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Have you taken a look at Jerome McGann's IVANHOE game? Seems an interesting way to organize an upper-level seminar. edit: I suppose a link might help, duh. http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/jjm2f/old/IGamehtm.html elentar fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Apr 21, 2010 |
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Apr 20, 2010 23:19
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Look Around You posted:Hey guys, I'm crossposting, but I have kind of an ethical problem involving my sister. Here's the original post: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3198184&pagenumber=65#post375414936. Thanks for any help. Usually when you get a freshman who does well first semester and bombs second semester, the problem is social rather than academic. And I think that's what you're describing here: Look Around You posted:Her first semester she did fine, but she's totally floundering this semester. She failed her first calc test, dunno about her second one. She got a low B on her first physics test, and "Doesn't know" how she did on the second one. She also skips physics routinely because "she can't understand the professor" and "he wants us to know what's going on with the topic before class". Students' first semesters are technically the most challenging; they've got to learn to navigate college life, being away from home, and so on. The problem that the second semester presents usually isn't more challenging coursework; it's that students develop a sense of social entitlement they didn't have when they first came to college, like "I should be able to go out three nights a week / play as much World of Warcraft as I want / smoke up every night and still do fine in my classes." And so second semester students get pushed into academic corners because they'd rather e.g. rush than do their calculus homework. My point is that your sister likely doesn't have an academic problem; her first semester suggests she's intellectually capable of and sufficiently trained to college-level work. What she likely has is a really typical second-semester-freshman time management problem, probably driven by people or habits she'd be better off separated from. This means that, frankly, you're wasting your time tutoring her. She's shown she can learn college-level course material and balance her time well when she's motivated to do it. I mean, if I stop going to the gym the solution isn't to teach me how to do squats. I already know, right? I've just chosen to do something else. So me, I'd let her fail. At least then she's got to either choose college or choose whatever else. The worst case scenario is that she burns however much loan money by squeaking by for a few semesters, not learning anything and eventually either failing completely or dropping out.
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Apr 21, 2010 13:49
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radiolarian posted:What do you think of Bennington College? I think Bennington's in a really bad position, and that its position is unlikely to improve. I can't speak to the student experience there -- I only know one Bennington graduate well, and what I've gotten from her is that the student housing is really nice and there are lots and lots of expensive drugs. But Bennington's structural position is just terrible. They're desperately expensive and desperately underfunded. And though Bennington is prestigious it is not academically strong. It's well outside the top 100 Liberal Arts colleges, and while I'm not inclined to put too much weight on rankings, there are generally significant differences in program quality between, say, a college ranked around 20 and a college ranked around 120. And Bennington's financial situation points to serious problems, I think; when you recruit students from among the wealthiest families in the nation and you can't run a successful capital campaign, that's bad. A college like Bennington should be pulling in $15 million dollar gifts, not shoestringing by on a $15 million endowment. I'd add to this that Bennington is dreadfully mismanaged. The board + president fired about a third of the faculty in the mid 90's and abolished tenure, which means that the college is effectively run by the trustees and the president. That is bad. Trustees and the president really exist to safeguard the mission of the college and raise funds; they don't have the academic experience, or the detailed field knowledge it takes to e.g. design or evaluate a biology program. That's another way of saying that they're great at approving things but terrible at designing them. And Bennington arguably has one of the worst and longest-serving presidents in higher education. But Bennington does have a track record for producing strong actors and writers -- Bret Easton Ellis is probably the most famous of these. But I'm inclined to attribute some of this to the financial position of the students Bennington attracts; it is a very expensive college without the resources or, frankly, the inclination to deliver significant need-based aid, and so many of its graduates have the kind of financial backing it takes to pursue what are normally non- or low-paying careers in the fine arts. So that's my unflattering take on Bennington. Given the strength of its programs, its real-world tuition, and its staffing and management, I'd need to see a really convincing reason to go there over Middlebury, Grinnell, or Amherst or even some of the fine 50s like Reed, Earlham, Denison, or Beloit.
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Apr 21, 2010 22:07
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Brainworm posted:First, knights exist in what I'ma call an ineffectual context. You can see this most in Chretien de Troyes's Arthurian romances, but I think it's true across the genre. In Troyes, like in, say, "Gawain and the Green Knight," a knight is driven to his quest largely because everyone else -- including the king -- is either too scared or too lazy to take it on. Absolutely! I always had this idea that medieval literature was naive and simplistic with good and brave kings and knights and pure chaste ladies, but when you start to study it, you realize that writers of the day were intelligent and perfectly aware of how hosed up and hypocritical society could be. In the stories, honor and chivalry came from doing your duty and keeping your word in spite of all this. King Arthur may be inexperienced and immature, but he's still your king so you do whatever you can to protect him. Isn't there a version of the "loathly lady" story where Sir Gawain has to marry the old hag because King Arthur screwed up? Detectives work for ineffectual, modern day King Arthurs with any vestiges of nobility stripped away. In The Long Goodbye, Marlowe's job is basically to take keep an eye on an alcoholic writer who can't take care of himself. Sometimes they end up doing a rich guy's dirty work (or are tricked into it), and there are countless detective novels and stories where the detective has to go in search of the missing daughter of an ineffectual, absent, or abusive father.
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Apr 21, 2010 23:55
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Brainworm posted:Truer words were never written. Do you see many instances of students being acutely aware of these cliches and making a rather ham-fisted and obvious attempt to go the polar opposite route? Like an Anti-Mary Sue sort of thing.
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Apr 22, 2010 03:29
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PlasticPaddy posted:Do you see many instances of students being acutely aware of these cliches and making a rather ham-fisted and obvious attempt to go the polar opposite route? Like an Anti-Mary Sue sort of thing. Literature students are not the most self-aware of people at times (hence the all-black wardrobes)
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Apr 22, 2010 05:47
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TheChimney posted:I always thought oval office was the last truly offensive word left. I guess I am behind the times. It's not that the word's inoffensive; it's at least as offensive as any other general-purpose profanity, and the novelty of it hasn't yet worn off. But whether this is because I'm getting older, or because things have actually changed, I think words have lost their power to hurt. What I mean is, general-purpose profanity (e.g. calling someone a "friend of the family" or a "fucker" or a "oval office") isn't going to inspire a depth of reaction unless you by chance tap some well of insecurities. That's another way of saying that a word like "oval office" or "bitch" has about as many hard edges as "I don't like you." Maybe fewer, since someone who care's what you think about them can't pretend the latter was said in anger and likely to be taken back.* So I think if you really want to offend someone -- that is, provoke a genuine emotional response instead of the kind of feigned outrage right-wing talk show hosts are so good at -- you really need to tailor what you're saying. If I wanted to really hurt girlfriend's feelings, I'd call her, I dunno, a "miscarriage factory." That's not profanity. There's no reason you couldn't say it on TV. But I'd bet my favorite jeans she'd take that to her therapist. "oval office" wouldn't do anything close to that, for the same reasons "miscarriage factory' wouldn't work on my sister.** That's another way of saying that words aren't inherently offensive or hurtful; they need a context, and the strength or particularity of that context is what makes them useful * Seriously. Think about which one your mom would cry about. ** i.e. Because she's practically got a reserved parking space at Planned Parenthood.
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Apr 22, 2010 15:16
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elentar posted:Have you taken a look at Jerome McGann's IVANHOE game? Seems an interesting way to organize an upper-level seminar. I had not seen this before. And my first reading of this leaves me with mixed feelings. One of those feelings is that McGann's prose is killing the speech center of my brain. Another is that there's an exercise with some potential buried in the game somewhere, but there's some distance between the avowed motives for the game and the logic behind the actual "moves"; that's a problem a useful game is going to have to negotiate. I mean, here's the object of the game: McGann posted:The players engage with this discourse field in the same way as in any critical exercise, by making use of primary or secondary bibliographic and historical texts. The object was (is) to explore and elaborate significant features of the materials that constitute the discourse of Ivanhoe and explore these as a means to uncovering "latent" texts within this field or the work itself. Right. So in non-stilted English, the players are to use texts that have some compelling rational relationship to "Ivanhoe" to discover something about "Ivanhoe" or the discourse surrounding it (e.g. Ivanhoe criticism). They then express that discovery in creative terms -- by writing a new "Ivanhoe" passage, for instance. But the moves played here seem to work according to a "write whatever the gently caress you want" logic; that is, the moves aren't answerable to either the "Ivanhoe" text or to the history and criticism surrounding it. Players are responsible for passages, but not their exposition. That's another way of saying that this is like playing Scrabble without being able to challenge words like "xnibleq"; without checks on moves, without a referee or a like process, I don't think you get a pedagogically useful game. You get a bunch of self-congratulatory semi-creative wankery. So if I were going to introduce a game like this into a class, we would need to referee the moves somehow. I think the easiest way to do this would be to break an introductory series of moves into some assignments with definite goals and endpoints, like "write a 200 word passage, to be inserted between the third and fourth paragraphs on page nine, that would resolve this critical debate about the text." After a couple discussions on what works (or doesn't) for those confined moves, I think you could start introducing complications. But even with an upper-level seminar, I think you'd need something to keep rigor in the game.
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Apr 22, 2010 20:29
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Brainworm, this thread is amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to everyone's questions. Reading through the posts has been quite enlightening, but I wanted to ask your opinion on my personal situation. Last year I graduated with a BS in English with focus in Professional Writing. During my time at college I spent 3 semesters as a teaching assistant and found a deep passion for working with students. I've always had great writing skills but an aversion for school. I want to teach, but am not very academic. Also I have little interest in classic literature and would much rather focus on current works, mainly 20th century American or British. Do you think there is a chance for me in that niche? Really I'd be happy teaching basic freshman writing courses, speech, creative writing, ect. but I don't know what to pursue in Graduate school in order to reach that goal. Do you have any suggestions or grad programs that you've heard of that might fit my aspirations? I've thought about doing a Ph D. in creative writing, but I don't know if that is worth the time and effort if I just want to mainly teach. Thanks!
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Apr 22, 2010 20:30
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Brainworm posted:I think Bennington's in a really bad position, and that its position is unlikely to improve. I can't speak to the student experience there -- I only know one Bennington graduate well, and what I've gotten from her is that the student housing is really nice and there are lots and lots of expensive drugs. Well, that's delightful. I sent in my deposit a few days ago.  For what it's worth, they gave me a lot more aid than Reed did. I guess I'll see how my first semester goes and go from there.
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Apr 22, 2010 20:33
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Brainworm posted:I had not seen this before. And my first reading of this leaves me with mixed feelings... I can see that, although this was the first iteration of the game and they tightened it up quite a bit afterward (McGann's prose remains bad, but he can still put on a costume and write perfectly serviceable mimicry; go figure that one out). And they quickly realized it was meant to be played online, in a shared virtual environment--meaning that, for any session to really take off, the players would have to play off of one another, which provides one important break on tangential wankery. (An interactive, semi-intelligent AI would provide another, but that is down the road still.) In the second game they played, on Wuthering Heights, he took on the role of a literary forger of the 1920s, who managed to convince a bunch of folks at the time that he had discovered a sheaf of letters between the Brontës that would, if authentic, affect the way we read everything that came out of that hosed-up little family. So a lot depends on the people taking part, and a lot depends on the virtual environment you can shape around that--though I'd think the same would be true of a classwide wiki (which is still something I look forward to incorporating once I get classes that aren't big lecture sessions on mandatory material.) I guess what I like most of it is that it dovetails with my intuitive feeling that literary criticism is at heart a game to be played. That is, I think people are already playing games like this when they write essays or BB posts, or when they survey critical literature, or whenever they take texts and make new texts out of them. So IVANHOE has the benefit of foregrounding that. I agree that without a somewhat firm structure it could easily spin off into wankery or circlejerking--but isn't that true of pretty much any classroom?
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Apr 22, 2010 23:46
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Malaleb posted:Isn't there a version of the "loathly lady" story where Sir Gawain has to marry the old hag because King Arthur screwed up? You might be thinking of "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell." In it, Arthur apparently wanders, alone and unarmed, onto the property of a rival king/knight, Gromer Somer Joure. Joure compels Arthur to promise to come back in a year, also alone and unarmed, to tell Joure what women want most -- that's where the "Wedding" starts to follow the loathly lady pattern. If Arthur doesn't have the answer to Joure's question when they meet back up, Arthur agrees to let Joure kill him. Because Gawain had apparently wronged Joure earlier, the quest to discover what women really want falls to him; he meets the loathly lady (Ragnell) and things happen about like you'd expect.* But yeah, Arthur arguably screws up during his deer hunting, and he certainly passes his task off on Gawain. * Following the loathly lady pattern, Ragnell is hideous looking, knows the answer to the riddle (sovereignty), but will only tell Gawain if he promises to marry her. He does, and on his wedding night discovers that she was cursed such that she can either be beautiful when they're alone together at night, or beautiful when she's around his friends during the day. He allows her to choose, breaking the spell so that Ragnell's beautiful all the time -- proving that as long as you let your wife do whatever she wants, she'll be hot, apparently.
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Apr 23, 2010 18:12
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Doing anything for Shakespeare's maybe-birthday?
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Apr 23, 2010 23:07
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What's up with sight rhymes? Some were auditory rhymes in the dialect of the writer; that I can understand. But it seems that at some point, poets started intentionally choosing sight rhymes that were not auditory rhymes in their own dialect. Why? Have poets of languages other than English also done this?
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Apr 25, 2010 04:20
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lugubriousmoron posted:Brainworm, this thread is amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to everyone's questions. Thanks. And do I need another reason to put off grading? Yes. Yes I do. quote:Last year I graduated with a BS in English with focus in Professional Writing. [...] I want to teach, but am not very academic. Also I have little interest in classic literature and would much rather focus on current works, mainly 20th century American or British. Do you think there is a chance for me in that niche? Really I'd be happy teaching basic freshman writing courses, speech, creative writing, [...] Do you have any suggestions or grad programs that you've heard of that might fit my aspirations? I've thought about doing a Ph D. in creative writing, but I don't know if that is worth the time and effort if I just want to mainly teach. I think what you want is a program in Rhetoric and Composition, a.k.a. Composition Studies. These programs are configured in lots of different ways, and I'll talk about some of the configurations that might work best for you in a second. R/C gives you a lot of training in writing instruction. And that's generally good, since this opens the doors to lots of faculty and staff positions that involve working with students -- not just teaching but running Writing Centers, designing Writing Across the Curriculum programs, and so on. Ideally, your experience in an R/C program would end with a couple years of you doing some or all of these jobs at whatever university and thinking through some research project -- trying some kind of pedagogical exercise for a semester and measuring whatever outcomes. But if you want to do 20th c. literature, what you want to find is a R/C program that's housed in an English department. That'll let you do R/C as a major area and 20th c. British or American lit, etc. as a minor area. The key is finding a program that offers you that kind of breadth but will still let you do those last couple years of R/C pre-professional work in e.g. the Writing Center. I can't recommend you a specific program that meets these criteria, but I think I can recommend you a type of program. You'll almost certainly want a private university, since State U's that have good R/C programs will have large ones, and almost certainly ones that are by policy or practice separate from English Literature. A smaller program will also give you a better shot at that pre-professional work; you'll have one person running the Writing Center regardless of whether there are 2000 or 20,000 undergraduates, and regardless of how many grad. students are doing R/C. So I'd start by looking at places like Boston or Tufts. I'm not recommending either one specifically, just places of about that position: small R/C programs close to English Lit., and generally strong programs so you're not saddled with a strong major area and a dog of a minor one. As a final note, the market for R/C grads is somewhat better than the market for Lit. grads, but nobody's really sure how much better because of the variety of staff positions R/C grads can fill. There are, on the other hand, lots of grads and comparatively few jobs in 20th c. So keep that in mind as you think through what you want to do; you might be better off going t a R/C program that really fits you well than one that'll let you concentrate in Lit., too.
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Apr 26, 2010 20:07
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elentar posted:I can see that, although this was the first iteration of the game and they tightened it up quite a bit afterward (McGann's prose remains bad, but he can still put on a costume and write perfectly serviceable mimicry; go figure that one out). And they quickly realized it was meant to be played online, in a shared virtual environment--meaning that, for any session to really take off, the players would have to play off of one another, which provides one important break on tangential wankery. (An interactive, semi-intelligent AI would provide another, but that is down the road still.) Yeah. I think the key to this is execution; I'd want to have a half-dozen informal games with undergraduates under my belt before I rolled it out in a class. Also: a wiki seems like excellent terrain for this game. If I were going to roll out a practice game, I'd start with a short text on the main page, and have the players go from there: writing subpages and sub-subpages, leaving comments, linking to the outside world, and so on. That'd also provide a sane way to track everyone's moves. And yes, literary criticism is a game -- at least in the sense that you're operating within a set of meaningful but wholly arbitrary constraints. That's one place I've often noted common ground between English and Math, but not, say, English and Chemistry.
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Apr 26, 2010 20:24
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Your Proud Pal posted:Doing anything for Shakespeare's maybe-birthday? If you mean 23 April, girlfriend went to the bar right after work and I joined her a few hours later. Thanks to an edged combination of boredom, stress, and idiot friends, she drank herself into a kind of petulance and stubbornness I've for some reason only seen in half-asian women. That's either a statement about race, culture, or who I drink with. Anyway. I found out that Girlfriend has like retard strength when she's too drunk to walk a straight line. So if she wants to sleep on her front porch because somebody might be in her house(?!), I can't move her. And even when she passes out she's too tall to carry. It's like trying to pick up a scarecrow made out of vaulting poles.
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Apr 26, 2010 20:52
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I work in the Writing Center at my school now, which interested me in your post i/r/t R/C (acronym overload). What do you think of writing centers and their future in university education, along with their roles in English departments and other interdisciplinary work?
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Apr 26, 2010 21:25
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Brainworm posted:she drank herself into a kind of petulance and stubbornness I've for some reason only seen in half-asian women. You should come to Taiwan for some real petulance.
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Apr 27, 2010 04:54
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Sorry if this has been covered, but this is a long thread. Singular possession is indicated by adding an 's no matter the final consonant right? My copy of Elements of Style is from 1979, and it is pretty explicit about that, considering it is the very first rule. I was wondering if that has changed because I just got my research paper back and my history professor took points off for "Dickens's novels..." The paper was kinda about Dickens so this came up a lot.
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Apr 27, 2010 23:45
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I'm no expert but I learned to put only the apostrophe after a word that ends with an s. Dickens' not Dickens's.
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Apr 28, 2010 05:21
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bigperm posted:Sorry if this has been covered, but this is a long thread. quote:Elements of Style It's a stylistic choice. I like to include the extra 's' because that's how I find it's pronounced regardless, which leads into... A related question! As I've heard it, people tend to pronounce both "Dickens's" and "Dickens'" approximately like dick-ens-ezz, assuming both refer to possession by a single entity. (edit: I also find that this pronunciation is unanimous in general speech.) My question is: does anybody care which is said? I mean, you're pronouncing something that's not written if you say "Dickens'" like I've mentioned, yet that's what I tend to hear. pokeyman fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Apr 28, 2010 |
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Apr 28, 2010 06:39
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Minor Mazurka posted:What's up with sight rhymes? Some were auditory rhymes in the dialect of the writer; that I can understand. But it seems that at some point, poets started intentionally choosing sight rhymes that were not auditory rhymes in their own dialect. Yup. And I think this goes back a long way. But let me back up first. Reading a poem starts with a kind of pattern recognition. How patterns are established, and which patterns count, are a matter of convention; it is, for instance, generally true that the font a poem is printed in is not interpretively relevant. Although this might be a pattern established in a collection like the Norton ("Hey! All these poems are printed in a Lucida Serif!"), we generally accept that a poem like "Jabberwocky" can be faithfully reproduced in serif or sans-serif fonts or, say, printed in blue ink in a chancery font on a billboard. But we wouldn't say the same thing about matters of traditional significance like line breaks. If a printer reproduced the first two lines of "Jabberwocky" like this: Mislineation posted:Twas brilig, and the slithy toves did We'd agree he mislineated. "Did" begins the second line of "Jabberwocky," and poetic tradition says that line breaks matter, even when the poet is writing nonsense. We'd also say that replacing "wabe" with "wape" is a similar error, even though "wabe" was not a word before Carroll used it, and the substitution of one meaningless word for another seems the slightest of differences -- and probably affects the reception of the poem less than printing it on one of those "South of the Border" billboards you see on I-75. But tradition says that "wape" matters and the billboard printing does not. This is where we get into rhyme. I think the chief use of rhyme in a poem is establishing a pattern. This might be a traditional and deeply formal pattern -- say, a series of rhyming couplets that draw attention to the poem's metrical regularity. In the case of, I dunno, a poem by someone like Pope, such couplets might draw attention to the poet's wit -- his ability to work within the constraints of rhyming couplets and still deliver incisive observations. Likewise, a rhyming couplet out of place -- say, a the end of a passage that does not otherwise rhyme -- draws attention to itself, and usually means that the content of the couplet is of special importance. You'd see this in drama when a villain is laying out his plans, like in Richard III or that awful Dune miniseries the SciFi channel did like ten years ago. But you also see it at e.g. the end of a sonnet, where you learn to expect a sort of twist. All of that brings us to things like slant rhyme and sight rhyme/eye rhyme. These sorts of half rhymes are ways of either establishing or varying a rhyming pattern, though which is happening, and to what end, depends on the poem. But because we're talking about poetry, and Western poetic traditions suggests that rhyme is always significant, a full rhyme, slant rhyme, eye rhyme, or non-rhyme always means something. If the poet is someone like Burns or Chaucer, it's a fair bet that the slant or sight rhyme is not really one at all, and is supposed to instead tell us something about the dialect that the speaker is using -- like if I had a character from Georgia rhyme "pin" with "pen" or a character from Southern Ohio rhyme "wash" with "marsh." Otherwise, sight rhyme is generally a tool a poet uses to draw your attention to some tension between the visual and aural qualities of his poem, or a part of it. Usually, this tension has something to do with another thematic or formal tension in the poem; a slant rhyme or eye rhyme is a way of establishing an almost-but-not-quite relationship, and a good poet is going to do that for a reason. quote:Why? Have poets of languages other than English also done this? This practice goes back a long way. I don't have much of Dante's Italian, but if you trust John Ciardi (who did a nice translation of the "Divine Comedy"), there's a sort of hierarchy of rhymes in e.g. "Inferno," where Virgil speaks in nicely rhymed prose and the various inhabitants of hell are more or less articulate largely by dint of how nicely their rhymes fit together. A more modern example is Neruda's Macchu Picchu #1 ("Del aire el aire"), which uses things that look a lot like sight rhymes and slant rhymes. Take the first three or so lines: Neruda posted:Del aire el aire, como un red vacia, I've had to leave the accents off of "vacia" and "atmosfera," but I think you should get the idea even if you're not great with Spanish. Lines two and three both rhyme in a ([d]+vowel sound [d]+vowel sound) pattern, while line two's "llegando" and "despidiendo" probably only sight rhyme -- every Spanish speaker I know would throw a long "o" on the end of one and either cut or schwa the "o" at the end of the other.** Regardless, no matter how you slice it you've got Neruda using slant rhyme and possibly sight rhyme inside the first three lines of Macchu Picchu, though to what end I'm not totally sure. He could be making it clear that he's writing in Latin American Spanish -- pulling a Chaucer or a Burns by forcing the rhyme. He could be setting up a sight rhyme that uses the distance between the text and its pronunciation to emphasize the distance between his narrator's literal and tropic (metaphorical/leaf) wealth. But tradition dictates that these rhymes, sight rhymes, and slant rhymes must mean something. * Rough translation: from air to air, like an empty net / dredging the streets and the atmosphere, I came / lavish (wealthy?) at autumn's coronation with the money offered / by the leaves [...] ** So you get "zhe-GAN-doh" and "des-pee-the-EN-d(uh)," at least from the Castilian across the hall. Neruda was Chilean, though, so how much of this difference makes it into Latin American Spanish I'm not sure.
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Apr 28, 2010 21:54
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bigperm posted:Singular possession is indicated by adding an 's no matter the final consonant right? My copy of Elements of Style is from 1979, and it is pretty explicit about that, considering it is the very first rule. I was wondering if that has changed because I just got my research paper back and my history professor took points off for "Dickens's novels..." The paper was kinda about Dickens so this came up a lot. This is one of those things. I've seen grammar and style handbooks show both, and English isn't math -- that is, we don't start with a set of rules and work from them to particular cases. Neither do we have some central authority that sets a nationwide apostrophe policy. Put differently, language has some consistencies but doesn't have rules. So I can't give you a right answer. All I can give you is my preference, which is the same as Strunk and White's: I always keep the "s" after the apostrophe. Sure, I'll follow the Elements of Style advice and avoid using the possessive apostrophe with ancient, proper names, since they carry a dignity that the possessive apostrophe doesn't really serve. But if I'm pressed out of writing "The temple of Isis" I'll write "Isis's temple" every time. Why? There are corner cases where consistently using 's avoids an ambiguity, like if you have a singular proper name that ends in "s" and is also a plural noun. Also, I cannot think of a compelling argument to omit the "s" trailing the apostrophe in print. And this is where I start touching Pokeyman. Every argument I've seen for cutting the "s" has to do with words like "Jesus's" or "Aristophanes's" being difficult to pronounce, and that is an excellent argument for not correcting someone who says "the saints super bowl trophy" instead of "the saintses super bowl trophy." But even if we all agree that everyone should say "saints" instead of "saintses," it's silly to think that this dictates 's use. First, we rarely pronounce apostrophes. The "n't" in don't sounds the same as the "nt" in haunt, so why would we assume that "s's" must in this case necessarily be pronounced differently from "ss?" I can see no clear reason, in other words, why "Saints's" could not be correctly pronounced "saints." Second, words' spellings and pronunciations are distant cousins at best, and I'm not talking about Middle English holdovers like "knight." "I'm going to go golfing," correctly pronounced, has three "g" sounds, not five. Pronounce the "g" at the of "golfing" and "going" and people will give you one of those boy-ain't-right looks, because "going" rhymes with "coin" and "golfing" kinda rhymes with "dolphin." So even if you think that, for some reason, "s's" should be pronounced "ses," there's no reason that the 's at the end of "Saints's" can't or shouldn't generally be elided like the terminal "g" in "going." We drop inconvenient sounds off of the ends of words all the time.
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Apr 29, 2010 16:36
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For context, I'm taking a course called "Great Books of Antiquity", which is a study of ancient Greek literature. I think that I and a classmate of mine offended a professor using some crude language to describe The Odyssey (specifically, I claimed that the suitors had effectively pissed on Odysseus' grave). She said that curse words were lofty and imprecise and not "English-majory" enough for our use. She didn't say it, but I got the notion that she simply found our wording offensive. What's your stance on "crude" words in the English language in and out of serious discussion? Do they have any meaningful place in our vocabulary? I strongly disagree with the notion that any single word should be deemed to be of lesser quality than another; these are, after all, just tools we use to express ourselves. And it's not like we used the gently caress word, or something. Other [decidedly mild] statements by my classmates that she didn't like: -"Agamemnon is a dick." -The suitors were "screwing over" Telemachus and his family. -Somebody also used the word "rear end" in a class debate, which got her all riled up.
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May 1, 2010 19:58
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Biggest pet peeve? Bad grammar?
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May 1, 2010 21:05
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SAVE_US.CHR
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Raimundus posted:
If I were the professor my issue would not be that they're offensive, but that they're just vague and imprecise, and not exactly suitable for such a discussion. That's pretty reasonable, no?
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May 1, 2010 21:37
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Jewellers posted:If I were the professor my issue would not be that they're offensive, but that they're just vague and imprecise, and not exactly suitable for such a discussion. That's pretty reasonable, no? But why? Fake edit: Yeah, I get the imprecision part, but it's not like we're trying to end the discussion this way.
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May 2, 2010 02:21
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Raimundus posted:But why? Some people just don't like talking like that, and I imagine that your professor hopes to not only improve your understanding of the text, but also your ability to express yourselves in general. I think in a formal context (such as a classroom) or in a situation where the preferences of the people talking aren't known, it's generally better to maintain a slightly more formal tone.
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May 2, 2010 03:05
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Barto posted:Some people just don't like talking like that, and I imagine that your professor hopes to not only improve your understanding of the text, but also your ability to express yourselves in general. I think in a formal context (such as a classroom) or in a situation where the preferences of the people talking aren't known, it's generally better to maintain a slightly more formal tone. I don't see that it necessarily hampers understanding. And I suppose questioning formality itself probably would not belong in this thread. I'd still like to see what Brainworm thinks, though.
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May 2, 2010 03:10
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I hate to interrupt the impetuous barfing dick, but I have a question about the job market. Specifically it's about these two essays, which you might already know. What do you think of them? Are things really quite so dire? You've touched on similar points in this thread, but without such a doomsday attitude. Obviously the advice about fallback plans and other forms of work/income is good. But should I be deeply second guessing the advice of every professor and professional I've worked with? Including two who dropped their programs after the MA to find non-academic jobs, but still think the ph.d. route would be good for me? I'm in musicology, by the way, and still an undergrad. I'm two years from the degree and I have all my work and research and undergrad thesis lined up, but I've also had a business-type internship outside the university. Should I be spending more time on the latter? The author of those essays addressed them to all of the humanities. But then, I can't really ask you to judge my position for me. (And if I'm looking for you to reassure me, at least I'm doing it somewhat surreptitiously...(not really)) Mostly I'd just like to see your reaction to the essays. the first essay posted:There is work for humanities doctorates (though perhaps not as many as are currently being produced), but there are fewer and fewer real jobs because of conscious policy decisions by colleges and universities. As a result, the handful of real jobs that remain are being pursued by thousands of qualified people — so many that the minority of candidates who get tenure-track positions might as well be considered the winners of a lottery. Do you feel like you won the lottery, getting your TT job? Thanks for a great thread by the way chinchilla fucked around with this message at 17:05 on May 2, 2010 |
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May 2, 2010 15:20
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Jewellers posted:If I were the professor my issue would not be that they're offensive, but that they're just vague and imprecise, and not exactly suitable for such a discussion. That's pretty reasonable, no? That's about my line -- I don't give a poo poo about students cursing in class, as long as we've established two things: 1) That profanity is the right tool for the job (that it's not papering over a more precise observation with a vague or semi-defensible claim), and 2) That this will drive class discussion in a useful direction. I'm usually not sold on (1). Just for instance, "Agamemnon is a dick" passes judgment on character actions without exploring character motivations and obstacles. "Agamemnon is a dick because he thinks that justice and fairness to himself are the same thing; when Apollo takes Chryseis from him, justice means replacing her with Briseis" is at least a starting point. And (2) can be trickier. Some students shut down against coarse language, not because they're offended, but because it doesn't look like intellectual rigor to them. So there's some responsibility on the professor's part to foreclose on profanity if that's likely to happen. Put another way, coarse language is only positive inside some rapport, right? When I call my best friend a cat rapist, that's something like affection. That doesn't work for strangers or even acquaintances. A classroom setting's the same thing. You need rapport first, or you don't get anywhere. Finally, I, like many men of my generation, think of offense as something that you feign when you're storming the moral high ground. I occasionally suspect that, in certain rare cases, offense may be absolutely genuine if no less strategic.
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May 3, 2010 16:28
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chinchilla posted:I hate to interrupt the impetuous barfing dick, but I have a question about the job market. Specifically it's about these two essays, which you might already know. Well, I'ma say the least useful thing you're likely to hear, and something that this article's author brings up just to shoot down: there's always work for good people. That's partly tautology, right? If you don't get a job, it turns out you weren't good enough. But I think that sticks to a piece of common wisdom that's worth repeating: graduate programs produce many more PhDs than there are tenure-track academic jobs. This isn't just true in the humanities. You could write exactly the same article about PhDs in Mechanical Engineering or Biology. If graduates from those programs were all pinning their employment hopes on tenure-track teaching positions, most of them would be disappointed. That's where I part company with these articles. Take this bit, for instance: Article #2 posted:Some may say all the hand-wringing about the majority of humanities graduates who do not end up in tenure-track positions is overblown. I mean, lots of doctors don't get their first choice of residency. But a more relevant question is, How many trained physicians are never allowed to practice medicine at all? This is not the right analogy. A better question would be something like "how many doctors who'd like to teach at a medical school get jobs teaching at a medical school?" My guess: something like "not very loving many." That is, if what you're interested in are ratios of graduates to teaching positions, the category of "humanities" isn't really relevant. So I don't trust these articles' framing: if what you're looking for is a tenure-track teaching position, it's going to be tough run no matter the field. Humanities has nothing to do with that. Second, this article's claims about humanities grad. school are built on a couple, probably false, assumptions: (a) That a PhD in English or History or Musicology either becomes a professor or a failure. (b) Graduate study can only be undertaken if you exclude all other things, i.e. going to graduate school prevents you from preparing yourself for, or actually having, a non-academic career. There might be some truth in both, but the more I look at each one the more I think that each one is basically wrong. That said, I certainly wouldn't go to graduate school if I thought of it as a sort of sacrifice fly -- years of paying dues that'll land an ultimately rewarding job. If you're not going to enjoy graduate school you shouldn't go, and if you don't like it you should leave; there's no job, professorial or otherwise, that'll meet the kinds of expectations you'll build out of six or seven years of self-imposed suffering. So when I see something like this: Article #2 posted:More than a few [graduate students] confessed the depression they experienced in graduate school. Several mentioned thoughts of killing themselves, and — after a decade of reading letters by the thousands on similar themes — I was not surprised at all. It's more than accumulated anecdotes. As Piper Fogg recently presented it in The Chronicle (February 20): "67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide,[...]" I wonder what these people are doing in graduate school. If you're contemplating suicide, you might want to think about making some changes.* And I also wonder what these people expect from the rest of their lives. I mean, if you're regularly too depressed to function as a graduate student, how on Earth can you expect to handle the considerably greater responsibilities and pressures of a professorship? Shouldn't you consider a career in something -- hell, anything -- else? Second, I wouldn't go to graduate school -- in the humanities or otherwise -- without at least planning to develop some non-professorial career track while I'm there. The assumption that these articles make is that you necessarily stop developing these kinds of tracks, or doing anything else, as part of the whole graduate school experience. Don't get me wrong: some people do. I think that's shortsighted. Setting narrow and uncertain career goals is just as ridiculous as expecting a job to compensate for a decade of bad experiences. Imagine talking to, say, a PhD candidate in Chemistry. If he said something like "yeah, I'm almost done, I want to be a Chemistry professor, and I'm not exploring other options," you'd smack him upside the head. And you'd do it hard, because only a total loving moron would wager his livelihood on the odds of quickly landing a professorial job. What I'm saying is, going to graduate school and expecting to land a tenure-track teaching job, that's asking for disappointment. That's not a function of any specific discipline; that's a function of there not being very many tenure-track jobs. So let me bring this back home. I said there's always work for good people, and I mean it. It may not be professorial work, because that's a small and volatile market. But if you've got the intellectual horsepower for real graduate work, you should also be clever and resourceful enough to carve out a non-academic career for yourself. quote:Do you feel like you won the lottery, getting your TT job? I'm not sure I'd call it a lottery win. Yes, I love my job, and there's definitely a lot of luck involved in getting it. But a lottery win makes it sound like TT jobs are handed out by some blind goddess. While some job seekers are luckier than others, and some are incredibly unlucky, I don't think the market is that driven by fortune. * I mean, apart from the one.
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May 3, 2010 20:31
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Brainworm posted:Well, I'ma say the least useful thing you're likely to hear... Not at all, that was very helpful. Thanks for taking the time to read and write all of that. Luckily I have time to fit a Public and Professional Writing certificate into my course load before I graduate (from Pitt), so I'm getting that rolling this summer. I can even cram in another solid internship or two. And if the research works out right, I should have a good all-around resume. So you think it'll be possible to get a public-writing-type career off the ground, and be a grad student at the same time? I've always heard it isn't, that I'd be too busy with classes / teaching / researching to even think about anything else, but you directly contradict that. Brainworm posted:Second, I wouldn't go to graduate school -- in the humanities or otherwise -- without at least planning to develop some non-professorial career track while I'm there. I guess you didn't, then? Were you working on those technical writing gigs and whatnot at the same time as your school sessions? Was it hard to juggle the two? Also, were you actually getting jobs and earning income in this other track, or was it more Brainworm posted:If you're not going to enjoy graduate school you shouldn't go, and if you don't like it you should leave I have every reason to expect that I'd enjoy the study. I love my current study, but undergrad music theory seems like just enough to whet your appetite. The grad level is where you get to really dig in deep. I'll bet it's similar in Lit. You know, it's the "professing" or teaching part of a professorship that really appeals to me. I wouldn't mind magisterial work, and I can get into research, but the teaching and student advising are what actually excite me. So if I can get some other stable source of income, I could probably be happy teaching as an adjunct. Oh and about this: Brainworm posted:I wonder what these people are doing in graduate school. ... I mean, if you're regularly too depressed to function as a graduate student, how on Earth can you expect to handle the considerably greater responsibilities and pressures of a professorship? With numbers that big, there has to be some skewing going on. Maybe "grad-school escapism" appeals to already depressive people? The workload couldn't possibly drive one in ten to suicide, all on its own.
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May 3, 2010 23:05
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Brainworm posted:I wonder what these people are doing in graduate school. If you're contemplating suicide, you might want to think about making some changes.* And I also wonder what these people expect from the rest of their lives. I mean, if you're regularly too depressed to function as a graduate student, how on Earth can you expect to handle the considerably greater responsibilities and pressures of a professorship? Shouldn't you consider a career in something -- hell, anything -- else? I want to print this and hand it out to other graduate students, the MAJORITY of them seem to have no clue what they signed up for. It's depressing. Well put.
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May 3, 2010 23:20
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Brainworm, Thank you for continuing to write such thoughtful replies. This thread is awesome.
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May 3, 2010 23:41
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chinchilla posted:So you think it'll be possible to get a public-writing-type career off the ground, and be a grad student at the same time? I've always heard it isn't, that I'd be too busy with classes / teaching / researching to even think about anything else, but you directly contradict that. I think it's absolutely possible. The thing is, grad school is full of the kind of work that expands to fill all the time you're willing to give it. Teaching is especially like that, and part of being a good teacher -- a part I'm still learning -- is spotting when you've hit that point when each hour you work accomplishes less than the last. I should also say something here that's going to bunch some panties. The graduate students I met wasted phenomenal amounts of time. Phenomenal. Some of this was regular office fuckery, and some of it was procrastination, and some of it may have been worthwhile. But trust me on this: you can get a staggering amount of work done in eight hours as long as you, you know, actually work for those eight hours. I can't speak for other people, but I know that when I went in at seven and worked until three, I didn't have any trouble finishing my reading, writing, course prep, and grading. It's when I slipped on that, maybe spent my morning on a slow breakfast, got to trawling the forums, or wrote a story or something, that I started having to take work home or stay late. So yeah. I'll bet one of the following: you'll find time to launch a public writing career in grad school, or you'll be able to point to the time you could have spent launching it. Put differently, I don't buy it when people tell me they don't have time for whatever. They do. I do. We all have time, and we all use all of it for something. So doing something new means giving something up. I mean, even if you're unemployed and living in your mom's basement, looking for a job means giving up watching Springer. So if writing and grad school are important to you, you can do both. You've just got to keep a sharp hatchet. quote:Were you working on those technical writing gigs and whatnot at the same time as your school sessions? Was it hard to juggle the two? I was, and balancing them wasn't hard. Usually, I set up a ten or twelve hour work day -- whatever I thought I could fit -- and scheduled my time backward from there. I'm a big fan of giving a small project however many hours and calling it done once the clock's up. Somehow, it always works out. quote:Also, were you actually getting jobs and earning income in this other track, or was it more It was always jobs. I know some people and some fields are big on internships, but I'm not. Again, this will bunch some panties, but many of the internships I've seen and/or been offered are a hair's breadth from outright scams. That is, they look a hell of a lot like a company getting semiskilled labor without providing much useful education or experience in return. So I never did them, and I can't say I've hit any closed doors because of it. quote:With numbers that big, there has to be some skewing going on. Maybe "grad-school escapism" appeals to already depressive people? The workload couldn't possibly drive one in ten to suicide, all on its own. I agree wholeheartedly. I think grad school, especially in fields where grad students are basically adjuncts, is a niche of least resistance for a highly specialized group of essentially pathological people. You see a lot of rock stars, in the sense that you see a lot of people who just can't function at the most basic level -- we're talking about getting out of bed before eleven, showing up to work, eating brown M&Ms, and so on. So yeah, you're starting with a pool of people who either have, or are prone to, some bizarre confederacy of personality disorders. And something about the lack of structure, the low pay, the company, or the freedom to not accomplish anything just spins them out. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 18:20 on May 4, 2010 |
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May 4, 2010 00:34
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Brainworm posted:I think it's absolutely possible. The thing is, grad school is full of the kinds of work that expands to fill all the time you're willing to give it. Ok, good. I've been following the thread from the beginning,* and I read everything you wrote about managing and budgeting your time. And I've been working on it, slowly, not particularly well, but I'm getting there. But yeah, that's massively reassuring. You should rent yourself out to universities as an over-the-internet academic advisor, because you're doing a much better job than the ones I've met in the flesh. Here's an unrelated question: have you read any Douglas Adams? Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? I've loved those books since middle school, for the way their words are crafted, and I wonder what an expert would think of them. *My old account was banned. It was either el Trentoro or Boner Logistics when I posted. I made some silly post about Led Zeppelin, which had nothing to do with the thread, but, um, I had no one else to talk to about it... Also, do you put the footnote symbol before or after the comma?
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May 4, 2010 00:54
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chinchilla posted:Here's an unrelated question: have you read any Douglas Adams? Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? I've loved those books since middle school, for the way their words are crafted, and I wonder what an expert would think of them. Jumping in here to recommend you read Robert Sheckley, of whom Adams said "I had no idea the competition was so terrifyingly good." Grab one of the omnibus collections of short stories (either Wonderful World Of Robert Sheckley, or the one actually called the Sheckley Omnibus) and go to town. His novels are decent for the most part, but put them down again if you're not laughing within a few pages: unlike all but a handful of science fiction writers his comic writing is far stronger than his serious stuff.
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May 4, 2010 03:23
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| # ? May 15, 2024 07:14 |
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Can you tell me about Othello? I'm seeing it this week and I want to be prepared.
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May 4, 2010 04:42
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