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FightingMongoose posted:There was an article in the news today that a new version of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' has been published for use in schools that gets rid of five instances of the word 'friend of the family'. I could see why people would want to remove that word, I mean I've heard stories of students reading the book aloud and stopping to stare at a black student while reading 'friend of the family' aloud. So if that is an issue that apparently can't be dealt with in the classroom, I can see not wanting to use Huck Finn in it's normal form. What I don't see is why this book is so important that they think it's worth reading even if it has to be altered, vs just reading another book. I'm guessing it has to do with standards delivered from on high vs. severe problems in a local school that isn't allowed to not use Huck Finn. While I find the idea of altering the book to be annoying and dumb, I can't see it actually impacting what the students (presumably early high school students?) get out of it. There are still plenty of other parts of the book that deal with race relations. Interested to see what Brainworm thinks.
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Jan 6, 2011 03:15
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chinchilla posted:Crazy. Would you be willing to copy/paste it for us? I'd like to see how you phrase that. Sure thing. Brainworm's CV, p. 7 posted:“I’m (Still) an English Professor. Shoot.” Something Awful (somethingawful.com). 04 May 2009.* There's probably a better way to do that, But I'm not sure I care enough to seek advice on what that might be -- at least right now. I'm keeping my CV updated, but it's not currently out anywhere. quote:Also I'd love to see your reaction to this Slate article: "MFA vs. NYC: America now has two distinct literary cultures. Which one will last?" (The first page is a bit weak, but it picks up on the second.) MFA programs don't really constitute a writing culture, at least not any more than any other form of professional training constitutes a writing culture. I mean, David McCullough and Conrad Russell and Christopher Hill all have academic backgrounds as historians. Their work is consequently of a type. But I wouldn't say that they're part of the same writing culture. It would make as much sense to talk about a culture of, say, Math majors; that culture might be in place in college, but twenty years after graduation I think it might be tough to generalize. Likewise, I'm not sure it makes sense to call "New York" a writing culture, either. Nabokov and Frantzen and Roth are (were) radically different authors with radically different styles, who thanks to an set of economic conditions published through firms based in New York. This is not a big deal. I mean, most publishing houses are headquartered in New York for the same historical reasons that most major film studios have facilities in California. In either case, this doesn't necessarily make a culture; a culture requires that all these associated people or businesses or programs communicate with one another in a meaningful way. I'm not sure that's true. There are also all kinds of major writers who are part of neither of these cultures. I mean, take Stephen King and J.K. Rowling who, like it or not, are the most successful Anglophone authors of the last century. You could say that this doesn't necessarily make them significant, but if the issue is "survival," well, commercial success plays no small role. And even if New York "culture" and MFA "culture" are, you know, actual cultures, I'm not sure that those cultures represent relevant groupings in the literary marketplace.
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Jan 12, 2011 14:27
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Brain's CV, p. 7 posted:This is awesome.
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Jan 12, 2011 14:50
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E/N: I am a second year student studying philosophy and critical theory at a good, "prestigious" liberal arts school in the Midwest. I'm interested in going to graduate school in comparative lit. I got a 3.7 this semester and at least two of my professors have encouraged me to get on the grad school track (i.e. want to write me recs if my work remains good). However, what they don't know is that I struggle/d terribly with addiction issues and ended up with a cumulative GPA of around 2.0 for my freshman year. I've mostly worked my poo poo out and intend to keep pushing my GPA higher (I would have gotten a 3.8 if I hadn't skipped class b/c of drugs this semester). My question is two part: a. I am interested in teaching and would like to go to a competitive program. Given my abysmal freshman year, there simply is no way my cumulative GPA will be above a 3.5. Am I hosed even if I get like a 3.7+ for the rest of school? I speak Latin, Greek, French and am learning German  .b. My profs think I'm a good student. One of them offered to advise me. However, she only takes on so many students (the ones she thinks can get into grad school). I feel really ashamed about my performance freshman year and haven't gone through with an advisor change because I don't want her to see my grades. Am I over thinking this? Is there a good way to explain to her my academic situation last year? I'm sure you prefer substantive questions to playing online academic advisor but I've seen you give really good advice in this thread so I'd thought I'd ask. U semm rly smrt k?
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Jan 13, 2011 01:52
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Brainworm posted:
I think that's a perfect description, actually.
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Jan 13, 2011 03:45
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weekly font posted:Less English, more post-grad in general: do you think it's possible to go after a Masters/Doctorate while working? I'd love to persue them (the former I'm not far from, though I'm on hiatus due to getting a job) but with the economy how it is, my bank account the way it is and my impending engagement/moving out of mom's house, I'm not sure how realistic it is in the coming years. It's possible. The future Mrs. Brainworm is doing that right now. But I think there's some stuff you've got to consider. The first is how you're paying. Full-time PhD students generally pay for their education with assistantships or fellowships, teaching classes or working in labs in exchange for free tuition and a stipend. Everyone complains that the stipend isn't much, or enough, but the total value of a fellowship is pretty high considering what you'd have to pay out of pocket without it. And paying out of pocket is what most people who work full-time have to do. FMB is an exception, since she works at a University that has a tuition benefit and so takes her classes for free. But I wouldn't want to be in the position of paying for however many years of doctoral work in cash or with loans. Point is, you've got to do the math. And you've got to be making some pretty good money for working full time to make more financial sense than a teaching fellowship. The second thing to think through is time to completion. FMB is going to take three years on a two-year Master's because she's part timing, which isn't bad. But that pace puts you on a long road to a PhD; most places look for six or eight semesters of coursework before you start qualifying exams and the dissertation. That's five or six years of night classes before you start studying for qualifying exams and write your dissertation. That's a long time. And it's a long time because of the third thing: focus. FMB's job plus coursework takes just about all the time she has. By that, I mean that she's working, reading, studying, writing, or preparing to do any one of those things from about 6am to 9pm weekdays, and mostly reading and writing and studying on weekends. That means I pick up a lot of slack, cleaning the house, cooking, and so on. It's one thing to do that for three years. It's another for that to be your song and dance for a decade. Keep in mind in this example that we don't have kids, extensive family obligations, or an active social life. Any of those would make claims on time that we don't have and likely can't make. So what am I saying here? I think it's possible to do graduate work while you have a full time job. I'd look at your other commitments and the total financial picture before you decide to go part time and work full time, though, especially if you want to go for a PhD. Part timing that is going to be a long and probably expensive process.
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Jan 14, 2011 15:56
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blazing_ion posted:Thanks for this amazing thread, it's truly inspiring. I spent the better part of my free time this week reading through it. I'm glad it's working for you. With classes and what not underway I've got a bit more time to answer questions, which is good. This thread's been a nice way to think through things I otherwise wouldn't think through. quote:The thing I wanted to ask you about is from somewhere in the middle, where someone asked you to provide a list of works that you'd consider essential for students leaving college to know intimately. I'll cut right to the chase, I did Beowulf in grad school and I have a pretty huge boner for it so was surprised to not see it anywhere on your list. I think I get why you didn't put it there and it's probably because it (and OE lit in general) only became influential when people started studying it again earnestly in the 17-1800s, but I'm not sure so I thought I'd ask for some clarification. I'm honestly not sure what to do with Beowulf or other Anglo-Saxon works. Certainly they're most influential when they're "discovered" by Romantic scholar-writers, but I'm not a strong Romanticist or really a strong A-S scholar, so the particulars of that influence are outside my ken. But I think there's a distinction to be made, too. I like Beowulf, mostly because I have a kind of geek boner for anything with dragons and magic swords that has a ring of authenticity. But I'm not sure I'd call it essential reading for an English Major; it's in what is, for all intents and purposes, a foreign language, and so may not have a place in the Anglophone canon. quote:I can think of a few reasons why I'd at least put in a translation of Beowulf and possibly some other stuff, but I'd rather hear what you have to say about it first! Many thanks in advance! I can think of some reasons, too. If you're going to be a Tolkien scholar (and I think somebody's going to, eventually and in a serious way), Beowulf is required reading. But I have a hard time with translations, or at least for works that have not yet developed a definitive translation. Like, I think everyone who reads Divine Comedy in English reads Ciardi's translation. Why? Because it's an artistic and poetic achievement in itself. Everyone's been reading it for something like fifty or sixty years, and it's unlikely to go anywhere. You can talk about it as a sort of autonomous text; Ciardi's Dante is a different text from anyone else's Dante, in the same ways that Lunar Park is different from Star Wars. There are few Anglo-Saxon translations, and really few translations anywhere, that enjoy that kind of stability. For Beowulf everybody used to read Coghill's translation, and now a lot read Heaney's, and while both are good it's hard to call either one mind-blowing. I don't think anyone would read them or take them seriously if they didn't have the A-S Beowulf behind them. What I'm saying here is that I think a translation of a work is a work in itself. It succeeds or fails on its own terms, not the terms of the text that it translates, and I think this is especially true when we're talking poetry. So the biggest reason I have for not recommending one read Beowulf in translation is that I haven't yet found a translation that I thought was really great on its own terms.
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Jan 14, 2011 16:17
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scradley posted:I didn't see anything in a quick skim of the thread about homework help, so I thought I'd ask. If this sort of thing is frowned upon, I apologize and you should feel free to skip over it. I'll second some other in this thread: for formatting advice and the like, use Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL). It's probably the best college-level online academic writing resource there is. And a rule for common knowledge: If you have to ask whether it's common knowledge, it isn't. And you should always cite information that (a) you get from any source you suspect may be even the tiniest bit unreliable or (b) may frequently change, which definitely includes anything you find using Google, and certainly includes a web page reporting the average seasonal temperature of anywhere (because it's a moving average).
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Jan 14, 2011 16:24
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chinchilla posted:So you're this stellar teacher who taught during every year of grad school and, presumably, worked hard during school to distinguish yourself as a good teacher. I think the best advice I can give is treat teaching like it's your major area. Because if you want a teaching-centered job, it is. What I mean is, any serious graduate student spends considerable time researching, writing about, and talking about his or her major field, whether it's Shakespeare or Postcolonial Literature or Peltier coolers. And any serious graduate student spends considerable time in the academic proving grounds: giving conference papers, publishing articles, contributing to edited volumes and field references and, more generally, aspiring both to achieve and showcase hard-won expertise. Teaching is the same way. Every day in the classroom is basic research; you do something because you expect an outcome, you assess that outcome, and change what you do in response to your assessment. When you're deciding how to assess outcomes and change your classroom practice, you dig up research so you can make informed decisions. And when you find something new or interesting, you write it up. You don't have to be terribly dedicated to this process to be a comparatively good teacher. Most academics I know would never, ever, publish a claim that couldn't be backed by either considerable research or at least a well-reasoned data-driven inference. But those same academics take unbacked or unsupported ideas to the classroom (and into program design) all the time, and they look at you like you're insane if you ask for evidence. That, incidentally, gets me in trouble pretty often. I've had these exchanges over the past two weeks: "A student needs to be a competent English speaker before he can be a competent writer." "How do you know? Is there a study on that process?" *crickets* "Students needs to learn that they can't ask for deadline extensions in the business world." "Is there evidence that students who cannot ask for deadline extensions develop or refine skills that their peers do not?" *crickets* "Students need to learn to do this calculation by hand before they can use a calculator for it." "Is there evidence suggesting that students who learn to, say, take a square root by hand become more adept mathematicians than those who don't?" And so on. I don't want to sound intolerant here, because there often isn't research professors can use to make decisions about, say, course caps, course sequencing withing a major, or which skills necessarily build on others. So you sometimes have to take your best guess. But if you're taking your best guess, track outcomes. Then publish them or share them so that everyone else knows you approach your teaching deliberately and systematically, and that you don't let a bunch of unquestioned assumptions and conference gossip drive what you do in the classroom. It's not like this is hard. Colleges already have students writing course evaluations, and most of the time they leave space for you to include custom questions. Yeah, that's an indirect measure, but it's still useful if done well. And the students are already in the room, expecting to be tested, to write papers, or be assessed in a million other ways. So building primary assessment instruments into a semester is hardly a struggle. You just have to (a) think about which knowledge or skills you want to assess, (b) figure out different ways to teach or practice them, (c) develop an instrument, and (d) use it. If you're designing a class, you do (a), (c), and (d) already anyway. And granting organizations like Teagle will throw money at you if you do (b) and spend a couple days writing up a report. I know that's a long answer with a touch of venom in it, but what it comes down to is treating teaching like it's major part of what you do, and holding your teaching to the same standards to which you hold your research. If you do that, people will know you do it, and if you take it seriously it's impossible that your classroom performance won't improve.
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Jan 14, 2011 19:34
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Brainworm posted:I know that's a long answer with a touch of venom in it That's the best kind! No one talks about teaching without a touch of venom. So, wait, are you actually engaged? Did you tell her about the chain-smoking women who wore body glitter and had caesarean scars? I look forward to your response in a few months 
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Jan 14, 2011 21:14
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MechaTruffautMk2 posted:I think it's not fair to say graduate instructors are akin to overblown high school teachers - I'm an advanced Ph.D. student with a lot of specialized knowledge and a dedication to university-level instruction and scholarship. My job as their teacher is to prepare them for thinking, writing and participating in a discourse at a college level, and I bring a lot of energy and a certain expertise to that goal. [...] That's true. It's certainly not fair to call you an overblown high school teacher, because by experience and training, and by dint of resources and lots of other things, you're not. But you're also not a typical grad. student instructor. If you're advanced in your Doctoral work, you're only going to be in the classroom as a graduate instructor for, say, another year or maybe two. And that's part of the systemic problem with using graduate student instructors; the experienced ones regularly get shuffled out and replaced by inexperienced ones. While that doesn't mean that any individual graduate instructor is going to be undertrained and inexperienced, turnover means that at least 1/5th or 1/6th of students taking comp. courses are going to take them with an instructor who's in his or her first year of things, has never taught before, and has one or two course past a BA under his or her belt. And given the graduate student attrition rates at most programs, that fraction of students working with first-year teachers is probably somewhat higher. So your students' situation is atypical. You're the most experienced instructor they can possibly get. It's tough to make an educated guess about what any program looks like, but some back of the envelope calculations built on my hazy memories of grad school suggest that about half our comp courses were taught by students who hadn't finished their MA's yet (and so had less than two years' classroom experience). That's not great.
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Jan 14, 2011 21:40
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radiolarian posted:What's your opinion of the "Dramatica" theory of storytelling that appears to be all the rage at the California Institute of Arts? It's supposedly the "most profoundly original and complete paradigm of story since Aristotle wrote Poetics"! I've got to agree with my friend and sometimes-student Shivcraft on this: it sounds like marketing, not method. And I think it's bad marketing, though only Phillips and Huntley's accountants know for sure. Put differently, this isn't a method for criticism or for composition. It's a gimmick. This doesn't mean that the process attached to it is incapable of producing stories or even publishable or good stories, since there are good, publishable stories, and even careers, built around gimmicks. But I suspect that a story written to convince a reader of a problem-solving proposition is going to read like imitation Ayn Rand. A second niggle: even if you take this seriously, it sounds more like a critical claim than anything that builds a bridge to a teachable process. Suggesting that all stories everywhere fit certain criteria is a fine critical claim as long as it's compelling. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you can design a writing process around such a claim. For example: all stories involve conflict, and that conflict is always one (or a combination) of only four types: a protagonist against himself (e.g. a psychological obstacle); a protagonist against other individuals (e.g. an antagonist); a protagonist against society (e.g. a social norm); and a protagonist against fate, the gods, or some immutable extrahuman force (e.g. the inevitability of death). Seriously. That's true. A story without conflict isn't a story. It's just a piece of writing. But that observation doesn't necessarily make me a better writer, at least in the sense that it suggests a process by which I can write better stories or write them more quickly. It may make me a better reader and make me a better writer as an indirect consequence, but that's probably not a method. And if it is a method, it's not a terribly new or innovative one. Last: just because we're in the Humanities and Fine Arts doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't be data driven. So if this "Dramatica" theory or process of storywriting is any good, where's the evidence? Where are the stories written using it? Where's the publication list? You get the idea. I mean, you can bet that if I developed a good comprehensive system for training people to write good stories, I'd be slapping results up like wanted posters.
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Jan 18, 2011 19:13
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Hey Brainworm, If you wanted to follow "the flow" of English poetry for a few hundred years, say from Shakespeare onward, what would be the easiest way to connect the dots without either: a) getting bogged down in mindless details or b) getting a view of things which is far to anthologized to provide any particular insights? Thanks!
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Jan 19, 2011 15:24
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:Granted this is not your field, Brain, but am I missing something with a lot of the postmodernists? Don't get me wrong I love Pynchon and Barthelme and so forth, but so much of the output of, for example, Joyce Carol Oates and Dom Delillo is just smug contempt put to paper[...] There's some disagreement about what you had to say about DFW, so I'm not going to touch that. But I agree with you that much Modern or Postmodern fiction shares a tone that disagrees with me. For me, some of that comes from not liking particular authors as human beings. JCO has what seems a real contempt for undergraduates curious about writing; I've seen her at two college events with Q&As, and at both she handled innocent questions from aspiring college writers rudely. I don't mean that she gave discouraging answers, like "you probably will not succeed as a writer," which is fine because it is true. I mean that she answered her questions as though she took great offense at each of them. Um. Anyway. Not to run JCO up this little flagpole -- and not that I've read much of her -- but through her writing she strikes me as a keen observer of human nature who belittles everything she sees. And not in a fun, satirical, witty, or carnivalesque way. More like Judy Dench's character in Notes on a Scandal. Is that typical of postmodern novelists? Maybe. This is third grade armchair sociology, but you need to have some serious ego to write academic fiction -- you know, style yourself as a man or woman of ideas sharpened by fine perception. That may leak onto the page.
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Jan 20, 2011 15:05
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weekly font posted:So I just re-read Romeo and Juliet and I have a question that might just be a stupid thing I glossed over. Why did Balthasar go to Mantua to tell Romeo about Juliet's death? Didn't Romeo keep the relationship a secret from everybody? I think you got it in one. I've always assumed -- and for no strong reason, mind you -- that Romeo had some kind of confidant servant like the Nurse just offscreen. Somebody needs to account for his whereabouts when he's gone, right? Maybe?
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Jan 20, 2011 15:09
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theunderwaterbear posted:I didn't mean to ask a 'hey do my homework' question, but I guess I should have been more explicit. I'm a second year of an English lit undergrad degree (in the UK); do you have any advice explaining what you think most students miss out or do badly on in exams? That's no problem. The thing is, I don't know much at all about exams in the UK system -- the closest experience I have are the comprehensive exams I took for my PhD, and writing questions for the comprehensive exams our students take during their senior years. What they often miss involves serious thought about similarity and difference and/or continuity and change. Simply put, any good understanding of a text is going to apply both these interpretive engines to both small structures of the text (e.g. characters or tropes) and to the text's situation in larger structures (e.g. a genre or historical period). So, take any given Renaissance sonnet. A close reading will give you a rhyme scheme, a meter, a governing metaphor or two, an assortment of tropes and schemes, etc. All of these can be neatly labeled, and there should be some logical correspondence between the sonnet's form and its content. A metrical break, for instance, might emphasize a discontinuity in content (e.g. you were sexually faithful / except that one time [extra syllable+slant rhyme]). That's all fine. But how is this sonnet significantly similar to or different from others? Is it continuous with sonneteering tradition or does it represent some kind of change? And how about, say, the stanzas? How are they like or unlike each other? Do they represent the continuous development of an idea, theme, symbol, concept, or emotional state? Or are they interrupted -- do they move from one idea to another at the stanza break? I think any good close reading is going to work more with those later questions than with an anatomy or taxonomy of the poem. That is, a good close reading is going to name parts of the text, but it's also going to use that naming of parts to talk about how the text functions as a whole, and how the text functions within larger structures like genre.
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Jan 20, 2011 16:24
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Bellams posted:What would you rather see in an essay, a paper with little to no original thought but written with excellent grammar and structure, or a paper that's insightful/brilliant, but is poorly structured and that has sloppy (but still comprehensible) grammar. From a student of mine, I'd much rather see the second. Writing is a teachable skill, or at least a learnable skill, and it's really easy to turn a crappy writer (with poor grammar and structure) into a competent or even a good writer. Solving problems with grammar, organization, and style can usually even be accomplished by carefully following a short list of specific rules or, more precisely, by designing a process of writing and revision that addresses a student's specific grammatical, stylistic, and organizational problems. At the most basic level, say you've got a student who always writes "it's" instead of "its." After a couple pieces of writing, I can identify that problem -- call it a constant issue instead of an occasional typo. Then I can sit down with the student and draft a list of issues to proofread for, and give him some simple processes that will iron out it's/its and any number of other similar issues. As long as this student follows the process I've outlined his work is going to improve. In the absence of other problems, like chronic laziness or a persistent learning disability, he should move from being a basic writer to a competent writer with maybe thirty weeks of steady practice. What I'm saying is, bad writing (bad grammar, style, and organization), that's a problem that's easy to fix. But perceptiveness and insight, that's not as easy. A lot of what we think of as perceptiveness is developmental. Understanding something complicated, or understanding something simple in a new or interesting way, is really only partly a function of raw intelligence. It's also a consequence of patience and deliberate inquiry, of reflection, of specific training, and of more generalized experiences that can be brought to bear on the matter. And many of those things are not teachable. There's little I can do in the classroom to turn an impatient student into a patient one, or a careless thinker into a deliberate one. I can model that kind of behavior, show what it can accomplish by example, and I can expect it from students and grade accordingly. But that's really it. If a student is a strong writer and obtuse there's very little I can do, and less that I can do to bring about any quick or dramatic improvement. quote:What are your thoughts on Middlemarch? Middlemarch I really don't know well. I'll put it on the reading list.
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Jan 20, 2011 16:51
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KildarX posted:This past semester I took an "Intro to Physics" course, which as part of the course required me to write a seven to eight page report on a physics topic. In the rubric for the report one of the categories was "over all style" with the description ranging from "college graduate" to "elementary school student", each with their own deduction or addition of points associated with it. I did not expect to get higher than a rating of "high school student", mainly because I struggle with the nuances of grammar, but much to my surprise I obtained the rating of "middle school student". That is interesting, and I'm interested in knowing whether you submitted your writing electronically. If you did, I suspect that your style was "calculated" using Flesch-Kincaid; it has metrics for specific grade levels, is easily automated (word processors use F-K to calculate readability), and where there are readability standards in e.g. technical and legal writing, they're usually expressed as F-K scores. Also, I've seen professors and TAs grade using F-K readability before, and its use in a physics class would not surprise me. The horrible thing about this is that F-K grade levels are calculated like so: 0.39(# of words/# of sentences) + 11.8 (# of syllables/# of words) - 15.59 Which should make a couple things obvious: 1) The assumption behind F-K is that longer words are harder to understand than shorter words, and longer sentences harder than shorter ones (which is true often enough for F-K to work well). 2) F-K describes only a specific relationship between text and reader (how much education a reader will likely need to understand a given text). It does not describe any meaningful stylistic quality of a piece of writing -- for instance, it doesn't tell you whether a long sentence needs to be long (i.e. whether it's full of needless words), whether a piece of writing is well organized, clear, grammatically coherent, stylistically consistent or, in short, whether it is competently written. Put a different way, F-K tells you with some reasonable precision how difficult a piece of writing will be to understand. It does not tell you whether a text is "well-written" according to any meaningful standard; for instance, a badly-written set of instructions is going to score higher (less readable) on F-K grade level than a well-written set, which is appropriate to the metric. You'll need to be a better reader to understand the bad instructions than the good ones. So. If your professors are using F-K grade levels to assess your writing, they're misusing the tool. An easy way to check this is by using your word processor's build in readability measure and seeing whether the grade level it describes for your writing matches what you got back from your professors. If it does, I strongly suggest doing two things (after confirming F-K is being used): Challenging your grade on the assignment. F-K is not a valid tool for this type of assessment, and that's not really a debatable point. If your professors look at F-K and decide to continue using it, explain the situation to their department chair, the dean, or whoever you appeal grades to at your college. That practice shouldn't hold up under scrutiny. Gaming the test. Just use the longest words you can and splice sentences together with colons and semicolons. If you really want to game it, choose a word with a lot of syllables (totalitarianism), write it five hundred times at the end of your paper, put a period at the end, and change the font color to white. Your F-K score will rocket to nearly unreadable (since that sentence makes absolutely no sense) and you'll get credit for stylistically sophisticated writing. And just so we're clear, that's not cheating. That's gaming. quote:Brainworm, as an English professor, how would you describe the writing habits of a person at each stage in education? I don't think I can -- at least not with any precision. In general, though, after mastery of basic writing skills, student writing develops specific kinds of complexity. Sentences get longer, words get longer, and most students eventually begin to prefer long words to short ones and complex sentences to simple ones. For some people, this never ends. They'll spend the rest of their lives writing in the passive voice and using a thesaurus to replace every horse with a zebra or, better yet, a quagga. But further development tends toward simplicity. It takes tremendous competence in a field, and considerable strength as a writer, to describe something complex both correctly and clearly. This means breaking concepts down into their component parts, thinking carefully about how to order and phrase them, and appreciating the abilities and inclinations of your audience. All of these demand that one's writing be no more complex than absolutely necessary.
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Jan 20, 2011 19:11
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FightingMongoose posted:There was an article in the news today that a new version of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' has been published for use in schools that gets rid of five instances of the word 'friend of the family'. I'd like to think that a high school classroom would be managed in such a way that the use of "friend of the family" in Huck Finn would be what Parker Palmer calls a "live encounter" -- a way for teachers and students to navigate the complex legacy of American slavery and learn something intensely complicated and important in the process. But what you're more likely to get are students and teachers tossing "friend of the family" around the classroom like it's a live grenade. So does changing "friend of the family" to "slave" lose important context? Absolutely. I mean, "friend of the family" has a metric poo poo-ton of cultural weight because it's part of systems of institutional slavery and racial bigotry that are as entrenched in American culture as the flag. In my lifetime, I think I can reasonably expect the see books printed on paper become relatively rare, ending five hundred years of movable-type print dictating the way information is retained and distributed. I expect to see tactile (paper and coin) money run out of circulation, ending whatever multi-millenium economic cycle began with Gyges of Lydia. I expect to see the end of broadcast television, and see the September 11th attacks become a historical footnote, right next to the Oklahoma City bombings and the Unabomber's Manifesto. I do not expect that the word "friend of the family" will be used with different intent or to different effect. So yeah, you lose tremendous context. And I think you partly lose the political and social contexts that make Huck Finn a significant part of the American canon. If that makes it teachable in a modern classroom, I suppose that's worth the trade-off, but it also makes me wonder about the environment and priorities that make such a trade-off necessary in the first place.
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Jan 20, 2011 20:50
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Anacostia posted:E/N: I don't think you're hosed at all. Sometimes people like to imagine a world full of impersonal statistics-driven gatekeepers. Don't ask me why. I don't know. But I also don't think that this world exists. Or I'm pretty certain that it doesn't exist in graduate admissions, and definitely doesn't include GPA. I'd be hard pressed to describe the difference between a student with a 3.5 and a student with a 3.7, even if they had taken exactly the same courses with exactly the same professors. I mean, is the 3.7 student more academically successful? Maybe. He has marginally better grades -- regularly tips from a B+ to an A- -- but I'd have a hard time making the case that the 3.7 student is better in the classroom, a stronger writer, a clearer thinker, or a harder worker, than the student with a 3.5. Research projects from them will probably be of about the same quality, and it would be silly to think that one of these students had greater potential for graduate study than the other. Point is, I'd be hard pressed to use GPA to make strong claims about a student's preparation for graduate study unless: (a) His or her GPA, or some GPA subset, confirmed some other problem (e.g. the student writes a poor entrance exam and also has a 2.0 in writing-intensive courses). (b) We were talking about an unexplained difference of something like half a point. If I had to choose to admit a student to graduate study, and all I knew was his or her GPA, I wouldn't feel confident choosing a 3.7 over a 3.4. If the 3.4 had nearly failed his first year and shown steady improvement, while the 3.7 had started strong and slowly declined, I'd choose the 3.4. If the 3.4 were from Reed College and the 3.7 were from the University of Michigan, I'd choose the 3.4. If the 3.7 took five years to graduate and the 3.4 took three and a half, I'd choose the 3.4. If the 3.7 had been nowhere but the classroom while the 3.4 had spent a semester at the Newberry or the Folger, I'd choose the 3.4. If the 3.4 had a better application essay than the 3.7, I'd probably choose the 3.4. And so on. Point is, even under the best of conditions I don't think there's a meaningful difference between, say, a 3.7 and a 3.5. Add in trends (improvement/decline), varying courseloads, the differences in grading standards between universities, disciplines, and departments, and you'd have to have an improbably close race between applicants for that kind of GPA difference to be a factor. quote:b. My profs think I'm a good student. One of them offered to advise me. However, she only takes on so many students (the ones she thinks can get into grad school). I feel really ashamed about my performance freshman year and haven't gone through with an advisor change because I don't want her to see my grades. Am I over thinking this? Is there a good way to explain to her my academic situation last year? You are overthinking this. If she wants to advise you and you believe she's a good and capable adviser (i.e. she's the person you'd most like to work with), dive in.
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Jan 20, 2011 21:53
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Brainworm posted:There's some disagreement about what you had to say about DFW, so I'm not going to touch that. But I agree with you that much Modern or Postmodern fiction shares a tone that disagrees with me. I probably shouldn't have brought up DFW at all. I always seem to start arguments with him. My point was only that he seemed to identify that strand of thinking as problematic and railed against it often. He saw it as a kind of cult of 'coolness' or, possibly more aptly, 'awareness' that used heavy irony to evade analysis and ultimately never really justified its self-concious cleverness in any way more sophisticated than by mocking, dismissing and undercutting everything else around it. The most cutting irony of this all is that this kind of thing is no longer out of mainstream, or terribly academic or whatever, but a part of pop culture. Television is filled with this sort of thing. DFW invoked David Letterman constantly, who I guess at the time was the towering figure. At one point in My Appearance from Girl with Curious Hair he points out that an 'anti-show' like Letterman's becomes a normal show by definition, which kind of underscores a weird disconnect between the anti-populism ('selective populism?' I don't know) of something like South Park -- where every episode is devoted to talking about how everyone discussing [current news thing] is stupid, part of an meaningless and incoherent 'public dialog' -- and its enormous audience, merchandising, etc. I probably didn't explain that well. I'm not sure if it's typical -- this kind of bitchy, mean-spirited mocking and dismissal -- but it's definately a strong fixture of a lot of these dudes, and I find it distasteful. There's basically a genre that consists entirely of pithy dismissal and mocking of our modern, shallow, banal, suburban, consumer lives. DeLillo is worse, from what I've seen: He often accompanies his bon mots and observations with a brief not undermining his comment, as though to say 'hey, you don't think that was clever/perceptive? Well maybe I didn't either.' Talk about impossible to pin down. Apologies for the rant. I needed to get that one off my chest. Brainworm posted:Sometimes people like to imagine a world full of impersonal statistics-driven gatekeepers. Don't ask me why. I don't know. But I also don't think that this world exists. Or I'm pretty certain that it doesn't exist in graduate admissions, and definitely doesn't include GPA. Holy poo poo dude you have no idea how good this makes me feel as a guy who's had a few issues in undergrad.
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Jan 20, 2011 23:25
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chinchilla posted:That's the best kind! No one talks about teaching without a touch of venom. I've been trying to speed up the responses a bit. And yes, I'm engaged. She grew up here, went to the college I teach at,* and so knows all about the chain-smoking body glitter-wearing multiple divorcee basket cases that buy most of this town's cocaine. And now she works in the Accountancy department at a nearby university. * And I need to clarify this constantly. She's an alum, but from before I started teaching here. Just so you all know there's no monkey business.
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Jan 21, 2011 18:04
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Congrats! From the way you described your local community, it seems fantastically lucky that you managed to find someone.* Are you planning on staying put at your current school, then? Lately I'm reading about the canon in Western classical music. Musicologists take 100% of their thinking from sociology and literature, and that's got me looking at Bloom's The Western Canon. Is this a book I can jump into easily? I'm used to scholarly writing but I have no literature experience past an Intro to Shakespeare course. Is the book full of references to Great Works that I'm expected to know? Do I need to understand those references to comprehend the book? Are there companion works or reviews I'd do well to start with? Thanks, and just to be clear, I was lightly teasing you about the response speed. I'm impressed that you find time for any replies during the semester. *It was something like, "The neighbors try to set me up with their daughters by showing me their senior portraits."
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Jan 22, 2011 21:30
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Brain Worm posted:That is interesting, and I'm interested in knowing whether you submitted your writing electronically. Using Turnitin.com, the bane of my GPA, because I like using quotes.
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Jan 23, 2011 17:32
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Barto posted:Hey Brainworm, I'ma suggest two things, and you can skip the first if you feel you already have the matter covered: 1) Read the anthology introductions to the various periods and movements of the last 500 years: The Renaissance, Restoration, Enlightenment, Romantics, Victorians, Realists and Naturalists, Modernists, and Postmodernists, for example. That should give you a rough understanding of how periods relate to one another. 2) Read sonnets specifically. For some reason, sonnets are a durable, durable form, and pretty much every major English and American poet of the last 500 years has tried them -- even ones you'd never suspect, like Edgar Allen Poe and Mr. free verse himself, Walt Whitman. This gives you the advantage of seeing how major poets from every period approach a highly-conventional form that dictates not only structure (14 lines, etc.) but content (love). That makes it easy to focus on what's important when you want both a sweeping and a detailed understanding of literature: similarities and differences, and continuities and changes.
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Jan 24, 2011 16:49
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chinchilla posted:Congrats! From the way you described your local community, it seems fantastically lucky that you managed to find someone.* Are you planning on staying put at your current school, then? I am, at least in the sense that I'm not looking to change jobs. I very much like where I'm working. But once Future Mrs. Brainworm finishes her degree, she'll be looking at a different class of jobs, and maybe she'll find one locally, and maybe not. So whether I stay where I am mostly depends on what's going to work best for us. This college isn't one I'll leave lightly, and not one I'll leave without landing a job someplace else first. But that's not exactly the same thing as planning on staying put. quote:Lately I'm reading about the canon in Western classical music. Musicologists take 100% of their thinking from sociology and literature, and that's got me looking at Bloom's The Western Canon. I think you can dive into The Western Canon without much preparation. Bloom writes in some detail about a range of texts, but I don't think you need to be familiar with them to follow his thoughts.
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Jan 24, 2011 20:19
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KildarX posted:Using Turnitin.com, the bane of my GPA, because I like using quotes. Yeah, I'll just bet they're using Flesch-Kincaid. Me, I'd ask about it or check the syllabus or rubric carefully -- there are courses out there that want you to target a specific F-K level for good reasons (e.g. as part of professional training, since regulations sometimes specify F-K readability scores). This may be one of them, in which case you should use whatever your word processor has to check your F-K scores before you hand in your papers. But if this isn't in the syllabus or the rubric, and your style is being "graded" using F-K scores, you've got a legitimate beef with the professors (who are really misusing F-K).
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Jan 26, 2011 14:32
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Brainworm, may I ask your thoughts on the treatment of poetry in the essay "Pottery, Poetry and Prophecy" in the following book: http://books.google.com/books?id=5V...epage&q&f=false It's largely representative of Hebrew scholars' approaches to poetry, though perhaps not so strange as others'. It's partly understandable - a result of the Masoretes' treatment of poetry as prose - but something seems always a little basic, a little 'off'... If I were looking to write on Hebrew poetry myself, what would you suggest as a good path in light of the above?
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Jan 29, 2011 14:27
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I kinda have been thinking about going back to school for something to do with writing, mainly because for a while now I've been writing heavily, just to keep my mind from going crazy from not being in an academic setting. I've decided that it's either a creative writing program or some kind of screenwriting program. I know I can just enroll in a screenwriting program at the New York Film Academy, but I'm curious about MFA creative writing programs and what their all about. I know that most of them want a portfolio of writing and such in order for them to even consider you, but what are they like. I've looked into every writer's dream, the Iowa Writer's Workshop, to try and figure out what a basic semester and day is like, but they give you nothing what the semester or your day will be like. Has anyone or even Brainworm ever dealt with a creative writing program? Is it worth it at all or should I save my money and go back and start working toward my PhD in English, like my orginial idea was.
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Feb 20, 2011 20:30
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screenwritersblues posted:MFA Stuff You might already have found this, but if you haven't, it will help. Here is every MFA program that will cover screenwriting, either as a degree concentration or as classes within the degree. http://sethabramson.blogspot.com/2009/12/screenwritingscriptwriting-mfa-programs.html I've thought about this a lot and I personally won't do a MFA unless I am well funded and it is somewhere I don't mind living. Funding is crucial for a creative degree.
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Feb 21, 2011 03:39
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Brainworm has written a bit about creative writing courses in this thread already, if you haven't checked.
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Feb 22, 2011 01:41
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I've heard people speculate that Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea was kind of a projection of his feelings about the general lack of acclaim for his previous book, Across the River and Into the Trees. An attempt at explaining why its even more soul crushing than usual even for Hemingway. What's your opinion? Hemingway's my favorite novelist; who's yours?
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Feb 22, 2011 02:51
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screenwritersblues posted:I kinda have been thinking about going back to school for something to do with writing, mainly because for a while now I've been writing heavily, just to keep my mind from going crazy from not being in an academic setting. I've decided that it's either a creative writing program or some kind of screenwriting program. I know I can just enroll in a screenwriting program at the New York Film Academy, but I'm curious about MFA creative writing programs and what their all about. I know that most of them want a portfolio of writing and such in order for them to even consider you, but what are they like. I've looked into every writer's dream, the Iowa Writer's Workshop, to try and figure out what a basic semester and day is like, but they give you nothing what the semester or your day will be like. Has anyone or even Brainworm ever dealt with a creative writing program? Is it worth it at all or should I save my money and go back and start working toward my PhD in English, like my orginial idea was. I think Paladin gives good advice here: funding is crucial. You've got to live in the world. If you want to create a short list of MFA (or PhD) programs, start with the ones you can afford. But to find out what a program is like day-to-day, talk to a current student or a recent alum. If you contact one of the program's administrative assistants, he or she should be able to give you the contact information for a few students or alumni who won't mind answering questions. I can't imagine a program that wouldn't do this, but on the off chance one doesn't, don't go there. And is it worth going? I know "it depends" is a lousy answer, but it depends. I think you need to find the experience inherently rewarding -- that is, you need to be happy going to graduate school regardless of what happens afterward. If you think of graduate school as something to endure, and that your endurance will find compensation in a job that makes up for however many years of academic misery, you shouldn't go. It's not just because the job market for PhDs and MFAs is at best uncertain; it's because no job I'm aware of is either (a) so different from graduate school that you'll love one and hate the other, and (b) so inherently rewarding that it can build you back up after a graduate experience knocks you down. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Feb 22, 2011 |
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Feb 22, 2011 13:38
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Brainworm posted:I'ma suggest two things, and you can skip the first if you feel you already have the matter covered: I just wanted to say thanks; this is a really good idea, and I'm going to start working on it soon.
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Feb 22, 2011 14:00
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The Scientist posted:I've heard people speculate that Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea was kind of a projection of his feelings about the general lack of acclaim for his previous book, Across the River and Into the Trees. An attempt at explaining why its even more soul crushing than usual even for Hemingway. What's your opinion? Well. I've read Old Man and the Sea but not Across the River, but the idea makes some intuitive sense. The usual reading of Ben Jonson's late career follows a similar trajectory (with one late play responding to the critical and popular failure of the last), and it would make intuitive sense given Hemingway's biography -- before Across the River he hadn't published anything in like a decade. So he may have been hypersensitive to criticism. And if we're willing to go that far, it's no great leap to see Old Man as a kind of autobiography by conceit. I mean, you can catch a huge fish (take a decade to write a book) but the sharks (critics) might eat it. Right? Right? quote:Hemingway's my favorite novelist; who's yours? It's a tough call. I really, really, like controlled prose. Hemingway is of course excellent here, as is Hunter S. Thompson.* Also, Vonnegut. And I'm sure I've said enough about Bret Easton Ellis, so I'ma just say that he's both an incredible writer and remains underrated. But I think the winner here is Coetzee. I don't like all of his work well, but Life and Times of Michael K is very good. Waiting for the Barbarians is mind-numbingly well-crafted. It's a hard book to read, but tremendous. *Seriously. Read his collected letters. His most casual ones are like my best day.
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Feb 22, 2011 14:42
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Brainworm posted:Waiting for the Barbarians is mind-numbingly well-crafted. It's a hard book to read, but tremendous. Sorry for the incredibly vague question, but is there any way you could expand on this a little? I read it somewhat recently and, while I enjoyed it, I remember having the distinct feeling that it's the kind of book that requires multiple readings to appreciate. (Of course, what good book isn't like that?) Also, what's your favorite Vonnegut? I just read Cat's Cradle and felt a little underwhelmed. I felt like it was a string of wonderful statements that encapsulate what it is to be human connected by boring characters and rather flat prose. To clarify, that was my first Vonnegut. I plan on giving him another try at some point and was wondering if you had an opinion on what to try. Edit: To add another question, are there any works you would recommend to read along with Waiting for Barbarians? z0331 fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Feb 23, 2011 |
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Feb 23, 2011 01:37
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Brainworm posted:Well. I've read Old Man and the Sea but not Across the River, but the idea makes some intuitive sense. The usual reading of Ben Jonson's late career follows a similar trajectory (with one late play responding to the critical and popular failure of the last), and it would make intuitive sense given Hemingway's biography -- before Across the River he hadn't published anything in like a decade. So he may have been hypersensitive to criticism. And if we're willing to go that far, it's no great leap to see Old Man as a kind of autobiography by conceit. I mean, you can catch a huge fish (take a decade to write a book) but the sharks (critics) might eat it. Right? Right? It sounds like you have a kind of modern taste for literature. That's kind of refreshing to see in an english professor. ------- I read "Bluebeard" and liked it. But that's the only Vonnegut I've read; still, I'd probably recommend it. ------- Has anyone ever read "Heart of Darkness"? I've never really heard of Joseph Conrad, much less in any other context, but drat, so far it seems like a hell of a book. I'm really digging it. edit: I saw on the criterion collection edition of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" that he believed that his "Year of our lord; 1971. If you look out from LA on a clear day, you can even see where the wave broke, and rolled back" statement, as an observation of the '60s generation, was what he considered to be the best thing he'd ever written. whose tuggin fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Feb 23, 2011 |
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Feb 23, 2011 03:36
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SelfDisgustTribunal posted:Brainworm, may I ask your thoughts on the treatment of poetry in the essay "Pottery, Poetry and Prophecy" in the following book: Going to break in here to suggest taking a look at Reuven Tsur and his theories on "cognitive poetry"--he deals with both a lot of English texts as well as European languages, plus of course Hebrew, all aimed at getting at the effects of poetry on the brain from pre-Homeric/Babylonian scribes and redactors on down.
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Feb 23, 2011 03:40
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I just found this thread a couple of weeks ago and I'm still working my way through it so forgive me if you have already answered these. It has been a great joy for me especially your insights on the academy and pedagogy. Reading this thread I can't help feeling like your style is somewhat akin to David Foster Wallace, particularly your heavy use of footnotes and a common appreciation of both high and low culture. Do you see any truth in this comparison? Do you like DFW's work? OK onto a pedagogical question. I am a Ph.D. student in sociology at a large public research university as such my tuition and stipend require that I TA. I actually really like teaching (I was an adult literacy instructor before going back to school), but I constantly feel frustrated with my current teaching situation. Being a big public school, I am responsible for teaching 3 discussion sections, 2 have 30 students and the third has 50. I feel like discussion should to be a time for students to engage and explore concepts and hopefully take ownership over their education with guidance and assistance from me. Unfortunately it seems like many of the students expect discussion to be another period for them to passively adsorb test material. Now I don't blame my students for this attitude because I know that many of my colleagues treat discussion as just that (complete with powerpoint lectures). So I try to head this off by starting each quarter by introducing my expectations and assumptions about discussion is for and what that will require out of my students and me. To facilitate exploration I let the students form support groups in which they create questions about readings/lecture and then in class they spend half the time in group and half the time as a whole class discussing their questions and answers. This seems to work marginally well, the problem is I know that their is a significant amount of the students who are still unengaged. I think the problem is that for the students who are already engaged this works great, but for those who don't really care or don't know how to engage with the material they can easily go unnoticed. So this gets to the core of my problem: accountability. Sure I can keep people accountable with assignments, but it is very difficult to maintain accountability with regards to discussion because I simply do not know all of my students I have so many students +100 who I only see once a week for 10 weeks that I honestly fail to learn most of their names. So I guess my question is how can I learn their names? And what else can I do to make people (other than my core few) engage in discussion*? Anyway sorry for the big unorganized rant, but hopefully you can offer some insight. *My girlfriend is an elementary school teacher with an MaT so I have learned some tricks from her (definitely more than the pitiful "training" my institution provided) like explicitly not calling on the first person with their hand up (waiting for more than one person to volunteer), modeling, bracketing. She has also suggested I try something she calls homie sticks where I have everyone's name on a popsicle stick and I randomly pick one to give an answer and if they don't have the answer they are allowed to call on a homie for help, but I haven't for fear that the students might be upset at the idea.
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Feb 26, 2011 22:32
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z0331 posted:Sorry for the incredibly vague question, but is there any way you could expand on this a little? I read it somewhat recently and, while I enjoyed it, I remember having the distinct feeling that it's the kind of book that requires multiple readings to appreciate. (Of course, what good book isn't like that?) That's fine if you don't mind an incredibly vague answer. I think Waiting for the Barbarians is a stunning piece of economy -- there's nothing in the book that does not absolutely need to be there, yet the book itself feels complete. I can think of nothing that could be usefully added, and I can think of nothing that might be usefully cut. This is another way of saying that Coetzee is really, really, really good at implication. Look at the first paragraph, for instance. Waiting for the Barbarians posted:I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes by loops of wire. Is he blind? I could understand it if he wanted to hide blind eyes. But he is not blind. The discs are dark, they look opaque from the outside, but he can see through them. He tells me they are a new invention. "They protect one's eyes against the glare of the sun," he says. "You would find them useful out here in the desert. They save one from squinting all the time. One has fewer headaches. Look." He touches the corners of his eyes lightly. "No wrinkles." He replaces the glasses. It is true. He has the skin of a younger man. "At home everyone wears them." Think about what we get from this in a purely expository sense, and how much greater it is than what's printed on the page:
We could do more, but the point here is that Coetzee has told us a remarkable amount about a society that is both significantly like and significantly unlike our own, and which we need to understand in considerable detail to follow the story. A less skilled author might include a map of the Empire (with the imperial seat some distance from the periphery), or convey this dramatically with protests, meetings about trade policies, or whatever. But Coetzee's so good that you pick up on all of this stuff intuitively. And we could go on to talk about what this shows about the narrator: he's resigned to the social and technological subordination of his "here" to the "back home" the visitor is from, for instance, and he doesn't reflexively buy into the values of his society (if he did, he'd ask how to get some sunglasses -- which may be what his visitor expects). That's all pretty simple, and I think a good close reading of this opening paragraph would wring out a stunning amount of expository matter. That's part of what I mean when I say that this is mind-numbingly well-crafted. It's not just that the prose here is lean. It's that every word tells us a staggering amount about what's happening and why. quote:Also, what's your favorite Vonnegut? I just read Cat's Cradle and felt a little underwhelmed. I felt like it was a string of wonderful statements that encapsulate what it is to be human connected by boring characters and rather flat prose. Yeah. Vonnegut is really good but not consistently strong, and Cat's Cradle is certainly not his best work. I think you might start with Slaughterhouse-Five or Breakfast of Champions or Bluebeard. quote:Edit: To add another question, are there any works you would recommend to read along with Waiting for Barbarians? This is a hard question. Coetzee is constantly in dialogue with Hemingway, but this doesn't come across in Barbarians as strongly as it does in Michael K (which reads nicely against The Sun Also Rises). You might read it alongside Old Man and the Sea though, since both treat strangely similar themes with strangely similar characters.
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Feb 28, 2011 20:37
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