have a script and so pick one up form the local bookseller (like they may have done for some of the other plays), or the play runs through several Quarto editions and gets integrated into a later Folio, like Pericles was in the Third Folio (1664). That doesn't certainly rule out a lost text, but it makes a renaming seem the easier explanation. So for a long time the assumption was that LLW was definitely an alternate name for a known comedy, and given the timeline and the other plays Meres mentions in Tamia, Shrew was the usual favorite. But then Hunt's comparatively-recently-discovered stationer's list made it clear that Shrew and LLW were both printed in quarto in 1603. That suggests that Shrew and LLW are different plays. And if LLW is an alternate name for one of Shakespeare's comedies, it has to be one of the ones Meres or other sources don't mention alongside LLW, that was performed before 1598 (so that Meres could mention it), in print by 1603 (so Hunt could list it), and not in print or register under its own name before 1603 (to avoid one play having two totally different popular names). That makes Merry Wives the least impossible candidate, although it was registered and published in 1602. Most, given that evidence, consequently assume that LLW must necessarily be a lost play; even though that's improbable, the evidence seems to rule out LLW being an alternate name for any other eligible comedy. Also, the structure of Love's Labors Lost suggests a sequel -- all the marriages get delayed, and the principal characters agree to meet and do their weddings together one year later. So I lean toward LLW being a lost sequel to Love's Labors Lost, even though that leaves unanswered improbabilities. It's also possible that LLW was some other kind of comic entertainment -- maybe a long poem read aloud on stage -- which would explain its absence from the Folio (which just collects drama proper). Of course that does some damage to the other evidence, since you need a reason for Meres to number it among dramatic comedies. Cardenio is even more of a problem. The only attribution of the play to Shakespeare was by Moseley, who in another part of the same entry definitely misattributes another play to Shakespeare. He had a habit of doing this. Apart from that attribution, the only other thing that links a play named Cardenio to Shakespeare is its performance by the King's Men in 1613. But the King's Men performed a lot of plays that weren't by Shakespeare. So I'm less convinced that Cardenio is a real issue as far as Shakespeare's concerned. The real issue is passing off a half-assed revision of the Second Maiden's Tragedy as a lost Shakespeare play; the evidence for that would shame a Kangaroo Court. quote:Also, just because I don't comment on your blog doesn't mean I don't read it! Keep writing your entries! Oh, I'm writing. Given what the college is going through right now, though, it's tough to make more than one or two a week.
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Nov 12, 2009 17:40
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As there seem to be more lit-crit folks hanging out here than in the Academia subforum: is anyone else turning up in Philly for the vast freakshow that is MLA? I'll be hanging out there for a few days before the godawful time for my panel rolls around (8:30am, last day of the conference = no audience). And then it's off to the book expo hall, to scoop up as many free copies of things as I can find. So as not to be a complete derail: Brainworm, have you suffered through an MLA panel, or did you have to go there for interviews? I've heard fairly astonishing stories from other profs about the ludicrous poo poo that goes on there. (E.g., my advisor had one interview in a hotel suite where he and the three distinguished academics interviewing him all had to whisper, so as not to wake the 16yo daughter of one of them who was sleeping in the next room.)
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Nov 13, 2009 00:13
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Brainworm posted:Well, we call Measure for Measure...
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Nov 13, 2009 02:19
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elentar posted:As there seem to be more lit-crit folks hanging out here than in the Academia subforum: is anyone else turning up in Philly for the vast freakshow that is MLA? I'll be hanging out there for a few days before the godawful time for my panel rolls around (8:30am, last day of the conference = no audience). And then it's off to the book expo hall, to scoop up as many free copies of things as I can find. I should be there, or at least around. This is the first year I've had since maybe 2002 where MLA's been optional -- I'm not presenting, hiring, or being hired. But fate's put me in Philadelphia then anyway. quote:So as not to be a complete derail: Brainworm, have you suffered through an MLA panel, or did you have to go there for interviews? I've done both. MLA panels are sort of hellish. I mean, doing an MLA panel is practically mandatory for grad. students and junior faculty, but I think most of what happens at MLA is driven by the organizations own organizational meetings and (maybe more than this) the job market. I mean, in a department of any size you're always running a search, and if you're not in a department of any size you're probably on the market. So that part of MLA gets you both coming and going. And sweet chubby Elvis do I have stories. For those of you who don't know, most MLA interviews happen in hotel rooms. There's technically an interview area, set up with cubicles like you'd see in a regular office, but the only groups that set up in that interview area are ETS and other testing services, translation and tech writing firms, other assorted for-profit enterprises, and community colleges. Anybody who conducts more substantive interviews -- think an hour or so of Q&A about what's on your vita -- does the interviews in a hotel room, since it's more comfortable, can accommodate more questioners, and quieter. A convention center full of cubicles of interviewees gets like a tree full of magpies. Anyway. So the interviews are in hotel rooms. Nicer colleges get a suite, so there's a table and chairs, or someplace to sit that isn't a bed. Places with a tighter budget or less foresight get a straight up room, as in two beds and a nightstand. That, right there, makes things a little surreal. Like you're auditioning for the kind of movie where dead-eyed models parade out of the bathroom. So I was only an interviewee one year, but I had eight or nine interviews set up over the weekend. By MLA standards, that's a lot. Most of these were the hotel room situation. My first one -- that is, my very first in person interview as a professor -- was with a Southern University most football fans know something about. So I walk in the hotel room, and it's three older guys, one of them in a seersucker suit and bow tie. Otherwise he looks like Coloniel Sanders minus the hair. After I sit down, first thing, he asks if I'd like a bourbon. It's eight in the morning. I'm not sure whether he's joking so I say that before noon, I'm more of a gin man. Nobody even cracks a smile. Then, Coloniel Sanders whips a bottle out, pours three bourbons, passes them to his co-interviewers, and they ask some polite questions. But I obviously blew it inside the first minute. The irony: I love bourbon. I have probably had it at eight in the morning before, and probably in the shower. I also had an interview with a man and a woman, both older, where the woman seriously looked like she was going to die like right then and there. Like she was seriously jetlagged and took five or ten valium to get over it. And the guy looked too beat to lick a stamp. So I kindly pointed out that this interview seemed more something we were all enduring than something they were excited about, and politely excused myself. This was after about fifteen minutes. They offered me the job. Based on what, I don't know. Last, I had an interview -- actually a pleasant one -- with three folks from an R1. The only thing that seemed odd was the way one of them was dressed. She was younger, sure, and a 19th century Americanist (note: 19th c. American is, for some reason, a fashion show) but she had like pulled out* the miracle bra, a really short skirt, and patent boots with vampire-stabber heels. And during the interview she got, well, flirty. Nothing crazy, but a lot of the emphasize-a-point-by-touching-you stuff. But the interview went well otherwise, and it's not like that was some kind of hazard. Next day, I'm going to a morning panel since I've just got one interview in the afternoon. The panel is on the Booths and their Shakespeare productions, so I go. Turns out, skirt lady from the day before's a panelist. So they do their thing, there's a Q&A (I stay totally quiet), and right after she stalks up to me and says "oh. Isn't it interesting to see you here." And this was with some hostility. And before I can say anything, she high-speed stalks out of the room. I didn't get the offer, and what went on with that whole thing, I can't even guess. * Note: Not "pulled off."
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Nov 13, 2009 22:46
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Sorry if some of these questions have been answered already, I'm making my way through the thread but I just changed my major to Professional English today and I have a few questions. I am not entirely sure what I am going to end up doing but I would love to be a professor if money / time permits. I am planning on going to grad school after I get my BA (since a BA on its own is essentially useless it seems). The university I am attending isn't exactly a big name or prestigious at all but it was all I could afford to attend and it isn't total poo poo. Right now I have a 3.9 GPA. I know you said the GPA isn't a big deal in grad school application because of the over-the-bar thing, but how much does the university you graduate from factor into it? Are they going to look at the school I graduated from and decide my 3.9 doesn't mean poo poo? If my eventual plan is to become a professor, what should I be looking at as far as a plan in grad school? Is there anything I should make absolutely sure to focus on? Are there any paths that make becoming a teacher easier / more viable? What else factors into grad school application? I changed my major from psychology and the graduate programs for psych all required internships / experience. Is English the same way? My university is small and it doesn't seem like I will have a lot of opportunities for anything resembling internships. Finally, what methods are out there to soften the blow of grad school attendance? I don't know much about any of the financial side of schooling since I am currently on a full scholarship, but grad school looks very expensive. Are there any graduate schools that cater towards students with little to no means of income or that are known for financial aid? I seem to remember a couple people in this thread talking about going to grad school for free, and a bunch of people have been telling me that if I can't go to grad school for free that it isn't worth it. (Not that I believe them. I will be trying my hardest to go to grad school and then work towards my PhD because I genuinely love English, but getting through for free / cheap would certainly be nice.) As a side note, I was looking at the tuition costs for graduate programs and this seemed crazy to me: I live in Austin, Texas so I was initially considering UT for my graduate studies. But looking at the costs, UT is almost 17 grand a semester for an in-state student living off campus. I looked at Stanford and their price for an out-of-state student living off campus was only about 5 grand. How in the hell does an in-state university that isn't even Ivy League cost three times as much as Stanford? Thanks in advance, even if you don't answer these questions. This is a great, informative thread and it is making me a lot more confident about my decision to change majors. Everyone has been telling me that an English degree is worthless and that I won't make any money, which I have already come to terms with, but cases like yours show that with enough hard work the degree can really pay off.
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Nov 14, 2009 04:17
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Here's the general stuff, which Brainworm may rebut entirely: The general rule is that you should never be paying to go to grad school. There are exceptions, but as a general principle if the school wants you to be there, then they will find an assistanship or fellowship to cover your tuition and pay you a modest but livable stipend. Be very, very suspicious of any school that admits you and then expects you to pay them in full. That is almost never going to be the path that will lead to you becoming a professor. As far as concentrations, develop a couple of areas of greatest interest to you--be it modernism, 18th-century, middle English, whatever--but make sure you also have a broad enough base so that when you come to job applications, you will come off as a candidate capable of teaching a wide variety of "Intro to X" courses. Also, don't lose touch with your roots in psychology--use that to your advantage: Freud and to a slightly lesser extent Jung both swing big dicks in literary criticism; if you can pick up some Lacan then you'll have one strength set in stone from the start. You don't have to worry so much about the prestige attached to your undergrad degree: what you do need to worry about is your writing sample, which should demonstrate that you will be able to keep your head above water at the graduate level; your personal statement, which should demonstrate both your commitment to and aptitude for advanced literary study; and your recommendations, which should come from professors who will attest to your ability to meet whatever challenges are thrown at you. Also pay attention to the GRE and GRE subject test requirements--many schools still require the first; some still require the second: don't get caught off guard by that expectation.
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Nov 14, 2009 04:54
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elentar posted:Here's the general stuff, which Brainworm may rebut entirely: Thank you very much. I'm still a bit overwhelmed by all of this as I wasn't even going to be able to attend university until I was awarded a scholarship, so I am definitely learning as I go here. As far as fellowships, is there a way to see what schools offer them and what the requirements are, or do I just shop around when I graduate from this university? And are there any guides on writing samples / personal statements? And if you have any more info on the GRE stuff I would love to hear it, I have never heard of that before now and it sounds like something to be concerned about. Sorry about all the questions again, I'm just really nervous about the whole process and I don't want to ruin my chances before I even get out of the gate.
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Nov 14, 2009 05:00
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There is a grad school thread stickied in E&A that will probably be a good read for you and I think will explain a lot of the basics. It's a good place to ask further questions too (not that Brainworm isn't-- this thread is, as always, engaging and informative )
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Nov 14, 2009 05:05
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elentar posted:your recommendations, which should come from professors who will attest to your ability to meet whatever challenges are thrown at you. AbdominalSnowman, elentar's advice is good, and I want to emphasize the statement above. This will sound crass and people will disagree, but DO NOT underestimate the power of a strong recommendation. Think of it like this: if I'm about to invest some serious money in a horse, should I go with the unproven horse I've never heard of that looks good on paper or the horse my friend (who is a horse expert) says has been consistently awesome for the last four years of horse undergrad? Ideally, you want to be the horse that looks good on paper AND comes highly recommended by my friend. Then you look like a sure-fire return on their investment, which leads to my next point: Don't pay for a graduate degree in English. Like elentar said, any worthwhile program will fund you fully and completely, whether it be through a fellowship, TAship, RAship, or some combination of the three. If nothing else, in English there are always freshman composition classes to be taught--do not pay! It's like dating: do you really want to be with someone who can't buy you dinner? A PhD is 6-8 years of your life--the least they can do is feed you. Finally, in English the GRE isn't a huge deal from what I can tell. It can hurt if you suck and help if you are amazing--otherwise, just take it and don't gently caress up. I would take a few practice tests and review a bit, but it is basically a glorified (and computerized) version of the SAT used to weed out completely unqualified applicants (note: there are some programs that still give a poo poo, but most just want you to have a score that proves you are sentient).
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Nov 14, 2009 05:49
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AbdominalSnowman posted:Right now I have a 3.9 GPA. I know you said the GPA isn't a big deal in grad school application because of the over-the-bar thing, but how much does the university you graduate from factor into it? Are they going to look at the school I graduated from and decide my 3.9 doesn't mean poo poo? I doubt that. That's a fine GPA, and it's fine no matter where you're coming from. I mean, maybe it's more impressive coming from Reed than Michigan State, but it means something no matter where you are. quote:If my eventual plan is to become a professor, what should I be looking at as far as a plan in grad school? Is there anything I should make absolutely sure to focus on? Are there any paths that make becoming a teacher easier / more viable? I think the other posts have hit the high points: recommendations and writing samples matter more than anything else, getting funding is much easier than it is for undergrad, so grad tuition is just a paper cost -- the University pays it for you, plus a stipend besides. The key, though, is thinking beyond grad school. I'd recommend taking as much statistics as you can handle, for instance. It's not going to help you with English at all. But it will help you write grants that touch writing and institutional assessment, since most of the reporting needs e.g. regression analysis. And if you ever want to be an administrator, you definitely need at least a stats foundation -- Deans have all kinds of metrics they use to assess e.g. faculty workload, the health of majors, and so on. For the same reasons, some business (management) classes can't hurt either. quote:Thanks in advance, even if you don't answer these questions. This is a great, informative thread and it is making me a lot more confident about my decision to change majors. Everyone has been telling me that an English degree is worthless and that I won't make any money, which I have already come to terms with, but cases like yours show that with enough hard work the degree can really pay off. Glad to do it. And you don't have to work hard, exactly. Like with most things, I think that if you're working hard, you're doing something wrong.
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Nov 15, 2009 05:23
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Brainworm, great thread. Really has me thinking I should read more English lit! My question is, how old is too old for grad school (Ph.D.)? Are there students in their 50s who go on to a decade or two of scholarship? How do folks like this fare in the job market? Are they doomed to adjunct status? Do they find jobs at all? By way of background, I'm still in my thirties and love my current government job, but am looking ahead to what I might do after an early retirement. Edit: also, let's assume one goes on to study a field relevant to one's work experience. (In my case, something to do with East Asian history/culture/politics/languages.) I know this is not exactly your specialty (and is probably better suited for the general grad school thread) but this is exactly what I would ask if I found myself sitting by you on a transcontinental flight! Business of Ferrets fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Nov 15, 2009 |
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Nov 15, 2009 08:31
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Brainworm posted:Yeah. I meant that Burroughs doesn't do a lot of looking back. That writers now look back at him is interesting, but I'm not sure it means a whole lot. I think you're right about Burroughs as far as the English literary tradition is concerned, but Burroughs definitely has major literary ancedents, most notably the French surrealists. Burroughs' cut-up experiments have a more than superficial similarity to the experiments in automatic writing that people like Apollinaire did in the 1910s; similarly, Ginsburg - Howl included owes more than a little to the French, most notably the delightful madman Antonin Artaud. I think this is a problem with a lot of English lit from after, approximately, the second half of the 20th century - analysis in terms of English literary tradition feels incomplete, since there are other major influences at work that clearly fall outside of that scope.
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Nov 16, 2009 23:10
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First, great thread. I spent the entire weekend reading through it and the blog. It's really made me realize why when I read all these 'great' books they generally bore me to death. I've never really read a book for anything other than just the basic plot. This thread has been a real eye opener. Thanks. I wonder if you, or anyone else, might comment on 1984 ? I've been meaning to re-read it for ages, since the book is referenced so much these days. Last time I read it (about 15 years ago?) about all I got was: "Totalitarianism is Bad. This is what to watch out for." Which, from the references I see to it everywhere, seems to be just about what everyone takes from it. I'm wondering if there's something more there? What sort of things should I be looking for?
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Nov 18, 2009 03:55
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Business of Ferrets posted:Brainworm, great thread. Really has me thinking I should read more English lit! Glad you're on it. If I'd have known threads got this kind of readership, I'd have gotten this one peer-reviewed. Oh, I'm hilarious. quote:My question is, how old is too old for grad school (Ph.D.)? Are there students in their 50s who go on to a decade or two of scholarship? How do folks like this fare in the job market? Are they doomed to adjunct status? Do they find jobs at all? There are really two answers here. The first one's that at Lehigh, I can think of two grad students -- Lois and Elsie -- who started their PhDs long after most people would retire. In both cases, their degrees weren't extensions of an earlier career that touched English. I'm not sure what Elsie's doing now, but to my recollection she wasn't really looking for a post-PhD career. She was just doing ti to do it. And I think Lois has steady community college work, though whether she's satisfied with that I don't know. I am not sure I would take Lois's job even if it paid twice as much and carried prima noctae. The second answer is that I can think of bunches of people who've made academia a second career by building on whatever their expertise. Right now, for instance, we've got a great fellow whose title is "Diplomat in Residence"; he was England's ambassador to various countries in the Middle East from about 1985 until he retired about two years ago, and now he teaches in our Politics and International Relations programs. I don't think there's a graduate degree in play there, but his position isn't tenurable and he doesn't have clear obligations outside of his teaching. So it'd be tough to call him a professor in any meaningful sense. (Hence "Diplomat in Residence.") But it's also clear that what he brings to the classroom and the college is insanely valuable, and that this makes him a great deal more than a glorified adjunct -- that is, he's got a line on an academic career, not just steady employment or a retirement hobby. A second example is a professor proper, also in Politics, who had an earlier career at the RAND writing what I can only call Outer Space policy, and is also a PhD in Political Science or a closely-related field. Were he not here, he'd be the Obama administration's Space Czar. He's not early retirement age, so his situation isn't much like what you're planning for. But the point is that academia is really his second career, that he's made the transition smoothly and successfully, and that he's made it by teaching and researching in an area that builds on strong prior experience. I think what these dual answers point to is pretty clear, though I don't have enough experience in staffing higher ed. positions to say what I'm about to say with great certainty: a strong second career in academia seems to mean building off of your first. If you want to be a conventional professor, a PhD is required. But if you just want a second career in the college classroom, your experience is really what makes you valuable, and you can find academic careers (as a ___________ in Residence, a Lecturer, Instructor, or similar) that are, well, viable -- full or part time benefit-carrying positions.
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Nov 18, 2009 15:49
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ma i married a tuna posted:I think you're right about Burroughs as far as the English literary tradition is concerned, but Burroughs definitely has major literary ancedents, most notably the French surrealists. Burroughs' cut-up experiments have a more than superficial similarity to the experiments in automatic writing that people like Apollinaire did in the 1910s; similarly, Ginsburg - Howl included owes more than a little to the French, most notably the delightful madman Antonin Artaud. I agree with you in part. English as a discipline doesn't deal with non-anglophone influences in any depth. That's part of the discipline's boundaries, after all. That's like saying mathematicians don't talk about baking. But I disagree with the idea that this is a larger issue in more recent texts. I mean, the English Renaissance is largely defined by Classical (Latin) and Continental (French and Italian) influences. Even Medieval texts -- think Chaucer -- are in dialogue with e.g. Tasso or Chretein de Troyes the same ways Burroughs is in dialogue with the French. I mean, Troyes practically invents Arthurian legend, right, which is the English myth until the end of the Second World War. What I'm saying, in other words, is that this is why English (or French or German) is a different discipline -- and a different kind of discipline -- from, say, Comparative Literature. Burroughs's relationship to Francophone media is a great argument for his inclusion in a Comparative Literature canon, but not necessarily a good one for English or French.
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Nov 18, 2009 19:18
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Brainworm posted:Great insights. Brainworm, this is very helpful. Thank you!
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Nov 19, 2009 02:57
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Do you have any recommendations about non-fiction books that provide social context for certain literary movements or periods? I find the concept of salons, for example, a little impenetrable. I understand what they were, basically, but I find myself wanting a rundown of what would occur there, where and when their popularity rose and fell, some anecdotes or stories about notable ones, et cetera. Something specifically about that would be cool but anything you've read that helped you understand something cultural about great literature would be interesting to hear about.
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Nov 19, 2009 10:31
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JasonV posted:First, great thread. I spent the entire weekend reading through it and the blog. It's really made me realize why when I read all these 'great' books they generally bore me to death. I've never really read a book for anything other than just the basic plot. This thread has been a real eye opener. Thanks. That's a hell of a way to spend a weekend, but thanks. quote:I wonder if you, or anyone else, might comment on 1984 ? I've been meaning to re-read it for ages, since the book is referenced so much these days. Last time I read it (about 15 years ago?) about all I got was: "Totalitarianism is Bad. This is what to watch out for." Which, from the references I see to it everywhere, seems to be just about what everyone takes from it. There are better readers of 1984 floating around here for sure -- that's not one I picked up since middle school. And I think you're basically right about the popular uses of 1984 being a set of political cliches, and it's probably also true that the novel was, at the time, meant (or at least read) as a popular political document that used a basically Marxist vocabulary for explaining the workings of a totalitarian state. For American readers, I think this might seem strange, but what I think 1984 does in context is distinguish good methods of state control from bad ones. Whatever else you can say about Orwell, he didn't have the libertarian streak you see in lots of American political fiction. But what I'd like to say about 1984 has to do with its pervasive misreading in popular culture. When people talk about it, they almost always read it as a sort of logical argument -- you know, you see Big Brother, Two Minutes Hate, Newspeak, or whatever, and you've got symptoms of a totalitarian society because (a) they're all connected in 1984 and (b) 1984 is a kind of political prophecy, or at least a prescient and logical political argument. I think that's a misuse of the text. Dystopias, whatever else they are, don't pretend to be logical arguments, even though they're necessarily political. 1984 comes from a long, long line of politically-sensitive dystopian fiction -- the most ancestors of 1984 are probably Gregory's Meccania and (much more explicitly) Jack London's Iron Heel (where Orwell lifts much of his plot from). I should add here that Iron Heel is also where Nabokov seems to get the idea for the layered narrative in Pale Fire. It's a fantastic and influential book that, for whatever reason, nobody reads. You could throw others on the pile of ancestors, too. Kafka's Trial seems like a contender, along with Zamyatin's We. Interestingly enough, all of these owe something to Bolokitten's City of Amalgamation, which for my money is the earliest modern dystopian novel -- it was written and published in the aftermath of Britain's Slavery Abolition act, which puts it in or around 1835. The thing that I think is really interesting about this is that it makes the nature of dystopian literature easier to grasp. Bolokitten (the guy who wrote Amalgamation) saw a political development (the end of slavery) and, in response, took it to a conclusion he thought was both plausible and repulsive (interracial marriage) in an effort to change the terms of the debate about slavery in the US. The result is a delightful piece of galloping racism: quote:What it could mean was beyond my comprehension—Negresses, hooked with white men! A circumstance puzzling, wonderful—for, be it known, O reader! that I live in a land, where the trite maxim, that "birds of a feather flock together," is universally respected. To mingle different species would be utterly abominable; but here it seemed it obtained; those distinguishing lineaments, engraved by the Creator upon his works, were entirely effaced; all was comingled into one hodge podge of black flesh and white flesh, and yellow flesh—an astonishing fact, that black and white flesh mixed, produces yellow flesh, of all kinds of flesh the most disgusting, because it is a compound, and has no purity in it; but is a sort of anomaly or patent right, or new invented specie, of which our Creator knows nothing, and who, consequently, will be much astounded at finding his dominions overrun with interlopers, especially of such an outlandish and mongrel breed. Point is, that two part strategy -- the logical extension of a current political issue to an abominable end -- seems to happen in Amalgamation first, and then gets picked up by the dystopian tradition that includes 1984. But I think looking at Amalgamation makes the political logic of dystopia clearer; dystopia doesn't work because the situations it describes are rationally untenable (although they might be). It works because its situations are viscerally repellent -- I mean, look at the way Winston gets tortured. Put another way, it doesn't make sense to read 1984 as a piece of political science. It's really a sort of rhetorical attempt to label a whole spectrum of political practices using the reader's mental gag reflex. That doesn't make it a bad book -- actually, quite the opposite -- but it does mean that you can't use it to reason from observation to totalitarianism, although it gives you a handy rhetoric you can use to get from one to the other.
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Nov 19, 2009 17:23
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Brainworm posted:I should add here that Iron Heel is also where Nabokov seems to get the idea for the layered narrative in Pale Fire. It's a fantastic and influential book that, for whatever reason, nobody reads. Quite possible, but there is also the immediate precedent of Nabokov's own translation of and commentary on Yevgeny Onegin, which also takes the form of preface, poem, commentary, index, and in approximately the same proportions as those found in Pale Fire. Between Nabokov's native playfulness, and his oft-expressed feelings of kinship with Pushkin (not least because of their exiles on the Black Sea, and their readings of Ovid on the same), it's easy to see the central conceits of Pale Fire taking root during that project.
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Nov 19, 2009 18:34
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A question both to Brainworm and to elentar, as I think he's the resident Pale Fire expert around here. I'm writing a gigantic term paper now of the relationship between Nabokov and Swift, but more specifically, Pale Fire as a response (intentional or unintentional) to A Tale of a Tub. Reasoning for this is obvious enough if you've read both texts, but it goes in comparing the narrator of Tub to Kinbote, the ridiculously innovative/stylistically rich structures, and tying back to the Spider/Bee metaphor in Swift's "Battle of the Books". Both books are two of my favorite and innovative I've ever read. Brainworm, what would you calculate as the influence of Swift? It goes far beyond simple satire, as many people think with "A Modest Proposal" and Gulliver's Travels. And elentar, have you read Tub, and even if you haven't, do you have any suggestions with my topic? Thanks! I hope the semester is wrapping up well for both of you.
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Nov 19, 2009 20:10
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Brainworm posted:I'll do my best, but you should know that I'm very much on the Barthesian(?) side of authorship. There are certainly people who violently disagree with me about the role of authorship and what it means for readings. But they're wrong. I'm mostly with you on the idea that the meaning of a text is derived from the actual words on the page, not from the author's intent. But it sounds like you're dismissing an author's intent and then suggesting that a text's relationship to other texts is also (if not equally) important. Then, with the sonnet example you suggest that the form of the text is as important as the words of the text. If I wrote "this poem is a sonnet but is not a love poem" a bunch of times in the form of a sonnet you're saying it would still be a love poem. Are you saying if sonnet then love poem just as an absolute matter or that every other form of sonnet is a love poem and so we have to reference those texts when interpreting this one and as a result come out reading this new sonnet as a love poem? Why can't you break this convention and why is the form more important than the text? Is form part of text? Is the issue here purely definitional - it's not a sonnet even though it takes the form of a sonnet because sonnets are love poems and this is not a love poem? It seems like there's clearly something outside the actual text that we can use to derive meaning from the text and as a practical matter our interpretation of a text will always be, at least to some degree, subjective. So where do we draw that line and why is what the author thinks on one side or the other of that line?
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Nov 20, 2009 16:56
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builds character posted:I'm mostly with you on the idea that the meaning of a text is derived from the actual words on the page, not from the author's intent. But it sounds like you're dismissing an author's intent and then suggesting that a text's relationship to other texts is also (if not equally) important. Then, with the sonnet example you suggest that the form of the text is as important as the words of the text. I think your key question here is "is form a part of text?" Absolutely. Form is just another kind of grammar writers use. Consider the difference between those last two sentences and: Absolutely. Form is just another kind of grammar writers use. Thing is, everyone's used to, and confident, saying that "form is just another kind of grammar writers use" is a sentence. And there are conventions that come along with that. We can talk about elements of grammar -- say, subject and predicate and voice -- and all of these things make sense if we're talking about a sentence and less sense if we're talking about an individual word. But none of those touch the difference between that sentence as prose and that sentence as a poem (in this case, a haiku). The matter here, so obvious that it's easy to miss, is that a literate reader will approach these two instances of the same sentence differently. In the poem, line breaks matter. And since it's a haiku, a haiku-literate reader looks for the cut word (or whatever he or she learned to call kireji), and tries to read a season into the poem (or however he or she learned kigo). This is all part of the text, since part of what the text does is, through form, determine the interpretive conventions a reader is allowed to bring to it. In other words, that the text takes the form of a haiku dictates reading practices in the same ways a period tells the reader a sentence has ended. These are conventions you can play with, but that you can't ignore. A period ends a sentence, so you can make sentences that are grammatically unconventional, extremely long, or extremely short. But you can't (at least not in any way I can think of) change the reader's system of literacy -- make a period not end a sentence. Just like you can't make a haiku the reader won't read in for a kireji or a sonnet the reader won't read in for love. I say "can" and "can't" and "will" or "won't" here to in the sense of validity. Of course you can read a sonnet and say that it is in fact not about love, just like you can read a haiku and say it doesn't have a kireji. Those are possible practices. I could also read a math equation and say that = really means, I dunno, n!, or say that soccer is actually tennis. But those kinds of readings, whatever I do with them, aren't valid -- they break the rules that a text relies on in order to mean something. At that point, I've stopped writing in English in the same way that reading = as n! means I've stopped doing Math. So there is something outside the text, sort of. There's tradition, or convention, or whatever you call the systems of literacy that determine how letters, words, sentences, phrases or whatever other symbolic structures have meaning. That is not a quality inherent in any single text. But that doesn't really affect the text's relationship with its author or the author's intent -- I mean, we don't play baseball according to what we think Abner Doubleday intended the rules to be, or do calculus according to how we think Newton or Leibniz meant the system to work. Even if it were possible to divine those intents -- and I'm certain it is not -- there doesn't seem to be a clear reason that arguments about these intents should drive the MLB rulebook or a college math course.
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Nov 23, 2009 20:34
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vegaji posted:A question both to Brainworm and to elentar, as I think he's the resident Pale Fire expert around here. I'm writing a gigantic term paper now of the relationship between Nabokov and Swift, but more specifically, Pale Fire as a response (intentional or unintentional) to A Tale of a Tub. Reasoning for this is obvious enough if you've read both texts, but it goes in comparing the narrator of Tub to Kinbote, the ridiculously innovative/stylistically rich structures, and tying back to the Spider/Bee metaphor in Swift's "Battle of the Books". Both books are two of my favorite and innovative I've ever read. Brainworm, what would you calculate as the influence of Swift? That is a tough question. I should tell you that Swift while Dryden, Pope, Swift, etc. fall loosely into my expertise, they're in what's got to be my weakest area. So a real Swift scholar might give you a very different answer than I will, and if he does, I'd trust him over me. I think of Swift's influence as popularizing a kind of "thick" satire -- one that depends on a dramatic irony rather than a sort of pillory of whatever the subject matter is. What I mean by "thick" satire is that the narrator, and the satire's self-described conditions of authorship, are complicit in its workings. This is, I think, a function of changing literary forms -- in or around Swift, you get the growth of the novel, and a novel does much the same thing. You get characters who develop rather than unfold and, maybe more important, you get a method of storytelling in which the conditions of storytelling are part of the story itself. Pre-novel texts sometimes have moments were they do this; the Canturbury Tales or the Decameron are really awkward examples of the "conditions of authorship" being played with in a sort of embryonic way, but it's not until the novel -- and with Swift in satire -- that the possibilities of this really find a home. For a popular decedent of Swift on these terms, I'd look to Vonnegut; starting with Slaughterhouse, he consistently foregrounds conditions of authorship in a way that drives the element (and often the satirical element) of whatever he's writing.
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Nov 23, 2009 20:59
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Brainworm posted:I think your key question here is "is form a part of text?" Absolutely. Form is just another kind of grammar writers use. Consider the difference between those last two sentences and: The formal study of literature isn't something I have much experience with and I'm sorry because I think I'm missing something (or I'm wrong, which is obviously not the case because here I am typing away on the internet). I think the comparison to math is a poor one. A text generally relies on grammar and form and the consistent meaning of words, but, at least in my mind, one of the things that makes literature interesting is that an author can rely on a reader's consistent use of grammar and form and words to get their point across by using, for example, form inconsistently. Someone who hates romantic love could write a sonnet satirizing romantic love that generally follows the form but includes at some point some key words that let the reader know that the sonnet is actually mocking romantic love. That doesn't work in math. I think the comparison to math is much better if you say "I write the equation 2+2=4, and then I go around telling everyone that the solution is really 5, not 4." Maybe we're agreeing here, but I'm not sure. It seems like an author can use form to convey meaning that the form does not traditionally convey. Does it make the sonnet about love being a waste of time not a sonnet? I don't think so, but like I said before maybe that's a definitional issue. I think where we definitely agree is in saying that if the author in the instance above wrote a sonnet whose clear message from the text (and form) was "romantic love is a crock" but they really meant to write "oh man, I loves me some romantic love" then their sonnet would still say romantic love is a crock. quote:So there is something outside the text, sort of. There's tradition, or convention, or whatever you call the systems of literacy that determine how letters, words, sentences, phrases or whatever other symbolic structures have meaning. That is not a quality inherent in any single text. What about the idea of the canon and how authors interact with one another? I'm sorry if there's something I'm missing here but it seems like a large part of being an english professor is looking at texts and then thinking about canon and how they fit in with or relate to other works. How does that relate to the idea that you can only look at the text when thinking about a work's meaning? How does e.e. cummings fit into all of this?
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Nov 23, 2009 23:17
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builds character posted:The formal study of literature isn't something I have much experience with and I'm sorry because I think I'm missing something (or I'm wrong, which is obviously not the case because here I am typing away on the internet). I think we're actually agreeing here. That sonnets are about romantic love does not mean that they're a celebration of it -- in fact, them not being a celebration is a signature of the form. This starts with Petrarch, who has a bunch of different ways of saying that love is at once exquisite and agonizing; it continues with Shakespeare, who adds that love is also totally irrational, and in fact binds you to people who, simply put, are no good for you. So what that conversation between authors looks like is Petrarch making a sort of claim: love is like this. And then there are counterclaims, improvements maybe, from Wyatt and Shakespeare, who each use the sonnet to put forth different understandings of how love works. Throughout this process, the rules of the sonnet get sort of codified -- there's a form that emerges, with whatever meter and whatever lines, the volta and the couplet -- and there's a negotiation of subject matter. And you get a situation where fourteen lines of iambic pentameter is, to any reader of poetry, about romantic love. Once that tradition's in place, you can get innovation. Sometime that innovation comes from exploring perhaps unintended consequences -- sometimes love means rape, like in Yeats's "Leda." Sometimes that love means a sort of barely-suppressed same sex desire, like in Shakespeare. Sometimes that love means a pathological, stalker-type obsession, like in Spenser. And sometimes that love is a complicated rejection -- I don't love you and I never did, but maybe I could have -- like in Edna St. Vincent Millay. So you can have a sonnet that says "love is a painful waste of time," or "I have a complex, erotic attachment to Transformers," or "my feelings for my teenage cousin are disturbingly complex," and it could do these things directly, satirically, or however else. But any sonnet, no matter what it says, is necessarily responding to its ancestry, like kids necessarily respond to their parents. So while an author can use that ancestry to innovate, an author doesn't have the option of working outside it. Once you write on the sonnet form, in other words, you're choosing a heritage. You're summoning the demon, inviting the vampire into your home, or letting the genie out of the bottle. You're choosing the rules you say you're going to play by, and you can use those rules to drive a kind of innovation and discovery; that's where I see sonnetin' being like math. Things are significant (or not) or innovative (or not) by dint of their relationship to whatever rules you've chosen to use. Without those rules, nothing happens. quote:I think where we definitely agree is in saying that if the author in the instance above wrote a sonnet whose clear message from the text (and form) was "romantic love is a crock" but they really meant to write "oh man, I loves me some romantic love" then their sonnet would still say romantic love is a crock. Yup. Once it's written, you don't own it (if indeed you ever did). quote:What about the idea of the canon and how authors interact with one another? I'm sorry if there's something I'm missing here but it seems like a large part of being an english professor is looking at texts and then thinking about canon and how they fit in with or relate to other works. How does that relate to the idea that you can only look at the text when thinking about a work's meaning? That is a delightful and complicated question. And I can think of at least two answers: 1) These in fact represent two different and mutually exclusive ways of looking at a text, both of which are powerful interpretive practices but neither of which has a definite or certain claim to a text's ultimate meaning. 2) The way a text means is tradition-dependent, so reading e.g. a sonnet as a sonnet means necessarily being familiar with the elements of the sonnet form that have been established through centuries of practice. I wouldn't say that looking up a word's meaning in another text (e.g. the OED) is going "outside" the text -- if that's "outside," the text doesn't have an interior. Moreover, the only way to find the meaning of a word is seeing how it's used, and how it's been used over time. So practices that establish meaning this way seem to fall inside the text. So I likewise wouldn't say that establishing the meaning of a form (such as a haiku or a sonnet) in the same way is going "outside" the text, either; forms, like words, have meanings. And like words, the meanings of forms can really only be divined by seeing how they've been used. Which means that tradition -- looking at earlier authors and seeing what they've done -- is a huge part of reading the text. That, as far as I can tell, is the only way to learn what a form like a sonnet or a haiku or a novel means. This is, I think, also true for any thing that has a meaning. Punctuation, for example. Or father-son relationships. They ultimately establish their meaning through interpretable traditions, or through textual usage. quote:How does e.e. cummings fit into all of this? e.e. cummings's stock in trade seems to be rolling his own rules as often as he can. He clues you into this formally by letting you know that he's starting with a blank slate -- killing off as many conventions as he can think of in a poem's opening, and establishing his own as early as possible. So a simple poem on the cummings model might look like this: a hypothetical model cummings posted:sonnet: hot dolphin That is, you get something early on that defines a device the poem is going to use -- in this case, a metaphor. And then the poem does something with it -- in this case, an adolescent joke. And this relates to some other established poetic convention -- in this case, the fact that this is somehow a sonnet.
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Nov 24, 2009 01:09
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This is out of left field, but do you have any thoughts on the 1001 Arabian Nights? I've been reading the Burton translation and I find it utterly fascinating so far. Anything I should look for as I read?
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Nov 24, 2009 03:10
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