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I was just thinking about this the other day and then saw this thread again. I was wondering if Brainworm or any other goon could help me out. I was trying in my mind to figure out want books would be the essential for the first half of the 21st century? The only one that I have so far is Don DeLilo's Cosmopolis. What other books would be considered essential for the 2000-2010 period.
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Nov 8, 2012 03:52
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Boatswain posted:Brainworm, glad to have you back! Have you read J. H. Prynne (is it genius or insanity)? What do you think of Paul Celan (if you've read him)? I strike out on this one. I haven't read either writer, but now I'm interested in Prynne's commentaries on Shakespeare's Sonnets.
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Nov 8, 2012 04:09
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rypakal posted:I feel sort of dumb that it had never occurred to me that Death of a Salesman was a take on King Lear. Well, I think it is. I also think It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Episode #36 ("Mac's Banging the Waitress") is a take on Othello, and that Hamlet is all over the original Star Wars trilogy in the same ways Shakespeare's histories are all over the prequels. And that the TV series House is just Sherlock Holmes in a medical setting. Which explains the title. So don't think of it like missing a fact, like that George Eliot was a woman. It's more like a way of looking at things that, worst case, yielded one of those "obvious once you've thought of it" moments. You can't beat yourself up on those. Believe me. All the grief I've given myself about not inventing the Swiffer or premium nutritional supplements for pets, it hasn't done me a bit of good.
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Nov 8, 2012 04:45
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I was having trouble getting through Portrait of a Lady so I tried something I've never done before, which was go to the audiobook. Not only did it not impact my understanding of the novel, but it also saved me a ton of time. The only downside is when writing essays it's more difficult to extract the quotes I'm looking for (but by using google books or the Kindle edition I'm starting to work around this). Am I doing something amoral though by not actually reading the books? I'm thinking of just doing this as my defacto practice now.
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Nov 8, 2012 08:27
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Brainworm posted:I strike out on this one. I haven't read either writer, but now I'm interested in Prynne's commentaries on Shakespeare's Sonnets. Good luck finding that, I've been trying to find it online and through faculty web-things but with no luck. It seems it exists by a small print-on-demand press somewhere in the UK…
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Nov 8, 2012 15:00
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Rick posted:I was having trouble getting through Portrait of a Lady so I tried something I've never done before, which was go to the audiobook. Not only did it not impact my understanding of the novel, but it also saved me a ton of time. The only downside is when writing essays it's more difficult to extract the quotes I'm looking for (but by using google books or the Kindle edition I'm starting to work around this). I think you're leaning toward the academically sketchy there -- that you ask is probably as good an indicator as any.* But that's not really where I want to plant my flag on this one. Instead, I think you could get an even better reading and save some time by reading along with the recording. For my Shakespeare classes, I make sure streaming audio's available on our class's course management page.** My intent there isn't to replace the Shakespeare text, but instead to make it possible for students to read along -- lots of difficulties with Shakespearean language evaporate when you can hear the script aloud. And even if you don't like an actor's interpretation of a line you get something tangible to think against. A novel's a different situation, but I think some of the auxiliary benefits of listening as you read are just as real. For one, listening while reading sets a sane pace. Most people read faster than an audiobook plays, at least sentence by sentence, but that pace usually also costs some amount of thoughtfulness and is susceptible to all kinds of distractions. Likewise, most people can listen competently while doing something else, but again at the cost of some attention, which sometimes means backing up and re-listening to something you missed. So if you do both, you may come out ahead both in terms of your reading quality and time commitment. Also, as you mentioned, just listening makes going back to the text to e.g. find a quote pretty fiddly. So reading along with an audiobook lets you, say, highlight interesting passages and remember what happened at about which location on which page (i.e. spatially).*** Again, this probably saves you some time. Last, just to answer a question you didn't ask and forestall a concern you probably don't have, I don't think that listening along with reading is academically lightweight, cheating, or "taking the easy way out" in the negative sense. Of course you'll sometimes have to read without an audiobook assist, but in the meantime listening to what you read is going to help build the reading pace and attentiveness that (a) you'll need in order to read well and that (b) you apparently haven't gotten through conventional instruction.**** Along those same lines, If you have a technology that lets you do a better job faster, always use it. There's a tendency among some people I know to devalue assistive technology, usually by calling the people who use it lazy/underdeveloped or wondering what will happen in that technology's absence. Which is bullshit all around, especially when quality counts. I was going to grind that axe a bit more, but that's probably already too much. * For one, one of the implicit reasons for reading in a class is that it develops your ability to, well, read. While that's not important for any specific book and probably not even for any specific class, it's an educational outcome I wouldn't want to compromise. ** The Arkangel productions, which are part of our library holdings. *** Incidentally, while I like the Kindle and other readers, I was surprised by how hard it is to find passages -- and not just because the spatial cues I use to remember where passages are different or absent (no left hand or right hand page distinction, for instance, and no thumb-measure of the thickness of pages between the passage and the end of the book). Test search on every reader I've used is just pathetic -- I've got about 1500 books on my Kindle right now, for instance, which is nowhere near maxing out the storage but makes even a search for an author's name so slow it's indistinguishable from a freeze. **** That might read like criticism, but I don't mean any.
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Nov 8, 2012 15:07
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Do you have advice on learning how to write well without the benefit of 'coaching?' I'm too inexpert for proper self-critique and self-direction. Based on prior university coursework, if I were working on an English degree, I'd be going into intermediate composition and creative writing. I can't just raid the corresponding course syllabi, though, as much of the coursework relies on evaluation and feedback so I'm a bit at a loss. If this is a bit of an intractable problem, I'd love even just some book recommendations on writing. My interest is non-fiction, by the way. I'm broadly interested in being a better writer but I'm primarily concerned with doing a better job of communicating information and analysis regarding current events. I'm toying with the idea of a blog (for fun).
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Nov 9, 2012 10:40
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Accretionist posted:Do you have advice on learning how to write well without the benefit of 'coaching?' You are so in luck. There just happens to be a good, short, cheap, book on this: Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers. WWT suggests setting up a writing group that looks suspiciously like an Iowa-style workshop, the point of which is to give every group member definite writing deadlines to encourage practice, a space safe enough to allow experimentation, and feedback structured enough to guide improvement. I don't think there's anything magical about Elbow's groups or Iowa-style workshops, other than that they're good mixes of the ingredients you really need -- practice and feedback. A blog can get you the practice, but you need readers playing by certain rules to give you useful feedback. For clarity's sake, "feedback" here doesn't mean editing or suggestions. It means reader responses like "I was bored here," "I thought this sounded really pretentious," or "this joke got in the way of your point." Basically the kind of feedback you'd get during peer review in a college classroom, the point of which is to both (a) give a writer potentially useful information about reader response and (b) train readers to become more sensitive to their own responses and so become better readers of their own work. And, just as an extra thing, there's no reason a writing group needs to meet in person. Elbow was writing before online writing groups were a real possibility, and when managing a writing group by mail would have carried a lot of administrative overhead and been unbearably slow. But there's no reason that writing and feedback couldn't work in something like a forum setting, in a blog's comments, or through lots of email. Everyone just has to put more time into it.
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Nov 9, 2012 14:24
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screenwritersblues posted:I was just thinking about this the other day and then saw this thread again. I was wondering if Brainworm or any other goon could help me out. I was trying in my mind to figure out want books would be the essential for the first half of the 21st century? The only one that I have so far is Don DeLilo's Cosmopolis. What other books would be considered essential for the 2000-2010 period. The first thing I was going to write here was something like "that's a tough question." I got that almost exactly wrong. It's not either hard or easy question as much as a sort of paradox. I don't think there's any recent book that's yet indispensable, because nothing written in the past decade has influenced later writers to an extent that defines a new canon or extends an existing one. Put another way, these books (whatever they are) haven't been around long enough to be influential in the ways I (we?) think of "indispensable" works as influential. That said, there are some books from the past decade that I think are really good, though right now that's just another way of saying that I like them. I'd throw out Lunar Park (again) not just because I like it, but because it stands up to repeated close readings. I don't know what that indicates, exactly, but it's unusual. Same goes with Grossman's Magicians. God help me, that book is uneven. But every time I read it I'm convinced that Lev Grossman is rewriting Victor Frankenstein as Quentin Coldwater in a way that really, really works. Of course I've pointed to two books centered on pretentious manbabies, which probably says a lot about me. Either that, or a certain issues of masculinity are approaching a point of cultural crisis.
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Nov 21, 2012 01:00
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Yeah but haven't manbabies been literary gold since A Confederacy of Dunces at least?
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Nov 21, 2012 01:07
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At least. Gilgamesh wasn't exactly mature about things.
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Nov 22, 2012 09:16
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Brainworm posted:Of course I've pointed to two books centered on pretentious manbabies, which probably says a lot about me. Either that, or a certain issues of masculinity are approaching a point of cultural crisis. :cough: the Iliad :cough:
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Nov 22, 2012 17:53
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Eggplant Wizard posted::cough: the Iliad :cough: Yeah. I've been thinking about this more that I probably ought to. And what I want to say about it seems horribly, horribly bumper sticker-ish. Basically, every generation of adults re-invents for itself what it means to be an adult: a man, a woman, a parent, or whatever other role a person finds him or herself obligated to play. It's hard to imagine a world (or at least a culture) where this does not happen, although I can imagine one where these roles are relatively stable -- that is, in which what worked for prior generations basically works for you, or in which some clear way forward is presented by a role model or some kind of guiding ideal. Luke Skywalker/Hamlet choosing between two father figures (Old Hamlet/Obi Wan and Claudius/Vader) is the most recycled modern version I can think of, but I'm sure there are others as good or better. And then there are those other moments, where this whole process of reinvention fails. Achilles crying over Patroklos or Briseis, Luke whining about Toshi Station, and Ignatius Reilly/Bret Ellis/Quentin Coldwater/Victor Frankenstein etc., etc., etc. So in that sense, there is nothing new under the sun. A character doesn't have a way forward into adulthood, and so gets stuck someplace short of it for longer than he ought to. At the same time, there seems to be a slightly different take on this in much of what I've lately been reading. And maybe that's because my reading isn't exactly a fair sample, and maybe that's because I'm a fair sample of immaturity myself. But a book like, say, Fight Club talks not just about adulthood and responsibility, but also about the ways what it means to be an adult man have become horribly confused; Tyler Durden's line about a "generation of men raised by women" seems at once to get the point and miss it entirely. So all that is on the table; there are all kinds of books with male protagonists who are in some advanced form of arrested development, and this goes back a long, long way. So where are the analogous cases for women? There's Holly Golightly (in Tiffany's, and probably a bunch of others that I ought to be able to rattle off but can't. If I reach, I can maybe get Pamela (as in Pamela). But arrested developement does not seem to be a condition to which women in literature are generally subject. Granted, there were time when a sort of passive infantalism in a woman was supposed to be an asset, and when women's stories were not generally considered worth exploration. But we are, and have for some time been, in a world where such attitudes are dead if not completely buried. So where are the female Ellises, Reillys, Frankensteins, and Coldwaters? OK. Maybe they're all Real Housewives somewhere, but for me that raises more questions than it answers. Along with this, it seems pretty clear that women have some idea of what the womanhood thing is all about, at least in the sense that the complexities of modern femininity have been the subject of some wide-ranging, critical, and direct discussion. Men do not have public or complex conversations about what it means to be men -- it's not something we do, ha ha -- and I can't help but wonder whether this relates to the ways men and women are characterized, or at least with what types of characterizations are likely to gain traction. Not that this is evidence, but it is strange: This is a GIS for "feminine." This is about what I'd expect: pictures of women and the occastioal disturbing painting. There are some interesting and probably predictible gaps -- at least in my GIS, I'm still waiting for a black woman to show up, and I've been scrolling for a while. But GIS "masculine." What the poo poo is this? It's like equal parts female bodybuilders and gay porn (note: Safe Search is on, just by the way). What does this mean? I have no idea. None. If this were a class, this is the part where I'd say "can someone explain this to me?" Implying, of course, that the diversity of images generated by a GIS for "masculine" warrants explanation in the first place. It very well may not; just because something seems odd to me doesn't mean it's actually strange.
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Nov 26, 2012 20:17
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I'm kind of re-posting a previous question I wrote on here when Brainworm was apparently AWOL or hacked or whatever.. I thought I was an English major, but turns out I am a "Liberal Arts with a concentration in English" major. (goddamn community college) Brainworm, are there any types of classes I can or will take, as an Englishy undergrad, that emphasize the formal rules, standards, terminology, etc of grammar? I feel that is a massive hole in my ability to communicate. Plus it is kind of expected of an English major/degree holder, by laymen. While I could try to learn it on my own elsewhere, I'm hard-pressed to find reliable sources of this and I'd much rather have a knowing professor who speaks English as a first language (goddamn community college) to sharpen my edge against. Also, in my associate's-level Liberal Arts Capstone course, and all we do is critique opinion-based articles found on the Gale Database. I have found that exposing people's bullshit and misinformation and their inability to write objectively and effectively is probably one of the most exhilarating and fulfilling things I've ever done as a writer. Sure that might make me an intellectual bully but oh well. Are there any careers that involve doing this or something like it? Any further information or recommendation is greatly appreciated!
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Nov 27, 2012 00:51
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Holy poo poo, dude. Welcome back. I wish I had a question to go along with this, but I don't, so I'll just go ahead and drop a massive gratitude bomb here. I've been reading this thread (and your first go-around) since I started my MFA last year, and it's helped me beyond words. If I ever run into you at AWP you have a beer of your choice with "Brainworm" engraved on the glass. Asbury fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Nov 27, 2012 |
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Nov 27, 2012 02:38
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Brainworm I'm not even going to try and play it cool here, yours is my favorite thread of all time and I'm a little bit holy poo poo! just to post. You've seriously transformed my thinking (about teaching and The Hobbit particularly) and when I saw you were back here it was like a surprise extra birthday. That said, Ima take a little stab at your stunted woman thing: Brainworm posted:And then there are those other moments, where this whole process of reinvention fails...So where are the analogous cases for women? There's Holly Golightly (in Tiffany's, and probably a bunch of others that I ought to be able to rattle off but can't. If I reach, I can maybe get Pamela (as in Pamela). But arrested development does not seem to be a condition to which women in literature are generally subject. K, but level one: we're talking about a minority group, which is forced by definition to construct itself against the majority's prescription. It's a whole different bag. Heck, "masculinities" really only gained explicit theoretical traction post-feminism. Historically, masculine experience was implicitly equivalent with "what it means to be a human." I know you're on this, I just feel like your post is missing a line acknowledging that literary women have spent centuries disrupting that whole infantalization thing (or, alternatively, the fallen woman thing ala Pamela), a conversation for which the arrested development narrative is a potentially limited vehicle (?) Maybe because the form is conventionally concerned with a crisis of masculinity? GIS aside, (literary) femininity has been in arguable crisis pretty much since day one. Might explain the lack of lady slackers. That said, your call for Ellises, Reillys, Frankensteins, and Coldwaters throws me off. That's a such a broad spectrum, and when you say this: "Brainworm posted:A character doesn't have a way forward into adulthood, and so gets stuck someplace short of it for longer than he ought to. sounds like some kind of failed bildungsroman, or an existential picaresque (ala Ignatius). Am I reading it right? I'd be into more of your thoughts. Why did you name only male-authored women in your examples? I'm generally anti-cult of the author, but at least for the purposes of this discussion why not George Eliot or even Jane Austen? The latter's career is essentially defined by variously dysfunctional female protagonists, their refusals to mature, and their eventual reconciliations with the (financial) system that controls them. That said, I'm a hypocrite since the only remotely contemporary example I can come up with is Denise in The Corrections. And her gender identity is purposefully complicated. But if we're maybe slowly learning how to discuss the masculinity of women, and vise-versa, perhaps we'll see this reinvented yet again. If we're gonna cling so hard to the gender binary, we might at least get some equal-opportunity arrested development out of it. Brainworm posted:But we are, and have for some time been, in a world where such attitudes are dead if not completely buried. Sorry to say it, but I think you might be underestimating the extent to which this all continues to shape the canon. Also, what do you think of the argument that Fight Club is actually a feminist tract? Edit: added oxford comma dream owl fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Nov 27, 2012 |
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Nov 27, 2012 07:37
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Omglosser posted:Also, in my associate's-level Liberal Arts Capstone course, and all we do is critique opinion-based articles found on the Gale Database. I have found that exposing people's bullshit and misinformation and their inability to write objectively and effectively is probably one of the most exhilarating and fulfilling things I've ever done as a writer. Sure that might make me an intellectual bully but oh well. Are there any careers that involve doing this or something like it? Any further information or recommendation is greatly appreciated! Politely talking poo poo about other people's articles is like half of academia.
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Nov 27, 2012 17:16
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Omglosser posted:[...] are there any types of classes I can or will take, as an Englishy undergrad, that emphasize the formal rules, standards, terminology, etc of grammar? I feel that is a massive hole in my ability to communicate. Plus it is kind of expected of an English major/degree holder, by laymen. While I could try to learn it on my own elsewhere, I'm hard-pressed to find reliable sources of this and I'd much rather have a knowing professor who speaks English as a first language (goddamn community college) to sharpen my edge against. This is a tough one. Writing in this thread a couple years ago changed some of the ways I think about grammar. It sounds like you want to have some basis for discerning what is conventional when things get muddy, and for helping others do the same. If that's the case, there are lots of manuals and handbooks that can be helpful; a recent (as in this-decade) edition of any major one (like the Scott Foresman ought to be as comprehensive a reference as you need. It's not going to get too hardcore -- nothing more complicated than, e.g. the subjunctive mood -- and some small matters of citation may fall out of date if the edition you're looking at is particularly old, but it should do the job pretty cheap. Of course Purdue's Online Writing Lab also has much of this content, but it's a little harder to read front to back and is somewhat scaled back on matters of grammar. But it is free and easily searchable. quote:Also, in my associate's-level Liberal Arts Capstone course, and all we do is critique opinion-based articles found on the Gale Database. I have found that exposing people's bullshit and misinformation and their inability to write objectively and effectively is probably one of the most exhilarating and fulfilling things I've ever done as a writer. Sure that might make me an intellectual bully but oh well. Are there any careers that involve doing this or something like it? Any further information or recommendation is greatly appreciated! Well, that's a tie between "no specific career" and "every career anywhere." Certainly, calling out people's bullshit is a staple of article writing and I would like to imagine it's a central part of being a journalist. It's also a central part of working into academic publication as e.g. a graduate student, but that's not a career as much as it is a situation.
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Nov 27, 2012 17:59
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3Romeo posted:Holy poo poo, dude. Welcome back. Well poo poo. That's one more reason to go to AWP. I'll let you know if I'll be there.
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Nov 27, 2012 18:31
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dream owl posted:Brainworm I'm not even going to try and play it cool here, yours is my favorite thread of all time and I'm a little bit holy poo poo! just to post. You've seriously transformed my thinking (about teaching and The Hobbit particularly) and when I saw you were back here it was like a surprise extra birthday. OK. I think you're absolutely right -- or at least that my way of approaching this whole thing was full of blind spots that are pretty typical of everything I do. Austen, (George) Eliot, and Woolf all make use of functionally "immature" female characters (and protagonists) all over the place. For me, that's one of those "obvious once someone else points it out" moments. Left to my own devices, especially when I'm working quickly and especially when I haven't put sustained and deliberate thought into revising something, I'll forget that 1730-1975 even existed. Especially where Jane Austen's concerned. That said, I'm kind of amazed I overlooked Woolf. Clarissa Dalloway is exactly the character I was looking for and bafflingly unable to find. And in a book I taught a few years in a row, no less. quote:That said, your call for Ellises, Reillys, Frankensteins, and Coldwaters throws me off. That's a such a broad spectrum, and [this] sounds like some kind of failed bildungsroman, or an existential picaresque (ala Ignatius). Am I reading it right? I'd be into more of your thoughts. That's more or less what I'm thinking, but I don't think the terms are as grand. There are all kinds of stories that I loosely group under the Hamlet heading, in which some crisis arrives at a protagonist who is emotionally unsuited to it, and almost entirely because (until the point of crisis) he has been unwilling or unable to choose a compelling future for himself. That's a variation on a somewhat older narrrative form, the Romance, which is much like an epic except that (among other things) the protagonist faces internal obstacles (which we would now call "psychological") that neatly mirror certain external obstacles. This is explicit in e.g. Faerie Queen, which allegorizes these internal/external relationships, but I think it's also a staple of the Grail quests going back to Troyes and Boron -- Parsifal's or Galahad's most significant obstacle is a kind of blindness to their own natures. [1] quote:Why did you name only male-authored women in your examples? Again, total blind spot. As I was writing I changed directions a bit (I was originally going to say something about how men and women seem to see men's and women's maturities differently), and I didn't revise "backward" as carefully as I know I should. Object lesson: If I had taken the time to be careful there, I might have caught my own mistake by thinking about Austen and Woolf. quote:Also, what do you think of the argument that Fight Club is actually a feminist tract? Well it's definitely something, but what it is depends a lot on which femininism you're talking about. I think the safest argument is that it's gender critical, in the sense that the narrator/Tyler is partly determined by the absence of workable forms of masculinity, i.e. he has no idea what manhood expects from him, and so invents variously destructive possibilities that appeal to other men in the same situation. And Chuck Palahniuk turns up the volume on this pretty loud. When the first action in a book (in this case, chapter 2) is set in a room full of men who have literally lost their testicles and the first one you meet is a former bodybuilder who's grown massive tits, you start to suspect a local shortage of straight cowboys and firm-handed, baseball-coaching fathers. If you get what I'm saying. [1] As a side note, I think Grossman calls this specific aspect of the Romance out in Magician King. As Quentin reflects on his own experience later in the book, he thinks about that particular aspect of grail quests. It's a nice moment, even if what it amounts to is Lev Grossman saying "you saw what I did there, right?"
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Nov 27, 2012 19:50
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Actually, you know, I do have a question. And it's kind of a cultural one. I'm from a small farm town in NW Ohio (and I saw earlier on in the thread that you went to UT, my alma mater, so I'm sure you know the culture in that part of the country), and I'm the first in my family to attend college, let alone go after an MFA, which pretty much means I'm in uncharted territory when it comes to being an academic. It also means, to put it simply, that I feel like a pretentious rear end whenever I use academic jargon, and I'm still unfortunately (and irrationally) hostile towards it. The first time I heard someone ask me to talk about "synergizing the paradigms between social-constructivist and expressionist pedagogies" I felt like my life had turned into a Dilbert comic. Which leads me to my question. I understand that jargon is a toolset for a particular field (no different than, say, going into a hardware store and saying that you need a 3/4" mall coupling for black iron pipe), but I still feel awkward when I have to use it in an academic setting or when I read something from the CCCC that's dense enough to spawn a black hole. Part of what makes your style of writing so fantastic is that you're able to mix that jargon with colloquialisms that bring it down to earth. Did you have a similar problem when you started your post-grad years? If so, how did you get over it?
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Nov 27, 2012 23:07
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Hey! First off let me say thank you for such an amazing thread - read the whole thing and well...now you got me into reading Shakespeare, something that I likely would never have done if it wasn't for how you wrote about him and his works. Anyways I just finished reading Macbeth, The Tempest, and Othello and I was wondering, since you brought up rewritings before, if you could recommend books that you see as rewritings for the books above? I'm curious to see these stories in a new framework.
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Nov 27, 2012 23:32
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Brainworm posted:I would like to imagine it's a central part of being a journalist. Have you ever thought being an English-jokes based comedian? 3Romeo posted:The first time I heard someone ask me to talk about "synergizing the paradigms between social-constructivist and expressionist pedagogies" I felt like my life had turned into a Dilbert comic. People actually, honestly talk this way? I thought that was just in Dilbert comics.
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Nov 28, 2012 00:42
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3Romeo posted:Actually, you know, I do have a question. And it's kind of a cultural one. I had it, and horribly. When I was a Junior I got really into literary/cultural theory -- mostly Marxist, but I worked my way through Foucault and Jameson and the Frankfurt School, and I got to a point where, basically, Louis Althusser was where poo poo was at. And Judy Butler, Bakhtin, etc., etc. I tried to write like them, too. A hideous example: somewhere at home I've got a copy of my senior thesis, which was something like "Gender Performativity and the Man of Tomorrow," a highly-theorized (cough) reading of golden age Superman comics, and every inch the piece of pretentious jackassery you'd expect. I'll see if I can dig it up tonight, just to show you how bad that poo poo can get. I got stuck there until I was about 24/25 and in my second year of grad school. My program's Master's thesis allowed me to write either one long piece or two short ones, and I wanted to work with Seth Moglen on one of the short pieces. I'm naming Seth because he did the right thing: he told me he wasn't going to work with me because my writing was loving terrible, and he wouldn't put his name on anything I was likely to produce. So I spent a couple weeks avoiding him, telling myself that my writing was great and he just didn't get it. And I wrote my Master's thesis, which was a horrible struggle. And it sucked. Three or four weeks before I put that thesis down, I started thinking about what I was writing and how, and how I was teaching students to write, and somewhere in that I made some decision I don't exactly remember. But I spent about two hours every day for the next year reading and re-reading Strunk and White, mostly while I was on duty in our writing lab. I remember that. I still mentally recite the short piece for Rule 17 when, say, I'm getting a tooth drilled. [1] That didn't fix things. I ended up trying to write like E.B. White instead of Louis Althusser's translator. But it broke me out of this infatuation with theory; that's about the point where I started thinking of close reading, rather than theoretical intensity, as the hallmark of a really good piece of criticism. I'd like to think my work started getting better all at once, but I'd bet that's not right at all. More likely, that's just when I started seriously writing to get better instead of just get done. quote:I'm from a small farm town in NW Ohio [...] and I'm the first in my family to attend college, let alone go after an MFA, which pretty much means I'm in uncharted territory when it comes to being an academic. It also means, to put it simply, that I feel like a pretentious rear end whenever I use academic jargon. I feel you. I lived in Perrysburg as a teenager. That's more Northwest Ohio's endless suburb than small town, but probably just as awkward. [2] Here's the thing: whatever the uses of jargon, it also defines a kind of community (as in a discourse community) that's as full of posturing as any other. Put another way: jargon is bullshit even if it's also technically useful. It gives you a (weak) credibility you can hide behind, for one thing. And hiding from other people, it's a trap. Adolescents spend a lot of time hiding like this, and the better you get at it, and the longer it works for you, the harder it is to grow up. The point? People sense this, though imperfectly. If you're talking to someone and ready to fall into jargon, you've got to ask yourself why. If insecurity is driving you to jargon, people are going to smell that. And in that case, the problem isn't the jargon -- it's that you're playing some version of this teenage hide-and-seek game that irritates the gently caress out of sensible people. The second point? Remember this when you talk to other people in your program, and to people at home. You don't need jargon to be an adolescent; you can be anti-intellectual, too, or pull some kind of country music simple man bullshit. So when you talk to someone, don't hide. Name how you feel, as in "I feel like a jackass saying this, but a social constructivist reading of that neck tattoo makes it look a lot less silly." You'll feel better about it, and probably make better conversation, too. [1] Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same basic reasons that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines or a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, that he avoid all detail, or treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. [2] An interesting note: Sam Jaeger (from Parenthood) was my High School class president (to the extent I was in high school; this is half complicated). We ran Cross Country together. True story.
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Nov 28, 2012 21:26
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Akarshi posted:[...] I just finished reading Macbeth, The Tempest, and Othello and I was wondering, since you brought up rewritings before, if you could recommend books that you see as rewritings for the books above? I'm curious to see these stories in a new framework. Well. When Shivcraft was a student of mine he convinced me that American Psycho was a Macbeth rewrite, and the more I think about that the more I'm convinced it's a really, really good one (especially if you think that Macbeth is necessarily Scottish for the same basic reasons Bateman is necessarily American). For Tempest, Aime Cesaire's Tempest is at once heavy-handed and probably the only postcolonial rewrite of Shakespeare I'd call necessary reading. Othello is a bit tougher; Paradise Lost is an immediate rewrite (the connection being Satan's sense of injured merit), though Frankenstein is I think a more interesting one; the creature sees himself as a Paradise Lost style Satan/Iago, but Victor (even though he's the God/Othello half of that pairing most of the time) manages to stay a kind of villain. I'm mentioning that because other texts that evolve that villain character are at least interpretable against Othello even if they aren't direct rewrites. For instance, there are hints of Othello/Iago/Desdemona in Magicians (as Quentin/Eliot/Alice in a sort of sometimes-homoerotic love triangle), but I don't think that's so much intentional as it is an artifact of influence. Fight Club is a closer match, but still a long way from rewrite territory. There are tons of others I'm forgetting, but those might make a useful start -- and that's not getting into plays and films, which are where I think Shakespeare turns up more often.
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Nov 28, 2012 21:50
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Farecoal posted:Have you ever thought being an English-jokes based comedian? Not past what it takes to do my job. I felt part of my soul actually raisin up when I wrote that and didn't immediately delete it.
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Nov 28, 2012 21:56
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Brainworm posted:For me, that's one of those "obvious once someone else points it out" moments. Cool, I figured as much. I'll be honest and say I'm intrigued if not immediately convinced by the association of Clarissa Dalloway, but I'm still rolling it around. It's also been a while since I read any Woolf that wasn't Flush, so we can probably safely disqualify my judgement. Brainworm posted:I think the safest argument is that it's gender critical... If you get what I'm saying. Thanks for the great answer. I'm with you, although I've had people try and convince me that Marla's inclusion sets up a kind of internal framework for feminist voyeurism...or something. In any case, reading this thread has forced me to grow some grudging respect for Palahniuk, at least in his willingness to tackle concepts. Brainworm posted:Lev Grossman saying "you saw what I did there, right?" Maybe I'll finally break this open over winter break. dream owl fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Nov 29, 2012 |
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Nov 29, 2012 02:04
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Brainworm posted:Well. When Shivcraft was a student of mine he convinced me that American Psycho was a Macbeth rewrite, and the more I think about that the more I'm convinced it's a really, really good one (especially if you think that Macbeth is necessarily Scottish for the same basic reasons Bateman is necessarily American). Either you or Shivcraft care to expand on that? I read American Psycho a year or two ago and while I thought there was probably more going on there then people gave it credit for* Brainworm posted:For Tempest, Aime Cesaire's Tempest is at once heavy-handed and probably the only postcolonial rewrite of Shakespeare I'd call necessary reading. No Magicians here? I do not actually have a theory on it as I've only just cracked it today based on this topic, but Grossman has already managed to mention it twice. First the he quotes the "I'll drown my book" in the opening**, and then when Quentin is taking the test he specifically has to translate a passage from The Tempest into his made up language. I'm not sure if that means anything but after reading this thread for long enough enough I've learned to pay attention when an author mentions a work by name that often. *If only because I have a decent amount of respect for Ellis, based primarily off of Lunar Park **Incidentally what is the history of author's quoting other pieces in the opening of books? Most authors seem to do it but I have never understood why, outside of sometimes noting it as from a book the author seems to be riffing off of.
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Nov 30, 2012 04:06
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jeeves1215 posted:Either you or Shivcraft care to expand on that? I read American Psycho a year or two ago and while I thought there was probably more going on there then people gave it credit for. Brainworm actually linked to my blog what feels like ages ago, and the posts where I did the American Psycho thing are there. It's a bit embarrassing to see these now, even if they were just free-time writing exercises for a personal blog, but the more mature Current Grad Student Shivcraft Who Can Quote Lacan shudders at what Undergrad Shivcraft considered 'pretty okay methodology' three years ago. That said I still stand by what I wrote, since this is essentially the same reading of American Psycho I'd offer today, if only a bit more elegantly. (This has also made me reflect on how personal web presences and archives may affect Millennial academics like myself, but that's neither here nor there.)
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Nov 30, 2012 06:20
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jeeves1215 posted:No Magicians here? I do not actually have a theory on it as I've only just cracked it today based on this topic, but Grossman has already managed to mention it twice. First the he quotes the "I'll drown my book" in the opening**, and then when Quentin is taking the test he specifically has to translate a passage from The Tempest into his made up language. I'm not sure if that means anything but after reading this thread for long enough enough I've learned to pay attention when an author mentions a work by name that often. Yeah. I remember noticing that as I was reading, but I haven't spent much time making sense of it (other than the superficial observation that abandoning magic is central to some kind of essential development). I'm making a note to go back to Tempest and wrangle this out, and that's one of those moments. I want to put off other stuff to do it, but there's no way I'm getting to it in the next week or so. quote:Incidentally what is the history of author's quoting other pieces in the opening of books? Most authors seem to do it but I have never understood why, outside of sometimes noting it as from a book the author seems to be riffing off of. I'm writing quickly and couldn't immediately find a reliable history: there seems to be some confusion between the use of the term "epigraph" to designate this leading quote, and the use of the term to designate the imprint on a title page. This is confusing because many early title page inscriptions are not the kinds of leading quotes we're talking about -- they're more like dedications, abstracts, or elaborations on texts (e.g. "as performed at such a place on such a date"). The earliest use of the term I can find is 1633 (in a commentary on some religious epistles), and refers to a superscription on one of the letters; this may be what we're looking for, but that's not necessarily the case -- a superscript can be something like marginalia or an artifact of shorthand. Webster's definition claims that the earliest printed epigraph (as in quote) dates from 1624, but doesn't provide a reference and so may refer to something like this. The first use of "epigraph" that I think refers unambiguously to a leading quote (placed on the title page, but functionally much like the epigraphs that Grossman and e.g. Stephen King use) is 1642 (in Dering's Collected Speeches on Religion, which refers to another document -- probably a recent year's Canons and Decrees). So a first use dating from between 1624 and 1642 seems reasonable; if I were taking this to the next step, I'd read over Dering and track down that Canons and Decrees document to see what it looks like, lock down that 1642 date, and roll it back by looking through other selected documents. Or, if I were sane, look a little harder for a note or article on the subject. But this date squares roughly with my experience. The earliest epigraphs I remember seeing start in the pamphlet-style religious disputations of the 17th century (which sometimes included biblical passages as epigraphs, and so give some idea on where a disputation might concentrate). I've seen a bunch of similar (Edwardian and Marian) disputations from the mid 16th century, and haven't ever seen a title page inscription that did anything other than name the author and the printer. This is fast and loose, but those first exegetical uses show some direction. You could do worse than consider a work a sort of extended meditation on, or explanation of, the text contained in or associated with an epigraph. Put another way, you could do worse than think of an epigraph as something the text tells you is central to itself.
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Nov 30, 2012 14:22
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I had to use the word "performative" in my class yesterday  I do try to avoid that poo poo unless it's seriously useful, though.
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Nov 30, 2012 14:25
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"Performative" is a perfectly valid critical term which more or less is what it sounds like. There's no reason to feel bad about using it, especially in a classroom setting. I understand the urge to avoid obscurity, but it's important not to get carried away here.
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Nov 30, 2012 19:23
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I got this as a PM, but the sender said it was fine to post here if I thought it might help other people. So here it is, or at least a couple parts of it -- I'm not going to be able to write the whole thing in one sitting:quote:I can't decide if academia is a life I want to pursue. Half of the time I'm afraid some administrator is going to find out I'm teaching the way I am and come down on me for not following procedure[...] Just for context, submitter is in his 30s, and tries to make his "classroom a place to experiment, to talk out ideas--in short, a safe place to fail." I couldn't find an easy way to both excerpt what he wrote and convey all that. I'ma back all the way up on this: having a relaxed classroom that's a "safe place to fail" isn't something any decent administrator is ever going to fault you for. In a classroom, certain kinds of discipline and order (what most of what people think of when they think of academic rigor, strangely enough) are often signatures of weak teaching – or, specifically, of a teacher whose insecurity drives the classroom more than student needs do. When I interview people, and when I talk to them and observe classes for review, I look at a sort of balance between responsibility and control. A strong teacher takes responsibility for everything in the class and is extremely selective about the scope and nature of the control he or she exercises. A weak (read: insecure) teacher will try to control everything in the class, but takes responsibility for none of it. In other words, insecure teachers expect to control most aspects of their students' behavior and throw a temper tantrum when that control breaks down. Some students unfortunately see what this looks like, although the lucky ones don’t. But I promise you that every administrator sees this kind of breakdown come across his or her desk way, way, way more than it ought to. Students in professor So-and-so's class are averaging a 58%, they and their parents are complain, and So-and-so says something about “standards.” Or S&S complains that other professors (or high schools) don’t teach whatever essential skill well enough, and makes a wet bitchy stink out of having to do it in his classes. You get the idea. So if you're running a room in a way unlikely to generate these kinds of highly artificial conflicts, I'd be surprised if a Dean walked in and did anything other than breathe an inner sigh of relief. And rest assured. For most deans and admins it's pretty easy to see the difference between a chatty room and one where everyone's just dicking around. quote:[...] the other half of the time I find myself walking on eggshells around other people, playing a strange kind of politics where I try not to say anything to offend them while dealing with their own awkward forms of neuroses. Yeah. My knee jerk was to write "don't do this." But when I was in grad school I mostly kept to myself and stayed out of of anything that smelled like bullshit. That was mostly because I had a hard time not antagonizing people, so holding back was probably smart. But walking on eggshells is crazymaking. As junior faculty I flat out refuse to do it, and I advise you not to, either. That's not license to be a social incompetent -- you can't go around telling people what you think their motives are, for instance -- but you can be frank as hell with them. And if I'd learned how to do that as a grad student I would have been better off then and might very well be better off now. I think submitter is probably on solid ground with this – just based on how he talks about his writing and teaching – but here’s how you do it: After making sure you understand what someone’s saying, say what you feel first, then why (as far as you know). Follow that with what you think, and why you think you think that way. And be honest about the whole loving thing. Do not strategize or try to anticipate the other person’s response, pretend to know more than you know, or otherwise cloud what you’re saying with bullshit to present yourself differently. This is being frank. The reality of most difficult conversations is that there's an emotional problem at the center of them. This is especially true in academia, where (wisely or not) people invest a lot of their self-worth in ideas that seem pretty poor vehicles for it. So if you want to have good, useful conversations, you've got to make a space for that to come out directly. Otherwise, it comes out indirectly as neurosis and bullshit.
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Dec 4, 2012 01:47
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And a second part:quote:At a meeting with my (unofficial) adviser the other day, she mentioned that if I decided to go after a doctorate, that doctorate would become my life, and that if writing fiction was what I really wanted to do, I'd be better off seeking a job outside of academia. I see where she's coming from--teaching (and school) takes just as much time as you'll allow it, and as an MFA candidate I'm allowing a fair forty hours a week, but I'm afraid that amount will increase pretty exponentially as I go after a Ph.D., meaning I'd be more of a teacher than a writer. I think your adviser and I disagree on an important bit. Working on a PhD can take over your life, especially when you're TAing your way through the thing. And for most of the grad students I know, that means that everything in their lives supports the teaching/coursework/conference cycle. That leaves about zero room for anything else. But -- not to get back on the bike I was riding earlier -- a lot of that situation is built on being, say, 22. When I was that age, I'd have made a really great cult member -- something like Travis Bickle saying "I want to work long hours. What's moonlighting?" You get the idea. There wasn't anything in my life that I was forced to balance grad. school against, and nothing important or tangible I had to give up to go. I think that's the position of a typical, traditional grad student. Because of that, or maybe because it just takes practice, balancing competing, real-life priorities (like grad. school and writing) isn't something you get good at until later -- if you get good at it at all. Most of the grad. students I knew who could do it were in their late twenties or older and didn't have much choice: they had families or children, or worked full-time jobs along with TAing and being full-time graduate students. Of course they weren't out drinking with the rest of us. Point is, a PhD program can be all-consuming. But it doesn't have to be. And -- not to put it too starkly -- if the full-time-job single moms and dads can hold a PhD chase together, I'm sure you can manage your writing. I would not give this advice to most traditional students I help send to a PhD program. For most of them, I'd give the same advice your adviser gave you: prepare to make this your life, and don't count on being able to balance other priorities against grad. school until you get a few years' experience under your belt. Out of the dozen or so PhD-bound students I've worked with closely, I can only think of a couple exceptions.[1] The debt, though, is a whole different thing. I advise students not to take on more in debt than they'll make during their first year in their first real career. The assumptions underlying that is that there's not much of a gap between their graduation and their real career -- three or four years at the outside. And -- more important in this case -- I assume that they'll have some serious breathing room between the time they pay off their loan debt and the time they expect to retire. I can't advise you much on this, because any individual situation has a whole lot of fiddly bits that I don't know, and that I wouldn't be able to advise you on if I did. But my back of the envelope says you're likely to be forty, or very close to it, once you finish your PhD and can expect to get a tenure-track job, which is likely to have a median salary of around $50K in today's dollars. That gives you about twenty-five years to both pay off your student loans and build retirement savings. That might be possible, but I can't see it being resilient -- a badly-timed market downturn, sickness, a pre- or post-tenure move, those are all going to be really, really hard to navigate. And it further narrows the already limited choices an academic career offers you about where you live, whether and when you can afford to get married and/or have kids, and so on. It would be slightly more favorable if you could seriously paying down your loans in grad school, but I don't know anyone who's done that and several people who planned to. So, yeah. It would be one thing if a PhD were absolutely and completely what you had to have, and anything else would be a compromise. But that doesn't sound like your situation. If your MFA is pushing teaching and you enjoy it, that's something you might do. But I can't see a way to work through a PhD toward a teaching career without taking some serious risks and foreclosing on a lot of future choices. [1] Yes. If we're gossipy that way, H.P. Shivcraft is one of them.
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Dec 5, 2012 01:01
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Food Court Druid posted:"Performative" is a perfectly valid critical term which more or less is what it sounds like. There's no reason to feel bad about using it, especially in a classroom setting. I understand the urge to avoid obscurity, but it's important not to get carried away here. I know  I just felt a bit silly using it. I did a day on postcolonial theory too which was a bit  One of my students used "otherization" correctly in a paper though so 
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Dec 5, 2012 14:48
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So now I'm asking for advice and opinions. Next semester I'm teaching Introduction to Literature, which is exactly what it sounds like. And I teach it about like you'd expect: with a focus on influence. In the past, I've charted the development of the "villain" character from Marlowe's Jew of Malta, through Othello, Paradise Lost, and Frankenstein, and then on to some more modern texts. Most recently it was Middlesex, which didn't fit as well as I'd hoped. So I'm redesigning the class around pairs and trios of books that are in conversation with one another: Red Badge of Courage with Slaughterhouse Five, Orlando with Middlesex, and Othello with Wells's and Ellison's Invisible Mans. As part of this last unit, I'm thinking of bringing in excerpts from Marc Shell's "Ring of Gyges" (Missippi Review 17, 1989). It seems like it would be a good article for 200-level students because the barrieres to entry are low -- that is, a student doesn't need to be grounded in loads of theory to make sense of it. But I could use a sanity check. Obviously I'm asking other people about this, including past and current students, but with something like this I can't be too careful. Also, good article. Second, of the texts in this list I've only recently taught two; I'm asking around all over about the rest, but its worth asking here, too. If you've worked with any of these lately, how did it go?
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Dec 12, 2012 16:30
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Hey, just thought I'd pop in and say thanks for the great thread! Any chance you could throw your old blog posts up somewhere? I meant to get around to them and now that I want to, they're gone. 
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Dec 12, 2012 21:10
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afaak posted:Hey, just thought I'd pop in and say thanks for the great thread! They're up here.
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Dec 13, 2012 15:46
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Hello Brainworm! You've mentioned working with ESL students before, so I want your advice on how to explain a fairly complex English concept to someone not necessarily very familiar with western culture, particularly not with literature. How can we explain why tragedy or tragic things (which make us feel bad) can be beneficial to the spirit and even very beautiful? In other words, how to explain what catharsis is and why it's important to the human condition.
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Jan 14, 2013 09:23
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This is a tough one, and it's hard to think through without knowing some of the particulars -- like which class (or level of class) this is, and exactly where the student seems to run into difficulty. It also depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If what you really want to do is help this student understand catharsis, you've got a lot of options and I think the job's comparatively easy; one plan of first resort is to help the student track down a native language translation of the Poetics and use that as a bridge to talking about the English-language text. But I don't think that's where you're going. If what you want to do is help this student gain some fluency concerning the general situation of tragedy in Western culture, things are a little more complicated. Rather than talking about theories of tragedy in a way that moves from Aristotle forward, you may want to start by talking about more accessible theories of tragedy. Hegel's thinking -- that tragedy is a product of equally legitimate, mutually exclusive, and irreconcilable responsibilities (to, say, government on one hand and family on the other) -- is a good starting point. You can easily get to this by asking your student to talk about a time when he or she made a difficult decision. Of course I don't know your student, but I promise you'll get something in which conflicting responsibilities are central to that difficulty. They always are. So Hamlet's "responsibility conflicts" (between the supernatural mandate imposed by his father's ghost on one hand and e.g. Ophelia, intellectual thoroughness, and his potential happiness on the other) are in this sense much like the typical conflicts students experience when they abandon their families and hometowns to go to school, or when they choose between academic work and social whatever. A decision is necessary, inevitable, and requires choosing one set of responsibilities over another, and while reasonable decisions in this contest are often clear, that clarity doesn't mean that they are made without cost. Hamlet, in other words, is just the music of everyday life played louder. If you can make that connection, between common experience and Hegel's definition of tragedy, then your student has a well-anchored way of thinking both about (a) what's central to tragedy as a form and (b) how an audience identifies with elements of a tragedy through common categories of experience. From there, it's a short leap to either Aristotle or Nietzsche; both describe specific emotional and intellectual consequences of exactly this process of identification. So once your student has a clear basis for identifying with tragic situations, Aristotle's catharsis and Nietzsche's "will of life rejoicing in it's own vitality" should be more intelligible -- they mean purging negative emotions in order to approach conflicts of responsibilities without unreasonable fear (purgation catharsis), clarifying the nature of these conflicts of responsibility (clarity catharsis), or showing that, despite these conflicts and their disastrous consequences, one's capacity to experience them is itself a too-easily-forgotten cause for celebration (rainbows-and-sunshine Nietzsche). If there's a language barrier to that conversation -- especially one that keeps you from talking about a student's experience with conflicting responsibilities -- you've got an entirely different class of problem, and one which is probably going to need a third party to successfully resolve. That might mean coordinating with an ESL tutor to help work with this student, or (in case this is a first-year writing course) finding a seat for your student in an ESL section. If that's the situation, your actions should be guided by your commitment to the best education of every individual student. I'm sorry if that seems obvious, but it's easy to forget. So if (and this is a big and long-distance if) the college doesn't have the support systems this student needs to do the work he or she is expected to do, the right course of action is to recommend that the student transfer, and to support that process as far as you are able. More likely, it means doing some footwork to coordinate with an ESL tutor and setting clear and responsible expectations for your student's work.
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Jan 23, 2013 19:15
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