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"The data is inconclusive" or "The data are inconclusive"? Please don't tell me it's the second one. 
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Feb 22, 2010 18:57
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Your Proud Pal posted:Honestly, I dig it just because it's more Stephen Dedalus and I can't get enough. Though you don't seem to specialize in Joyce, do you count yourself among those who see the narrator of the first three stories in Dubliners as a younger Stephen? (Especially An Encounter) I do, I think. There are likely a million reasons why this assumption's baseless, and likely a million more for why it is outright stupid, or does some unimaginable violence to one of Joyce's texts. I read Dubliners after I read Ulysses, though, and thought that the resemblance between Stephen and the narrator ran pretty deep. That -- and not whether the narrator is actually a younger Stephen -- seems to me the more useful line of thought.
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Feb 22, 2010 19:18
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Ryan-RB posted:Long time lurker, first time poster. I go to a Big Research University, and the professors who are actually here to teach, not just indulge their own specializations, are too few and far between. It's nice to find profs who employ literature as a useful tool for learning thoughtful and humane communication as well as an enlightening experience in itself. I really like that you seem to fit into the better category. Thanks. quote:I wanted to ask what you think about the general state of the humanities, actually. I'm interested in doing a Communications or Cultural Studies MA (maybe PhD as well) to further my education in digital humanities. Anyway, something that you hear a fair amount about in the digital humanities is how the mainstream humanities have lost a sense of their own utility to society. Coming from a Big Research University I can certainly sympathize with this sentiment. The general state of the Humanities? It's not great. I'm not prognosticating here -- saying that the Humanities as a whole are languishing, share a bleak destiny, or something like that. But I think Humanities scholars and their (our?) fields have not been well served by the choices we've made over the last several decades. The most important, and probably the most baffling, of these choices has been to completely dismantle our relationships with the public. Seriously. Listen to any public debate about, I dunno, stem cell research. Probably, you'll hear a bunch of scientists explaining what stem cell research is, and you'll hear a bunch of research-oriented physicians talking about how it'll change the future of medicine. But when the ethics part of the conversation rolls around, you won't hear from anyone with a similar level of expertise -- say, a philosophy professor who precisely outlines the ethical issues in play and the ways these issues can be negotiated, or have been negotiated in the past. When religion gets into the mix, you're not going to hear a religion professor quote chapter and verse to smack down some nutjob who thinks Muslims hate babies. And that's a shame. It's not just a shame because public debates that touch History or Ethics desperately need guidance from something other than self-appointed experts. It's also a shame because the American public has absolutely no idea what that kind of expertise looks like or why it might be valuable. This is an absolutely staggering failure. This goes further than just cutting off relationships with the public, though. There's been a trend in Humanities scholarship towards painful and alienating jargon, and towards what I can only call a shrill and superficial treatment of social justice issues. You know, reading The Tempest so that you can look at the ways Shakespeare's writing of Caliban anticipates the problems of colonial subjectivity articulated by e.g. Franz Fanon. That's simultaneously insulting to Shakespeare, Fanon, and anyone who's been touched by British colonial enterprise. quote:EDIT: No love for the beat poets in your canon? Maybe only in a strict American canon, eh? Yeah, probably... Remember: that list is a sort of canon by committee. Me, I think Ginsberg's "Howl" is a great way to read Milton's "Lycidas."
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Feb 22, 2010 21:55
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gowb posted:Is the job market for english phds as bad as everyone says, or worse? Right now, it's bad. I mean, bad in comparison to a couple years ago, when it was also bad. But this is a different kind of bad. We'll see how MLA counts the jobs list this year, but it's probably fair to say that, inside the next eighteen months, you'll see Byron scholars stabbing each other with crude bone knives over dumpster scavenging rights. And I think elentar's probably right -- the bad market now isn't just a consequence of the current recession. There are at least two other corrections at work in English PhD hiring: For one, grad schools have long produced more English PhDs than can find good employment, and even a year of low hiring creates a huge glut. Especially when non-tenured professors get pink-slipped back out onto the job market to compete with new grads, and especially when short-term appointments aren't getting renewed. At that point, you get a market where you'd be a fool not to hire someone with a book out, or with three or four years' post-grad-school teaching experience. That's not great for a freshly-minted PhDs. For two, this whole recession has led people to rethink college economics. With cuts in state funding, you've got private colleges getting price competitive with state universities* and all other kinds of voodoo. That voodoo might be important later, but right now its most important effect is that it's making everyone financially skittish. You've got students deferring admission, going to community colleges instead of state universities, going in-state instead of out-of-state, and generally concentrating on degrees with steady payouts and low debt loads -- training up as paralegals instead of lawyers. And this means that students have been swapping out of e.g. English for Business or Economics or Chemistry. If that continues, it'll mean smaller English departments. But right now, it means that smart administrators are putting hires on hold, or hiring people on three-year contracts so they can see what the market does. Again, not good for the newly-minted English PhD. * If you're from, say, Pennsylvania, sticker price at Harvard ($33K/year) is a couple grand less than U. of Michigan ($17.5K/term), but for most students Harvard would be way cheaper thanks to how they deploy their financial aid.
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Feb 23, 2010 00:29
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I don't know how much exposure you have to other humanities, but does the same hold true for, for example, foreign literature PhDs? For example, I'm planning on doing Japanese Literature through a Japanese L&L department. In my mind I generally equate this with an English Literature degree except that it's in a different language. Do you have any idea if those kind of PhDs have greater luck in the job market or is it all pretty much the same?
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Feb 23, 2010 01:36
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z0331 posted:I don't know how much exposure you have to other humanities, but does the same hold true for, for example, foreign literature PhDs? For example, I'm planning on doing Japanese Literature through a Japanese L&L department. In my mind I generally equate this with an English Literature degree except that it's in a different language. Do you have any idea if those kind of PhDs have greater luck in the job market or is it all pretty much the same? As soon as the Otaku fad is over, say goodbye to your job.
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Feb 23, 2010 04:02
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I wasn't aware there still was an otaku fad. Even if there is I doubt it'll last for the next 7 years or so so I won't have to say goodbye to a job since I'll probably never get to say hello.
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Feb 23, 2010 04:59
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z0331 posted:I wasn't aware there still was an otaku fad. Even if there is I doubt it'll last for the next 7 years or so so I won't have to say goodbye to a job since I'll probably never get to say hello. Lately, I've heard that the magna/anime industry in Japan itself is in serious trouble (but I don't know, I don't read that stuff). The entire Japanese department thing has been driven by Otakus and their Japanese classes/minors, so I don't see it lasting much longer. But then, that's just my very subjective impression of the situation.
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Feb 23, 2010 05:16
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zzyzx posted:"The data is inconclusive" If Brainworm doesn't mind me chiming in on this one, I'd say it depends on how pedantic you want to be. Data is the plural of Latin datum, but data is a much higher frequency word in English than datum (which most people have probably never even heard and its obscurity is probably why it's more common to refer to a unit of data as a data point) and has been reanalyzed in popular language as a mass noun that takes singular agreement. It's similar to the situation with media (plural of medium), which in its specialized use as referring to the whole of broadcasting/journalism/etc. will often take singular agreement as well. A lot of words that come from languages that form plurals differently than English and are high-frequency enough to enter common speech tend to get reanalyzed, either along these lines or they'll have a new English-native plural formed for them (index will yield both the Latinate plural indices and the Anglicized plural indexes, for example.)
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Feb 23, 2010 05:36
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bartlebee posted:Here's a couple of things, since we've been pretty slow this last month. Well, it's adjuncting. I don't mean to sound snide, but I wouldn't get too nervous; as long as you meet whatever the minimum qualifications for the position are, have some academic or field experience, and don't look like you've got an apartment next to a playground, I think you'll be fine. In this market there will be some competition, but I doubt it will be highly qualified or credentialed. Anyway. When hiring adjuncts, colleges look for the safest possible choice. I can't say that strongly enough. Adjuncting is a conservative's game. Your resume's going to be what it's going to be; just present it neatly and smartly, don't overformat, and generally write it like you're applying for a job at IBM in 1955. Most important, be personable. Hiring adjuncts is seriously a matter of going through resumes looking for the least crazy person, and still having at least two or three interviews where you think you'll have to call campus security. So when it comes down to the interview, be relaxed. Be sane. Don't get in arguments about anything with anybody, and don't talk about your pets or former spouses. Make eye contact. Shake hands. Say "please" and "thank you," and so on. If you can do that, you can get any adjuncting job you want. Hell. Social skills and actual experience could probably get you a full-time job. quote:Second point, since I've just finished all these screenplay classes: what television series/movies do you all appreciate from a literary value? I've become a pretty big fan of "Dexter" and "Mad Men," and I've been following a bunch of movies. What have you ladies and gents seen that warranted attention from a writing perspective? I've got to agree with Bartlebee -- or at least with the industry majors who're saying that TV's the place for long-form storytelling. But I think good storytelling practically requires a hard endpoint. Otherwise stories meander, they stagnate, get sloppy. Like a soap opera. And this is what TV is really bad at; it rarely allows writers to work back-to-front, to have an end in mind when they set out at the beginning. I don't think it's possible to sustain a good story without having an end (or an idea for an end) in your back pocket. And this ruins a lot of promising shows. Look what happened to BSG (I know, another dig) or The Sopranos, which started out with a clearly defined set of nicely-integrated conflicts, turned into Tony Soprano vs. This Season's Villain, and wrote itself into such a corner that the finale wisely, if spinelessly, left the show's in-family conflicts both unresolved and basically unexplored. I won't even mention Heroes, which could have been a show for the ages if it had been greenlit as a season-long miniseries instead of a gasbag. So when it comes to good long-form storytelling, The Wire does a nice job largely by dint of being a different show every season. If Lost has something like a coherent ending -- though I doubt it will -- that'll make it a fascinating piece. And if AMC has the guts to lay down Breaking Bad and Mad Men well in advance, and leave the writers a season or two to move toward some comprehensive endpoint, I think they'll have some great shows on their hands. But a couple I think are overlooked: Slings and Arrows is, Shakespeare matter aside, a tightly-written long story. Also, Ricky Gervais delivers a delightfully clear rise/fall/redemption story with Extras. I found that shocking, actually, since his Office did whatever the exact opposite of character development is.
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Feb 23, 2010 18:02
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This thread is fantastic and has really made me think. I don't know what you did about the Shakespeare book you were offered but you could write 'Shakespeare: Explained by 'that' teacher you felt like you were lucky to have' and I'd definitely buy it. I have a massive list of of e/n questions about studying literature, my crashing existential burdens regarding my studies and my motivations but I'm not sure that's really for here. I have a literary/pedagogical question, however. I know it smacks of 'help me rebel against authority' but you have the chops to tell me if it's a wise move and tell me off properly if it's a bad move. Prologue: I'm 18, and studying in the UK. I should be in my first year of university but I have had to spend an extra year at college (typically ages 16-18) studying A-levels to facilitate a switch from Mathematics to Literature. I'm absent a lot because of medical problems severe enough to hamper my attendance, but the reaction I get from my teachers is generally positive and I've had 3-4 essays anonymously used as model answers which is really flattering and I take as a sign that I'm a strong student and that at the level I'm expected to achieve I'm excelling while being mostly self-taught. I'm not getting along with my texts. Well, one half of them. It's a two module system, one of which is coursework based and ends in two essays. The other is final exam based, and revolves around genre. There are two sets of questions on the paper, one of which is on Gothic texts and one of which is on Pastoral texts. My college decided to alternate the sets of texts each year and my year is studying Pastoral texts, which I loathe. I think we've been given the short end of the stick, and I'm considering asking if I'd be given the blessing of my teachers to focus on Gothic while still attending lessons on and studying Pastoral. There's nothing they could do to stop me answering whatever I want when it comes to the exam but that's not really the most mature way to go about it and it could easily explode in my face. (The Pastoral strikes me as a weird genre, and not really one of the 'biggies'. The basic theme that we've been taught is country vs town, and centre on oppositions. The country is either considered cruel, backwards and unforgiving or idyllic and filled with bliss. The town is either considered corrupting and foul or sophisticated and educated.)  Here is the texts list from the specification, which states we must be taught three texts minimum with one from the 1300-1800 bracket. I've put red dots next to what we have studied in class, and grey dots next to things that I know we won't be studying. The blanks are poems which are being covered at the moment, but I'm not sure how much of it we'll be seeing in class. If pushed to choose from this list, I'd take Shakespeare, Waugh and Blake with the poetry and what I remember of Tess.  I'm a lot happier with this list. I don't know if I'm just anxious about the Pastoral and want something I'm more confident with or if picking from this list would be ultimately beneficial regardless of my distaste for the Pastoral. From this list I'd take Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton on instinct but I've not sat and looked at it properly. We have two sets of questions, one set made of questions on individual texts and one set of questions on the texts as a set, Gothic or Pastoral. We answer one from both lists. Here is a sample question paper if you want to see what sort of questions we're being set and if you want it, a sample mark scheme to see what they think we should be answering with. From what I've experienced, the examiners are looking for 'form, structure and language', 'symbolism', loads of framework related toss and a really heavy reliance on context. The teacher I see more of hates it, and agrees with me that they're trying to strip the life out of the subject. http://web.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/pdf/AQA-LITB3-W-SQP-07.PDF http://web.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/pdf/AQA-LITB3-W-SMS-07.PDF That's a long question for a really short answer. Sorry for putting you through all that. Aside: Do you know anything about universities in the UK? I'm totally lost, even a vague footing in who you know is where would be of immeasurable value.
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Feb 23, 2010 19:19
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vegaji posted:I've really gotten into Mad Men as of late, and I think that it's brilliant. It has some of the best character development that I've seen in television, along with the thing thats actually draw people in (an incredible commentary on 20th century American life, from gender roles to post-war capitalism). I had the same impression of Mad Men. Maybe I'm running out of brain cells, or maybe turning into my grandfather, but when I watch that show I can't get past how drat stylish everything is. That show could get away with using that Charlie Brown's parents noise every time someone spoke, or just have them say lines from Lord of the Rings. I bet five dollars it'd take me at least five episodes to notice. And honestly, Christina Hendricks doesn't help me attend to the writing, either. The attention I pay to that woman whenever she's on screen, it disappoints and saddens me.
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Feb 24, 2010 00:51
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Rick posted:My adviser suggested I become an English major as a placeholder major until I decide on something next fall(since it's basically too late to declare any other major for next fall already). I kind of am at a point where I have to choose a major to stay in college, but, it really could be worse, I did very well in my college English classes, and a lot of classes might be applicable to other majors (I'm leaning towards a media arts major). I thought I replied to this, but clearly I didn't. Your choice of major isn't a problem as much as your advisor's advising is. You should choose a major for one of two reasons: You're interested in the things you do as part of the major, or you're interested in the things you can do with what you learn as part of the major. Hopefully, you hit both these points -- I'd be hesitant to advise someone into a line of study where only one were true. But it doesn't sound like you hit either of these, really, which means you need to make a decision -- not about what you're going to major in, but how you're going to find out what to major in. Not knowing your exact situation, I'd advise you to look at this semester's course catalog and see which classes sound most interesting, then ask professors who teach those courses if you can sit in for a few days. Once you find some interesting ones, spend next semester either doing coursework or auditing courses in those fields, with an eye toward deciding on a major next semester. That might put you a few courses behind, but that's a drat sight better than either changing majors or retraining for whatever job you want ten years from now. Seriously. College is too expensive, and your time is too important, for you to study -- or spend your career working in -- a field you don't like. Especially when you've got a chance to find one that you do.
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Feb 24, 2010 01:03
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bartlebee posted:And that was another particular problem with bringing it up - as you said, this is a form that can't be utilized in other media. But I'd love to hear some opinions, even though I completely agree with this. I think I'ma disagree there. Long form storytelling's been used in other visual media for years -- there were serials in movie theaters both before and during TV's golden age. Radar Men From the Moon might not be high art, but it was definitely long form storytelling. There's no immovable reason that LFS in such a medium couldn't be revived. And as long as we're talking filmic media, there is no reason that long-form storytelling couldn't happen more often in regular moveis; it's already been well and successfully done in e.g. Godfather I and II (and, if you admit it, III), the Star Wars series, and so on. Not all that storytelling is particularly good, but neither is all the long-form drama on TV. And certainly Shakespeare did this with theater; you've got eight history plays that sequence one right after another (I Henry IV-Richard III), which gives you something like thirty-five hours of stage time; that's more than two seasons of an hour-long drama if you don't count the commercials. Again, there's no reason a theater couldn't present such an expansive story arc today. Except that most theaters are insanely risk-averse and thin on talent. So there are lots of film-style media for long-form storytelling; it's just that television, for whatever reason, is currently the medium of choice for much of it. But I can't think of a good reason that equally traditional media couldn't do this, since they've done it successfully in the past. And it's only a matter of time before we see long-form storytelling in non-broadcast flavors of "television" (e.g. a straight to DVD/Netflix/Redbox/Hulu series). So while LFS is the province of TV right this second, it wasn't that way in the recent past and probably won't be that way in the recent future. Also, I really like talking about TV. Especially well-written TV. So if that's where we want to go, full speed ahead.
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Feb 25, 2010 02:36
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z0331 posted:I don't know how much exposure you have to other humanities, but does the same hold true for, for example, foreign literature PhDs? For example, I'm planning on doing Japanese Literature through a Japanese L&L department. In my mind I generally equate this with an English Literature degree except that it's in a different language. Do you have any idea if those kind of PhDs have greater luck in the job market or is it all pretty much the same? MLA keeps strong stats non-English Language and Lit hires. My impression is that any non-English Language/Literature market is basically characterized by reduced supply and reduced demand. What I mean is, you're roughly as likely to get a job, but you'll need to wait longer for jobs to open up, and you'll need to be more willing to move to wherever the jobs are. That's another way of saying that non-English Language and Literature is, even more than English, an imperfect market. I mean, one job and one candidate means you've got it as long as you're willing to move to Anchorage. The second thing is that foreign language/lit programs do a lot of general education and have comparatively few majors. I'm at a college that is deeply, even radically, international. But even here, majors in e.g. Spanish or Japanese are rare. So even if your degree is in L&L, be prepared to teach a lot of language Gen Eds. At least unless you're at a department large and careless enough to adjunct out language instruction so you can teach all your classes to a half-dozen majors. As far as Japanese goes specifically, though, that's a trick. I think you'll find that Japanese Studies has recently suffered as a discipline as colleges have realized that the Koreas and China are worth researching. I think this move is largely complete, but what this means for future Japanese Studies hires, I can't even guess. Unfortunately, MLA doesn't track job markets by language -- or at least didn't in their 2004/05 report -- so you might have to hunt down stats from another professional organization to get a clearer picture of what Japanese/JS has recently done.
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Feb 25, 2010 02:55
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Thanks. I skimmed the MLA JIL 2008/09 report and it actually listed the number of JIL ads by discipline, stating Japanese had something like 35 ads in the foreign language edition. I'm not sure if I'm understanding that correctly, but to be honest it's a bit more than I would have expected. Although, it doesn't specifically say how many of those were TT positions, etc. I was also surprised at how many Comparative Lit-related ads there have been; around 200 each year for the past decade.
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Feb 25, 2010 04:01
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Howdy. Loving the thread. EDIT: was already discussed. Nevermind! Boston Low fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Feb 26, 2010 |
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Feb 26, 2010 05:40
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staggerlark posted:[Pastoral Problem] What can I say? That Gothic list looks way more exciting to me, too. Not that Pastoral is a bad genre -- it's actually really cool if you get Spenser or, you know, "Lycidas." I mean, it's only like the greatest poem in the English language. But I think my knee jerk response wouldn't be abandoning the Pastoral list to examine in Gothic. Instead, I'd get together with a confederate teacher and learn the gently caress out of Pastoral; there's nothing that says you can't bring in pastoral poetry that's not on the list, right? So check out some Cavalier poetry, some of the Libertines -- I'm thinking Herrick and Wilmot for starters -- and use their Pastoral material to drop some bombs on the exams. They're interesting, they'll definitely help you talk about how the library of symbols and themes associated with pastoral poetry changed through the Renaissance and Restoration, and (maybe most important) you'll have a clear idea of how, and to what extent, these extra readings improve the answers you'd be otherwise prepared to give. quote:Aside: Do you know anything about universities in the UK? I'm totally lost, even a vague footing in who you know is where would be of immeasurable value. I don't know much, that's for sure. I've got some contacts at smaller universities from working on literature handbooks and so on, but I might be better able to help if I had a clearer idea of what you're trying to decide.
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Mar 4, 2010 15:57
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z0331 posted:Thanks. That's a lot of jobs -- enough that I think the number wants more investigation. I'm not in a position to check the JIL now, but it'd be worth reading through the ads to see what's going on with hiring. I suspect that many of those jobs will be one and three year contracts, since that's the environment we seem to be in across disciplines at the moment. But that at least tells you where you might be seeing tenure-track hires when things improve. quote:I was also surprised at how many Comparative Lit-related ads there have been; around 200 each year for the past decade. Yeah, but keep in mind that -- at least in hiring practice -- Comparative Lit. job listings usually aren't all Comparative Lit.; you've got people being hired to teach in language and lit programs (that is, where the hiring parties trawl C/L graduates for someone with expertise in 17th c. German Drama), you've got hires for Classicists (who also often hold C/L degrees), you've got hires for basic language instruction, and you've got hires for those nastily-specific vacancies you get in well-developed C/L programs (e.g. we want someone with a general knowledge of Japanese literature who's done extensive research on 20th c. Beijing Opera and can teach Cantonese 101 & 102). So yeah, there are always a lot of Comparative Lit jobs; part of the reason for that is that not everyone hiring a C/L degree is a C/L program. Another part is that C/L hires are often difficult because C/L vacancies can leave maddeningly-specific curricular gaps. That doesn't mean it's not a good market -- I think it is. It just means you'll want to read the individual ads to get an idea of what the market looks like.
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Mar 4, 2010 16:17
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How do you feel when in literature (or any of the arts really) an allusion is made that isn't fully understood by the author. That is, the allusions are used to ground the work more or give it an more authentic feel even if the author isn't as well versed in the referenced subject as one is lead to believe by reading said work. Is that author somehow dishonest in his work? I ask this because I was writing something (a song) that both references a Cormac McCarthy character (Judge Holden, possibly a real historical character, though the description in Samuel Chamberlain's autobiography is said to be unreliable), St. Peter and Nero. I'm reading a book of bible stories in modern English as a way to become more familiar with the Bible before reading it in any of its many versions. However I haven't read about St. Peter yet. I have also read a few McCarthy novels but haven't read Blood Meridian. Does this somehow make my work less authentic? I guess I'm just worried that I'm just name dropping. What I am really trying to do is make some vague parallels between Holden and Nero. Thanks! The Bible is so rich with material but I also want to experiment with using different religious texts from different religions as a starting point for writing. Edit: For anyone who cares, Simon Peter's Hellenized name (I love wikipedia) is Simon Cephas, Which rhymes with Jesus way better than Peter does! Spiderfailure fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Mar 19, 2010 |
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Mar 19, 2010 07:15
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The interesting thing about allusion is how fluid its target objects (= e.g. Nero) are, in cultural terms. YOUR Nero is going to be a very different one from MY Nero, and even if mine (as a classicist) is more grounded in historical fact, yours may actually be more familiar to your audience. So while an inaccuracy on your part might be irritating to a pedant (like me  ), your image of a character is more familiar, thus more intelligible and effective to a general audience than mine would be. See what I'm saying? There's a linguist/Classicist called Greg Nagy at Harvard who does some truly complicated stuff on the concept of mimesis, which he defines as the process of reenactment. Inherent in reenactment is both a target object (in his case bits of mythology, or character types) and a sort of composition stage (mimesis) wherein that target is recomposed, reworked, reunderstood in every performance/instance of allusion. In conclusion, allusion is really goddamn interesting, and I wouldn't fault you for making allusions to things you aren't an expert in. That's what makes culture so rich: it's a shared network of constantly changing and developing targets. fakeedit:  I think I just had a small nerdgasm, thanks
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Mar 19, 2010 15:38
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Spiderfailure posted:How do you feel when in literature (or any of the arts really) an allusion is made that isn't fully understood by the author. [...] I ask this because I was writing something (a song) that both references a Cormac McCarthy character (Judge Holden, possibly a real historical character, though the description in Samuel Chamberlain's autobiography is said to be unreliable), St. Peter and Nero. I'm reading a book of bible stories in modern English as a way to become more familiar with the Bible before reading it in any of its many versions. However I haven't read about St. Peter yet. I have also read a few McCarthy novels but haven't read Blood Meridian. Does this somehow make my work less authentic? I guess I'm just worried that I'm just name dropping. What I am really trying to do is make some vague parallels between Holden and Nero. Thanks! I think I want to split this into two responses: one on how I respond to or think about allusion, and a second on authenticity -- or whatever you want to call the quality of your song that comes from knowing a great deal about your allusive subjects. For the first part: Check out this piece of Ginsberg's "Supermarket in California": Ginsberg posted:I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, It's difficult to glean from this allusion how much Ginsberg knew about Whitman (though it's easy to see what he thought of him). And I think we could agree that while this poem raises the issue of Whitman's homosexuality, whether the historical Whitman was (or was not) homosexual is interpretively irrelevant. What matters is that this Whitman has a thing for grocery boys; what might matter is whether Ginsberg is here establishing a relationship between his poem and other Whitman texts on the basis of Whitman's sexual preference. Put another way, the success of Ginsberg's allusion to Whitman the Character (as he appears in his own poetry, in biographies, and so on) doesn't seem to rest on how much Ginsberg knows about Whitman. Instead, it rests on what the allusion to Whitman contributes to the poem; this gets clear in the last stanza: Ginsberg posted:Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, We could pull this into all kinds of pieces, talk about how Ginsberg sets himself up as Whitman's poetic successor, why he incorporates Greek mythology here, and so on. But it seems clear that the poem means to set up a contrast between its America and the America that we understand Whitman to have imagined in his body of poetry -- sort of what you'd get if you compared the Camden he writes about in "I Dream'd in a Dream" to the Camden you'd see if you got really lost in New Jersey. So. My point is that (a) the knowledge, background, or depth of research you bring to your allusions and (b) what your allusions add to your song, they're totally different things. What I think matters is that you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish by comparing Holden to Nero, since even a well-researched or "authentic" allusion is an embarrassment if it's merely decorative. I'm not sure what your song's about, right? So I can't offer an opinion on whether this allusive strategy is wise. But I feel confident saying that your comparison of Holden to Nero is only worthwhile if it has some clear relationship to some other element of your song -- the cruelty or catastrophic indifference of some ex girl- or boyfriend, for instance. If you've got that, then I'm not sure the quality of your research really matters; you could probably craft just as useful an allusion with Wikipedia articles as Blood Meridian, since allusions are generally light on particulars and context. Unless you're writing something unusually detailed, you'll be lucky if your listeners get that you're talking about Judge Holden and not, say, Holden Caulfield. That said, I think as long as you're enjoying your research as a project, go to town. If it's a reason to read Blood Meridian or dig into some interesting Bible stories, go for it.
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Mar 22, 2010 22:03
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Thanks. I'm just sketching out thoughts right now. When I have something put together maybe I'll post it for critique. So essentially the allusion should refer back to the song and not just refer Holden and Nero to each other?
Spiderfailure fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Mar 23, 2010 |
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Mar 22, 2010 22:44
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I'm trying to decide between doctoral programs at the moment. Given: A) A fellowship/assistantship at an institution with unparalleled holdings in one of my main areas, one very strong faculty member who will introduce me to everyone in that field and promote the hell out of me generally--in a department that, while otherwise solid across the 20th century (where all my dissertation work would be), is top 40 at best and has a mediocre placement record, or B) An assistantship at a large top-25 or so department, without the same holdings, and without the field resources, but stronger across the board and with a correspondingly better placement history, which looks like a better choice, in terms of the likelihood of future employment? I should note that B would be slightly cheaper and definitely more pleasant to live in; both are farther from home than I would like to be but them's the breaks. I'm also waiting to hear from two more schools C and D, where C is a slight upgrade all-round on B (top 15-20, one field expert), and closer to home though not in as pleasant a location; and D is the school I would accept without hesitation if they let me in (top 10, great town, drivable distance to home). It's amazing to me that the number of applicants to programs continues to increase as the job market in the humanities continues to worsen; but then I am certainly part of the problem at this point. elentar fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Mar 23, 2010 |
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Mar 23, 2010 16:18
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elentar posted:I'm trying to decide between doctoral programs at the moment. Given: I'd take (A), at least if you're dead set on your field and the stars align. My thinking goes something like this: 1) Rankings for grad schools don't mean a whole lot -- I mean, even less than undergrad. Mostly, they're based on reputation surveys. They're also not granular or current enough; one or two good hires can turn a lousy concentration into a great one, especially if they're backed by e.g. a strong library or institutional research connections. So I'ma discount B's rankings as a selection criterion. It'd be different if the spread were wider -- say, top 25 v. top 100 -- but rankings are so indistinct and general that I'm not sure you'd see consistent real-world differences in individual students' experiences before you hit a ridiculous rankings spread. Where I get a little nervous on A is their placement. In my mind, that's the only ranking metric that matters. Mediocre placement suggests that the program might not have good soft supports -- research and travel money for grad students, publishing and job-gettin' seminars, and so on. Working with a good and dedicated faculty member can take the edge off of some of that, but it's not a substitute for the kind of vibrant intellectual community of grad students you get when everyone's conferencing and traveling together. 2) Who you work with matters more than where you work, not just in terms of reputation, but in terms of the quality of your research. No matter the size of a grad program, the backbone of your dissertation-stage work is the mentor/mentee relationship you've got with your adviser. This only makes A the better choice if you're confident you'll be able to work closely with this faculty member. If you can't, he or she might as well not be there. This being the case, it might be useful to talk to some of that fellow's former students. They'll give you a good idea of how available he is, and how helpful he was during the job hunt. 3) It might be useful to imagine, as best you can, what kind of PhD you're going to be. Do you want serious research depth in a small field, or some strong secondary teaching areas? Do you want to focus on a single author's work, or on trends inside a particular period? Do you want to be a great teacher or a great researcher? If you have any tentative answers about these, look at the recent grads from both departments, find one (or a few) who look(s) like who you want to be, and ask them about their experiences in their programs. So I think the short story is: A's clearly the better choice if your big-deal faculty member there has traditionally made his mentees a priority and the program's placing elentar-like PhDs in the kinds of jobs you'd want and you're unlikely to change fields or focuses. Otherwise, a broadly-strong program like B may be a better fit.
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Mar 23, 2010 20:36
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Brainworm posted:So I think the short story is: A's clearly the better choice if your big-deal faculty member there has traditionally made his mentees a priority and the program's placing elentar-like PhDs in the kinds of jobs you'd want and you're unlikely to change fields or focuses. Otherwise, a broadly-strong program like B may be a better fit. Cheers, thanks for that. The program tending to elentar-like PhDs is relatively new so the first crop of doctors won't be going on the market for another year yet, so data there is lacking. Still, I'll be working in this field for life; my pet author is closely tied to it--but it's not anything that will by itself get me hired. I definitely would be working with the guy; he's been recruiting me since a conference a year ago. And in his field at least, they have support for conference-goers: they sent 8 students to that same one this year. I've talked to a few students of his and their main complaint is the cost of living in the area, so the stipend won't be going very far. Sweating jobs and I'm still a minimum of 3 1/2 years out, ugh.
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Mar 24, 2010 22:39
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newth fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Oct 26, 2011 |
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Mar 26, 2010 03:09
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newth posted:I have a general question about grad school. Well I have kind of a similar story to reassure you with. I originally was planning to study early-modern European history at the doctoral level, but ended up doing modern British history for a number of reasons. As far as "catching up" just get your advisor to recommend a few of what he considers the best-done overview books on the subject, read them carefully and you'll be fine. It'll be tougher for you than for people who've done art history all along at first, but with dedication you can easily catch up. edit: My undergrad degree was a sociology degree, and then I got an MA in History, for reference. My u/g career has only mattered at all because I read texts like Durkheim, DuBois, Marx et al earlier than a lot of purely History students, but that's about it.
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Mar 26, 2010 11:39
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1) What is your view about English stealing words like "kindergarten" and "plateau" from other languages? 2) Why do we have so many bloody rules on "word forms of multiple" such as Ox -> Oxen (not Oxes) Child -> Children (not Childs) Virus -> Virii (not Viruses) Sheep -> Sheep (no such thing as Sheeps) 3) Why does "bullshit" have to the leading equivalent word of "lies , rubbish and nonsense"? I have heard quite an amount "horseshit" and "chickenshit" but nowhere as much as "bullshit."
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Mar 26, 2010 12:58
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elentar posted:I've talked to a few students of his and their main complaint is the cost of living in the area, so the stipend won't be going very far. If their main complaint is cost of living, I think you're golden. One thing you'll find is that humanities grad students are notoriously bad with money. As are many of the professors. So whenever I hear the "we don't get paid enough" complaint I usually tune it out. Count on renting and possibly sharing a bedroom in a house or similar close to campus. You will not be able to afford a one or two-bedroom apartment in a college town on an English stipend. If you own a car outright, keep it (unless you're moving someplace where this would be stupid, e.g. Manhattan); otherwise, plan around not having one. You probably will not be able to afford cable TV, broadband, or a fancy cell phone plan. And budget as though you will not be able to find Summer work (i.e. bank about a quarter of what you make against the possibility of Summer unemployment). What I'm saying is, set your lifestyle standards according to what you can actually afford year to year, and not based on what you think you're entitled to (e.g. your own car or living space), and you'll do fine. You'll also be amazed how many grad students will, say, rent a one-bedroom apartment in a nice part of town, or buy a car, and then complain about how they're always broke.
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Mar 26, 2010 15:49
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newth posted:I have a general question about grad school. You'll catch up fine. What I think you'll find is that media literacy skills transfer surprisingly quickly from one medium to another, at least as long as the cultural backing for those media doesn't change too much. That is, it's fairly easy to go from talking about 19th c. American literature to 19th c. American painting, since much of your critical vocabulary -- the ways of reading you've learned -- will serve both moderately well. If you were moving from 19th c. American Literature to 7th c. Chinese sculpture, you might have work cut out for you. But I can think of at least a few scholars who've made the transition to or from Art History to Literature and back again; Scott Paul Gordon, for instance, started off as a Restoration Lit. scholar (and still is), but writes a tremendous amount of well-reviewed scholarship on Restoration painting. So if he can make that move without the benefit of coursework, I'm sure you can do it with strong institutional support. Hell, I went from studying Shakespeare to training technical writers and designing standardized tests after about a week of intense reading. If you're clever and well-trained, picking up competence (or even expertise) in something entirely new is, well, it's not hard. Plus, I think you'll find the majority of the useful skills you take away from an undergraduate degree involve the broadest forms of modern literacy -- you know, reading and writing academic prose, researching whatever, making strong interpretive cases, and so forth. Those skills are maybe division-specific, since writing as an engineer looks different from writing as an historian, but they carry over more easily than you'd think.
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Mar 26, 2010 20:52
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You say that you've worked worked with technical writing. I'm taking classes next year for technical writing, and my school offers a certification for it, but I'd need to stick around an extra semester to finish that out. Not really worth it. Anyways, I'm really interested in pursuing work as a technical writer after graduation if grad school doesn't fall into place. Do you have any suggestions, specific or general, to offer? Keep in mind I'll probably only have 2 or 3 classes re: technical writing when I graduate next spring.
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Mar 26, 2010 21:29
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Anonymaus posted:1) What is your view about English stealing words like "kindergarten" and "plateau" from other languages? Well, I'm not a linguist. But I'm not sure this is "stealing" in the same way that taking money out of my mom's purse is "stealing." In fact I'm not sure that "stealing" is a useful analog. After all, words/ideas and objects operate according to totally different natural economies. But me? I think any individual can only benefit from having as large a conceptual toolkit as possible, and that means grabbing as many words as you can. Even if you've got to smash some store windows or bust some heads to get them. I mean, without schadenfreude it'd be very difficult for me to describe how I feel when someone gets denied tenure. quote:2) Why do we have so many bloody rules on "word forms of multiple" such as This is an interesting question, but I think a wrong one. Language, like most human whatevers, isn't designed. It just happens or, more to the point, is produced by a set of processes that do not favor the simplicity or elegance of the final product. So to ask why we have so many "rules" for something linguistic sort of assumes that the language is the product of the rules rather than the right way round: rules exist to describe properties of the language, not to prescribe how the language ought to be spoken or written. That might seem confusing, since rules are used to norm written and spoken behavior all the time: maybe your mom says "don't say 'ain't,' say 'isn't.'" What she means when she says that isn't that there is some inviolable set of rules that governs the language, or that using "ain't" will confuse people. It's that the people she would prefer you speak like don't use "ain't." That is, it's useful to think of a language like English as being composed of what Rhetoricians call "discourse communities," or people who share a common linguistic method or dialect. You can use rules to describe how these dialects work, or how they are different from one another, but what you "ought" to do isn't governed by these rules; it's governed by the discourse community you want to affiliate yourself with. So depending on how I want to affiliate, or what group I want to designate myself a member of, the plural of "child" might be "children" (if I want to affiliate myself with white, college educated professionals) or "harem" (if I want to affiliate with the Tea Party). quote:3) Why does "bullshit" have to the leading equivalent word of "lies , rubbish and nonsense"? I have heard quite an amount "horseshit" and "chickenshit" but nowhere as much as "bullshit." This is very, very interesting. I think it all begins with Martin Luther. Yes, that Martin Luther. The earliest uses of "bullshit" I can find are from the early 20th c. The letters of Wyndham Lewis has the earliest use, in letter 66, c. 1915: "Eliot has sent me Bullshit and the Ballad for Big Louise. They are excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry." Here, "bullshit" appears to mean "joke" or "jest" -- a piece of "ribaldry," not a lie. A more common use appears in e.e. cummings's "Enormous Room": "When we asked him once what he thought about the war, he replied, 'I t'ink lotta bullsh_t.'" That's from 1928, and more in line with contemporary usage. The meanings of both uses roughly correspond with meanings of the word "bull," which as early as 1630 meant a "jest"; a "bull," in other words, was a joke, which is why my favorite Renaissance jest book is 1636's Booke of Bulls. That seems to roughly correspond to Lewis's use of "bullshit" as "humorous anecdote" or "joke" or "jest," which seems extant in some uses of "bullshitting." But I think we can firmly place the blame for our more common modern use of "bullshit" firmly on the shoulders of Martin Luther. Luther is largely responsible for another meaning of "bull," which enters the English language in 1561. Luther was fond of punning on the word "bull" (as in "Papal Bull," as in Papal decree) by switching it with the Latin bulla or "bubble," the upshot of his pun being that Papal decrees (Bulls) were essentially weightless and insubstantial. This caught on. So, for instance, when Leo X excommunicated Luther in 1520, theology students at Erfurt tore the bull into pieces and threw it in some local body of water; if I remember my European history correctly, the quote from the event translates as something like "it is only a bubble (bulla). Let it float." So what we inherit from Luther is a word, "bull," that means "bubble"/bulla, as in an empty, weightless, insubstantial, or "untrue" declaration. And I think this gets us both the meanings of "bull" that show up as "bullshit" in the 20th c. On one hand, it gives us the meaning roughly correspondent to "untrue speech," since the upshot of Luther's pun was that Papal Bulls were essentially meritless. On the other hand, it gives us the meaning that roughly corresponds to "joke," since Luther's deliberate exchange of "bull" and bulla was a play on words with international appeal. It was probably the single most significant and widely-known joke in human history. Where and why we get "poo poo" tacked on to "bull," I don't know. But it's interesting to speculate. My best guess is that adding "-poo poo" comes out of the widespread mistaken impression that both these meanings of "bull" refer to the animal rather than the protestant take on Papal decrees. "-poo poo" also emphasizes the quality of being untrue, I think, though I'm not going to dig for much evidence on why that might be.
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Mar 26, 2010 22:01
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vegaji posted:You say that you've worked worked with technical writing. I'm taking classes next year for technical writing, and my school offers a certification for it, but I'd need to stick around an extra semester to finish that out. Not really worth it. Sure thing. The most important thing to remember is that you're writing for people, and most often for people who are in situations where they need documentation: An employee who needs to know who to talk to when his paycheck gets screwed up; a trainee who needs to know what what a CLEC is; a technician who needs to know how to get a machine to produce an error code, and how to find out what error code --X- means. This means that the most important skill you can have as a technical writer is knowing your readers and knowing their situations. You don't have to be an electrical engineer to tell someone how to fix an alarm clock or, say, be an architect to tell someone how to shingle a roof. But you do have to know whether the person you're explaining these processes to is an electrical engineer or an architect or a roofer; that's the difference between writing a list of reminders ("always bring an extra chalk line") and writing a two hundred page manual that starts by explaining what a shingle is. So when you apply and interview as a technical writer, attend to the human element. When someone asks "how would you document process X?" your response should always be "who am I documenting it for?" and "what will they be expected to do?" You'd be amazed how many writers get wrapped up in knowing the ins and outs of whatever kind of engineering but never, say, interview the workers they're writing manuals for.
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Mar 27, 2010 02:02
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At what point does the phrase "I'm a writer" not become an exercise in douchebaggery? When is one considered an actual writer and not an amateur hack? I ask because I've written a couple of novels, one "almost" published yet I try not to call myself a writer unless I'm either joking around or stating a point on something (the latter is me adding to the douchebaggery).
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Mar 27, 2010 02:06
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Brainworm posted:This is very, very interesting. I think it all begins with Martin Luther. Yes, that Martin Luther.  Brainworm, I love this thread. I think you're a cool guy and you represent your/our field really well. However, Anonymaus was asking linguistics questions of the wrong person. Mediocre responses to something outside one's field are unsurprising and not a big deal. However, while inventing nonsensical folk etymologies may be entertaining, it's the opposite of helpful. Disseminating misinformation is just not nice, darn it. Linguistics scholars discussing "bullshit."
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Mar 27, 2010 07:22
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i like nice words
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Anne Whateley posted:
Yes. Asked for the etymology of "bullshit," I did what any red-blooded academic would do and made up something crackrock.
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Mar 27, 2010 14:07
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Contractions are supposed to reflect their counterparts, I suppose: doesn't = does not, etc. However, people tend to use the contractions in cases where it would be syntactically wrong to use their counterparts: "Isn't it a bad idea?" = "Is not it a bad idea". Generally, using contractions to open a sentence. Is this gauche, accepted by tradition of prescriptionists? Trying to rewrite sentences to conform to the non-contractions can be arduous, and why bother if it's perfectly fine.
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Mar 27, 2010 15:04
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bengraven posted:At what point does the phrase "I'm a writer" not become an exercise in douchebaggery? When is one considered an actual writer and not an amateur hack? I think of writer as an occupational label, like "waiter" or "teacher." So I think it makes sense to say you're a writer when that's what you do for a living. I mean, I write as part of my job -- I've written a few books and I write articles and book chapters pretty often -- but I don't self-identify as a writer. I don't get paid for it for the same basic reasons I don't get paid to keep my office clean. That's not great, since if I were pressed I'd have to say counterintuitive things like "I write a book every year or so, but I'm not a writer." That sounds like some kind of denial, but I'm not sure it is; there's a difference between wanting to be a pro basketball player and being a pro basketball player, even if, either way, you play basketball eight hours a day. So I think that's my answer. You're a writer when writing's your job, and I think that holds regardless of how much you write or how skilled a writer you are. That cuts out a lot of people, including some friends of mine and e.g. a few Pushcart winners. But the best I can say on that is that winning a pushcart makes you a good writer, but doesn't necessarily make you a writer.
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Mar 27, 2010 15:13
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Brainworm posted:Yes. Asked for the etymology of "bullshit," I did what any red-blooded academic would do and made up something crackrock.
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Mar 27, 2010 16:48
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