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tokenbrownguy
Apr 1, 2010

So here I am, having read this thread for four years. I started reading as a bullshit undergrad STEM major, and now I'm grading my composition students' second paper and not knowing what the gently caress is going on. I have 4 projects due next week, and will be gravely discussing the influence of adaption in postmodern media for a majority of graduate evaluation next week. And getting paid for it.

I love my job.

I know Brainworm has talked a lot about how horrible the job market is, but drat if I'm not having the time of life at the moment. So thanks I guess? Sounds dumb that an internet comedy forum nudged me toward where I needed to be, but hell if I know how else I ended up where I am. So I guess, ask me what it's like to be an English graduate student in the 10's. Because it is awesome.

More on point, I'd like to ask how you humanities writing folks handle midterms. I'm doing a in-class midterm writing exam on Monday to ostensibly prepare my students for the midterm exams they might have have in their future careers. I'm hesitant to grade it for any meaningful amount, but I also feel a duty to my students to evaluate them in a useful way. I feel that many of my students won't meaningfully respond to anything but a letter grade, despite our awesome class environment. I'm leaning towards grading them with an A/B/C/FAIL scale, but not attributing many points to the midterm. How do I make this midterm useful to both my students and myself without arbitrating a relatively unrelated (timed) piece to the rubric that I use on their primary work?

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Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

3Romeo posted:

Brainworm, a few years ago (goddrat) you mentioned watching Breaking Bad and being pleasantly surprised about the ending of season two. Now that the show is over (and, as I believe, hit its stride near the end of season three and went balls deep to the end), I'm curious: did you watch the rest of the series, and if so, what did you think? (In case you missed it, this is me looking for an absurdly insightful post along the lines of your Hobbit-contract law/Red Badge-Slaughterhouse Five analysis.)

Well, I didn't watch the rest of the series. Or haven't yet. That's nothing to do with quality or promise of the show, though -- my putting down TV watching (and a lot of other things) roughly corresponds with meeting, marrying, and divorcing my then-fiancee and now ex-wife.

I was going to write something like "that intensity of dysfunction puts an upper limit on how much TV a man can watch," but a quick look round the neighborhood suggests that the opposite (if anything) is true.

Anyway. What I don't have here is anything like a knowledge of what happens in Breaking Bad seasons three to whatever. But in the interest of making connections, I think the arc of the show and the probable arc of Walter's character has some ancestors in a group of dramas that most people call "revenge tragedies," which I've written about before and which include Rolling Vengeance (I linked to Amazon here because they, unlike IMDb, have the right cover art for the tape).

I threw "revenge tragedies" in scare quotes there because most people think of revenge tragedies as having the qualities that e.g. Wikipedia attributes to them, e.g.:

quote:

* A secret murder, usually of a benign ruler by a bad person
* A ghostly visitation of the murder victim to a younger kinsman, generally a son
* A period of disguise, intrigue, or plotting, in which the murderer and the avenger scheme against each other, with a slowly rising body count
* A descent into either real or feigned madness by the avenger or one of the auxiliary characters
* An eruption of general violence at the end, which (in the Renaissance) is often accomplished by means of a feigned masque or festivity
* A catastrophe that utterly decimates the dramatis personae, including the avenger

And in this form, revenge tragedies seem to have little to do with Breaking Bad. But I think the first couple of points can be abstracted to a degree that they include it.

Usually, the way a revenge tragedy murder works is as a sort of clearly outrageous crime that can't find any socially acceptable form of legal recourse: Hieronymo's son is murdered by a royal intimate, Joey Rosso's dad is murdered by a family of local untouchables, or Old Hamlet is murdered by the now-king Claudius.

For the revenger, this crime is coupled with something that provides an initial sense of moral clarity: in The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet, this is a ghost. In Titus Andronicus, this is Lavinia writing in the sand. In Rolling Vengeance, if I remember correctly, the guilt of the murderers is basically established during their trial, but they go unpunished thanks to some bribes and bizarre legal technicalities.

What I think is important here is the position these events describe for the revenger. He or she sees the crime and whatever wrongs attend it in extremely idiosyncratic terms, and those terms shape the form that his or her revenge eventually takes. In more pedestrian examples of the form, this means constructing some more-or-less conventional parallel to the original crime -- say, murdering the murderer.

In others, it ends up being a bizarre act that I can only call "educational" -- for instance, building a killer monster truck to tell one's victims that the reasons they're being augured, flame-throwered, or Bigfoot-crushed has something to do with trucks.*

That being the case, insanity actually comes in two different flavors. In flavor one, the "murdering the murder" type, it looks a heck of a lot like stress -- your revenger demonstrates anything from an inhuman, coldhearted resolve to wild distress because of a values conflict that makes it impossible to do what he or she thinks is right. You know, "it's bad to take the law into my own hands and worse to let this crime go unpunished." This is every Lifetime movie where a desperate woman kills her abusive ex-husband, and every vigilante-style movie of the week and crime drama where someone murders a criminal who got off on a legal technicality.

In flavor two, though, revenge looks a heck of a lot like mania. Your revenger might have a specific problem, but his or her real problem is with a culture, society, or worldview. So the revenger falls in love with the act of revenge and brings his or her unique brand of violence to bear on an increasingly indiscriminate or inappropriate family of targets. You know, "the world did something wrong here, so now the world's going to pay." In this flavor, the act of revenge is never really complete until the revenger is forced to stop revenging (usually by death).

This is Marlowe's Jew of Malta, nearly every version of Batman, and at least some part of many movies where more-or-less mainstream white guys decide to kill people for non-professional reasons, e.g. Falling Down.

And this is where I'm convinced Breaking Bad is probably going/has already gone. Walter White is a revenger in the sense that, from his perspective, his cancer, handicapped son, imperfect wife, under-appreciated genius, etc., etc. are deeply unfair and therefore a kind of unremediated crime. And the interesting thing about that (as in most revenge tragedies of this type) is how easily an audience can side wholly with the revenger in confusing unfairness with actual injustice -- that is, confuse something bad happening to you with someone wronging you.

So, based on very little, that's the kind of connection I'm making. Walter White is basically the meth-genius version of the guy who's constantly saying: "Someone stole my lunch again! No. Wait. Here it is. Behind Harold's lunch. Why the gently caress did you put your lunch right in front of mine, Harold?"


* And in Rolling Vengeance this gets even more interesting. The offending hooligans initially drop a cinderblock off an overpass to kill Joey's father, but also run his mom and kid sister off the road (killing them). Then they rape his girlfriend for good measure.

I don't know which part of the truck's iconography speaks to mom and sis, but a monster truck with a giant drill on the front is pretty on-the-nose with the other two.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Verr posted:

So here I am, having read this thread for four years. I started reading as a bullshit undergrad STEM major, and now I'm grading my composition students' second paper and not knowing what the gently caress is going on. I have 4 projects due next week, and will be gravely discussing the influence of adaption in postmodern media for a majority of graduate evaluation next week. And getting paid for it.

I love my job.

[...]

More on point, I'd like to ask how you humanities writing folks handle midterms. I'm doing a in-class midterm writing exam on Monday to ostensibly prepare my students for the midterm exams they might have have in their future careers. I'm hesitant to grade it for any meaningful amount, but I also feel a duty to my students to evaluate them in a useful way. I feel that many of my students won't meaningfully respond to anything but a letter grade, despite our awesome class environment. I'm leaning towards grading them with an A/B/C/FAIL scale, but not attributing many points to the midterm. How do I make this midterm useful to both my students and myself without arbitrating a relatively unrelated (timed) piece to the rubric that I use on their primary work?

First of all, awesome. I loved grad school, and I love my job now. And I think the first one led directly into the second.

Second, here's what I've started doing with basically every class assignment that isn't pass/fail: I have a writing rubric (basically the IGEAP rubric) that has five categories. Instead of using that rubric to create an individual grade for each assignment, I take the top score from each rubric category and use that to determine the final grade.*

Were I to give tests, I'd bring the same method to them: every test would look like the final in the sense that it would have questions assessing students' knowledge and skills in the same categories and at the same degree of proficiency. The highest score in each category goes into the final grade, and everything else gets dropped.

That turns every exam into a chance for useful feedback and future planning; every exam tells them what they can do well, what they need to work on, what you'll expect them to be able to do later on, and how that'll be represented in the exam. It also tells you which of your students are ahead of the curve, and which particular aspects of whatever you're doing later in the semester they might already be familiar with.

* It goes without saying that, for my classes this year, all of our writing assignments are basically the same: write an article for a periodical or website of your choosing that makes a set of perceptive, compelling connections between the ideas we've discussed, the texts we've read, and the ideas or issues important to your article's readership.

Asbury
Mar 23, 2007
Probation
Can't post for 6 years!
Hair Elf

Thanks, Brainworm. I've been trying to train my mind to think of texts in relation to other texts (which seems like the only way to go, in retrospect; otherwise all you're stuck with is a naming of parts) and this is the kind of stuff I love having for models.

GiveUpNed
Dec 25, 2012
This might sound stupid, but what steps can I take to get a job? I'm going to school to study PR/Advertising, but still like the idea of pursing a graduate degree in Film Studies. My mentor is sad I'm not going to grad school, but he understands.

If I go down this path, what steps can I take to become employable? I don't have parents who can support me, or a large nest egg to ride on if it all blows up.

the JJ
Mar 31, 2011

GiveUpNed posted:

This might sound stupid, but what steps can I take to get a job? I'm going to school to study PR/Advertising, but still like the idea of pursing a graduate degree in Film Studies. My mentor is sad I'm not going to grad school, but he understands.

If I go down this path, what steps can I take to become employable? I don't have parents who can support me, or a large nest egg to ride on if it all blows up.

These bits don't make sense next to each other. You... want to do grad school but can't?

Anyway, SAL might be able to help w/r/t grad school, and I think there's at least a few more professionally focused A/T's around that might be better if you're trying to figure out a job situation.

GiveUpNed
Dec 25, 2012

the JJ posted:

These bits don't make sense next to each other. You... want to do grad school but can't?

I can't because I'm in a competitive secondary program for PR/Advertising. $$$ is important at the end of the day.

Baron Porkface
Jan 22, 2007


Why are plurals of animals in English so hosed up http://animal.discovery.com/animal-facts/22-peculiar-names-for-groups-of-animals.htm

Business of Ferrets
Mar 2, 2008

Good to see that everything is back to normal.

I humbly submit my forums username for consideration.

Guy DeBorgore
Apr 6, 1994

Catnip is the opiate of the masses
Soiled Meat

I have only ever seen these "peculiar" group names used in the context of lists of peculiar group names. Which makes me think that's the only time they've EVER been used and that they've become some sort of bizarre pseudo-urban legend.

Boatswain
May 29, 2012

Guy DeBorgore posted:

I have only ever seen these "peculiar" group names used in the context of lists of peculiar group names. Which makes me think that's the only time they've EVER been used and that they've become some sort of bizarre pseudo-urban legend.

I've heard a murder of crows several times before so that can't be right.

Iunnrais
Jul 25, 2007

It's gaelic.

Guy DeBorgore posted:

I have only ever seen these "peculiar" group names used in the context of lists of peculiar group names. Which makes me think that's the only time they've EVER been used and that they've become some sort of bizarre pseudo-urban legend.

I know the following are real:

A murder of crows
A convocation of eagles
A troop of monkeys
A parliament of owls
An unkindness of ravens
A pod of whales

I've heard OF a kaleidoscope of butterflies, but only in a poetic context, not in a "gaggle of geese" context. I've heard of a penguin rookery, except that I've only heard it refer to being a penguin nest, not being a group of penguins. Granted, you will find a lot of penguins at any area that penguins nest. I can easily imagine a charm of finches being a proper term, but I've never heard it.

As for why we have so many animal group names? That's a good question. I suspect it started as jargon for specific animal handler positions, and then when people started keeping more types of animals they wanted to get in on the action too? I mean, prickle of porcupines? Really?

Guy DeBorgore
Apr 6, 1994

Catnip is the opiate of the masses
Soiled Meat
Well I'm glad to hear at least some of them are real. I know that if I ever had the need to refer to a group of rhinos I would totally call them a "crash" (which I got from a similar list).

What makes me suspicious is, why would any actual ornithologist call a group of larks, say, an "exaltation" instead of just a flock? It's four syllables instead of one and way clumsier! And how often would (e.g.) the phrase "a skulk of foxes" come up? They're solitary animals and don't generally hang out in groups larger than their immediate family as far as I'm aware. Ditto a battery of barracudas.

Boatswain
May 29, 2012
According to Wikipedia it is something inherited from medieval hunting traditions and consciously developed into excess which sounds reasonable to me?

E:

quote:

And how often would (e.g.) the phrase "a skulk of foxes" come up?
 Maybe when you've run a group of them down?

Boatswain fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Oct 28, 2013

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Boatswain posted:

According to Wikipedia it is something inherited from medieval hunting traditions and consciously developed into excess which sounds reasonable to me?

Ditto that. I can see "a murder of crows" and a Chaucerian sense of humor parenting "an unkindness of ravens"* -- just generally, in the sense that the medieval version of irony seems to be something like a combination of puns and strategic understatement.

Some items on this list are suspect, though. When I started spot-checking them, I found that "prickle" doesn't have an OED-recorded use meaning "a group of porcupines." But "prickle" does refer to the spines of a porcupine or a hedgehog (starting in about 1567, though the word is used for urticate plant spines and trichomes as early as 1462),** and I can see how a 16th-century text -- with its varied words for "porcupine" and its bizarre relationships between pronouns and antecedents -- could get confusing enough to generate a widespread misunderstanding.

For instance, consider "They cluster together lyke porkenpickes," from Hollybush's 1561 A most excellent and perfecte homish apothecarye. I don't think it's clear whether Hollybush is referring to (a) a group of porcupines or (b) a single porcupine's close-packed quills, since "porkenpickes" could be a variant of "porcupine" (like the 1425 "Porcz de spyne" or the 1413 "portpen"), or an inkwell term for a porcupine's quills. It doesn't take much for this kind of ambiguity to turn into a sentence that seems to call a group of porcupines a "prickle," "quill," "porkenpicke," etc.

Of course, the absence of this use of "prickle" from the OED doesn't suggest that "prickle" is a totally unacceptable name for a group of porcupines. It just means that the evidence for this use isn't where it ought to be. And that suggest (probably) either (a) the word "prickle" has not actually been conventionally used to describe a group of porcupines (i.e. the internet is wrong), or (b) the hardcore OED-ers have somehow managed to miss a quirky but longstanding use of the word "prickle" about which the internet-at-large seems well informed. I don't know enough to be certain here, but I wouldn't bet on (b).

* Or vice-versa, actually; the OED has the first raven-pertinent use of "unkindness" dated 1452, while "murder" dates from 1475.

** For instance, consider Caxton's 1413 Pilgrimage of the Soul: "These sowles..were al ful of pryckes lyke to a portpen." Or Puttenham's 1589 description of a porcupine shooting its quills: "The Purpentines nature is, to such as stand aloofe, to dart her prickles from her."

Brainworm fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Oct 29, 2013

Asbury
Mar 23, 2007
Probation
Can't post for 6 years!
Hair Elf
So I'm heading to AWP in Seattle at the end of February, here in the final year of my grad program. (Would've gone in my earlier years, but I was too busy trying not to drown in coursework.) Anything I should know?

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

3Romeo posted:

So I'm heading to AWP in Seattle at the end of February, here in the final year of my grad program. (Would've gone in my earlier years, but I was too busy trying not to drown in coursework.) Anything I should know?

Well, I don't often go to AWP, and a lot of what I'm thinking in terms of advice has to do with why you're going. But, just in general, I think going to a conference for real means paying some attention to the relationship between your goals and what -- for lack of a better term -- I'ma call your qualities.

This is probably true for anything else as much as it's true for conferencing, but if you want to e.g. meet and talk to publishers, you need to be someone (as in "a kind of person") publishers want to meet; if you want a job, you need to be someone your interviewers will want to work with. And so on.

I'm not suggesting that you strategically fake your way through everything. You can be conscientious and authentic at the same time. But the people I hear griping about conferences -- or complaining that they didn't get what they wanted out of conferences, interviews, etc. -- are also generally the ones who are either (a) as self-centered as gyroscopes or (b) horrible, horrible listeners.

Those aren't mutually exclusive qualities, either. The peacock at every conference (i.e. the guy who asks the first question about someone's paper solely for the purposes of talking about his own research) is a great example of how to do both.

And I'm willing to bet that most peacocks aren't a peacocks at home among friends. Instead, they're just acting out of a million different kinds of nervousness, conference-induced insecurity, job-hunt panic, and so on. So, you know, be aware. If you know you're anxious about some conference-related thing, do whatever you usually do to check your behavior. Slow down, listen to people, and don't dive into any conversation thinking about what you plan to say.

Naked Man Punch
Sep 13, 2008

They see me rollin';
they hatin'.
Brainworm – I hope it’s okay that I add some thoughts, observations and recommendations.

I’ve gone to AWP the last two years (my wife for a few more) – as a part of Sundress Publications – and hope to go this year, pending my job. I mention that as my thoughts may be a little different than a regular attendee, since I spend a lot of my time helping out a vendor booth. In short, the convention is an interesting mix of an academic conference, a college homecoming and a drunken bacchanal.*

To elaborate, it’s best to break the convention down into parts:

1. A-Lister Readings. These are public readings by well-known authors and pending on their “star power,” there may be a lottery system in place for seats. (Often times though its general seating.) Only go to these if you really like a particular author – as in “this is my first or second favorite living author” – or it’s a special event (and you like the author). For example, I went to Anne Carson’s reading last year. Given her reputation as a recluse, to do a public reading at a large conference meant it was kind of a big deal. Also, she is my wife’s favorite poet.

2. Keynote events. Skip ‘em. I cannot think of anyone who goes.

3. Panels. There are always a handful of panels that are interesting. I would go through the program well in advance, pick out a few that are relevant to your interests and think about going. I say think, because the panels are pretty much the same as they are at any convention – sparsely attended unless a presenter is a big name. I try to make it to one or two a year; makes me feel like I’m at the convention for some kind of professional development and not “hang out with a bunch of writers.”

4. The bookfair. This is where you will end up spending most of your time. Seriously.
First, it is massive. I can try to describe the size, but it is better experienced. Row after row, room after room of small press publishers, big presses, companies hawking things related to writing but aren’t necessarily books (there was some kind of video service, if I remember right, at last year’s in Boston) and the like.

4a. Because there are so many publishers, there are many books – poetry and fiction primarily – up for sale. No matter what you set as a budget, let’s say $100, you will likely go over it. Related, if you are flying in, bring an extra carry-on with you for the haul you’ll be toting back home. (And insist on the carry-on, unless you’re a tenured professor and have the money to check an overweight bag.)

The best time to buy is toward the end of the convention. Many publishers don’t want to be going through the airport with multiple bags of unsold books, so they are likely to slash prices and/or make a deal with you.

Related, if you are a publisher or a writer with some credibility (on-line or in print), you can usually broker trades. (Ex. I brokered a deal with a neighboring table in Chicago, giving them a shot glass for a couple of their author’s chapbooks.)

Some dealers leave the convention early – usually bigger presses – so bear that in mind.** But a lot of the presses are independents and smaller ones who are there for the whole shebang. By buying from them, you’re helping keep them afloat. So, if you see a book that catches your eyes, buy it and give them your support.

4b. This is the homecoming aspect of AWP: A lot of writers and publishers travel in various circles and use AWP as a way to reconnect with old or connect with internet-only friends. My wife has some solid “street cred” in the independent publishing world and it is nigh impossible to walk around with her without running into someone she knows and introduces to me.

But if you’ve never been, don’t feel that AWP is completely incestuous or that you won’t enjoy the bookfair. It’s a great place to network, to discover new presses and make friends. Again, if you see a press or book that you like, chat up the booth a little. Get to know them.

4c. If you’re a writer, the bookfair is a good way to find out about contest and/or publishing opportunities. However, don’t be one of those attendees that walks from booth to booth asking each vendor if they would publish the attendee’s work. Speaking as a past vendor, this is similar to the young actor who bothers a famous one because they “have an idea for a script.” If the press has a call for submissions or an upcoming contest, there is usually some quarter-sheet or page of information. Pick it up and if you have questions – or if they tell you about it directly – then engage in conversation. I am not dumping on any person’s work or potential work, but unsolicited authors can be annoying.

4cc. Oh, occasionally big-name writers wander the bookfair. They’re there for the same reason everyone else is, to visit with someone they haven’t seen in a while or just peruse the current lit. landscape. Be cool and don’t be a fanboy/girl. ***

4d. If you don’t line your carryon bags with books, you will load them up with swag.

5. The longer you walk through the bookfair – especially on the first three days – the more off-site readings you will be invited to.

These are public readings, often in bars, and there are many. And they’re often made up of multiple presses doing a joint event. And there’s only a limited number of hours per night that they happen. In other words, you will not go to every off-site reading. Not by a long shot. You might do one or two a night and your choice often comes down to “who do I know at this reading” or “this is a really cool venue.” (More the former than the latter.) If you have friends reading at two different events at the same time, you have to make a choice.

6. No rundown of AWP is complete without mention of the AWPlague. After it’s all over, invariably you or one of your crew will get sick as a dog. Use this time to read the stuff you picked up, watch old episodes of Cheers (that’s what I did after Boston) and curse the convention.

Until six months later, when you look at the calendar and start wondering if you’re going to have the money to go next year.


Oh, and if you do see Sundress at the bookfair (they'll be there), stop on by and say hello. Note: Most of us will be either drunk or hungover.




* Seriously, there is a lot of booze flowing. (What else to expect from a convention made up of poets, writers and disenfranchised educators?) Quick story: Atlanta 2007 – Because of local/state regulations, the conference hotel bar received a weekly shipment of alcohol. The conference attendees drank them out in less than a day, prompting the bar to beg their distributor for an additional, immediate delivery.

** One to watch is The Rumpus. They don’t leave early but they sold out of their “Write like a Motherfucker” coffee mugs and glassware really fast last year.

*** I’ve seen award-winning slam poet Patricia Smith “on the floor” each year and I’m half-sure Seamus Heaney was behind me at Dunkin’ Donuts last year when I was making an afternoon coffee-run for my friends. I was sleep-deprived, so it may not have actually been him. I choose to believe it was, though.

Duece Ex Machina
Aug 6, 2008

Brainworm posted:

That being the case, insanity actually comes in two different flavors. In flavor one, the "murdering the murder" type, it looks a heck of a lot like stress -- your revenger demonstrates anything from an inhuman, coldhearted resolve to wild distress because of a values conflict that makes it impossible to do what he or she thinks is right. You know, "it's bad to take the law into my own hands and worse to let this crime go unpunished." This is every Lifetime movie where a desperate woman kills her abusive ex-husband, and every vigilante-style movie of the week and crime drama where someone murders a criminal who got off on a legal technicality.

In flavor two, though, revenge looks a heck of a lot like mania. Your revenger might have a specific problem, but his or her real problem is with a culture, society, or worldview. So the revenger falls in love with the act of revenge and brings his or her unique brand of violence to bear on an increasingly indiscriminate or inappropriate family of targets. You know, "the world did something wrong here, so now the world's going to pay." In this flavor, the act of revenge is never really complete until the revenger is forced to stop revenging (usually by death).

This is Marlowe's Jew of Malta, nearly every version of Batman, and at least some part of many movies where more-or-less mainstream white guys decide to kill people for non-professional reasons, e.g. Falling Down.

And this is where I'm convinced Breaking Bad is probably going/has already gone. Walter White is a revenger in the sense that, from his perspective, his cancer, handicapped son, imperfect wife, under-appreciated genius, etc., etc. are deeply unfair and therefore a kind of unremediated crime. And the interesting thing about that (as in most revenge tragedies of this type) is how easily an audience can side wholly with the revenger in confusing unfairness with actual injustice -- that is, confuse something bad happening to you with someone wronging you.

So, based on very little, that's the kind of connection I'm making. Walter White is basically the meth-genius version of the guy who's constantly saying: "Someone stole my lunch again! No. Wait. Here it is. Behind Harold's lunch. Why the gently caress did you put your lunch right in front of mine, Harold?"

Dude...

Are you Vince Gilligan?!?!

Because this is a pretty outrageous take if you've only seen up to the plane crash

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Naked Man Punch posted:

Brainworm – I hope it’s okay that I add some thoughts, observations and recommendations.

[...Excellent advice...]

Thank you. This is great for AWP, but also sound advice for any other big conference with a book fair, panels, and keynotes -- think MLA, but also bigger subfield conferences (like RSA).

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost
OK. This is a little out of step, but last night I cracked open Treasure Island and had a moment.

The only book of Robert Louis Stevenson I've read up until last night was Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, which stood out to me as being both economical and well-plotted; what it is, I think, is less like science fiction and more like a detective story with an incredible twist. In that respect it's very much like Fight Club.*

Anyway. Treasure Island is what it is, right? The Goonies, kind of, and in a world of what are now stock pirate characters. But it's also home to the best opening set of forwards and actions I think I've ever read. And so apart from being engaging -- raising questions and then answering them in ways that raise other questions -- the technical proficiency of Stevenson's plotting just blows my mind.

I don't know what to do with that other than make a distinction between what I thought Treasure Island was (an adventure story) and what it actually is (an intrigue), and what I thought I was going to get (action and pirates) and what I actually got (well-managed suspense). So I guess I'm either (a) recommending it or (b) adding it to a short list of books, plays, and poems that are impossibly excellent in a specific way.


* One of a bunch of connections I've always wanted to follow up, but not badly enough to re-read Fight Club again.

FightingMongoose
Oct 19, 2006
If you get a chance to read The Wrecker I'd be dead interested to know what you think of it.

Boatswain
May 29, 2012
Hey Brainworm some questions:

What are the most interesting books on Shakespeare at the moment? What would be considered classic works of Shakespeare criticism? Have you read Katharine Eisaman Maus' Being and Having in Shakespeare (it seems right up your alley), if so what do you make of it?

Cheers

E: Also, what do you make of Kermode's Shakespeare's Language?

Boatswain fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Nov 11, 2013

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

Boatswain posted:

Hey Brainworm some questions:

What are the most interesting books on Shakespeare at the moment?

This is a hard one. I think James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the life... represents the leading edge of a trend in interesting and rigorous Shakespeare scholarship written for a more-or-less popular audience; other examples include Harold Bloom's Invention of the Human or Greenblatt's Will in the World.

Those are interesting because, were I a betting man, I'd bet on this as a viable direction for English scholarship. What's interesting[ about these and similar books is that they bridge the gap between being popular and being credible, which in turn at least starts to solve a longstanding problem with research in the Humanities.

Here's that problem: Traditional, low circulation books academic books are expensive. Not just in terms of cover price, but in terms of the back-end investment by a University. I wouldn't want to be a dean or president explaining why we're spending $150K a year on a Shakespearean who teaches, say, three classes annually and writes traditional, insular monographs. That's because the best case scenario is that your Shakespearen is writing one well-reviewed book every five years, which means that you're spending $750K on one book and fifteen class sections.

Given that you can get fifteen class sections for anything from $50K (with adjuncts) to about $275K (with an instructor teaching 4/4 on the same salary as our Shakespearean), you end up paying a lot for that book. Call it half a million dollars, or about $100K a year (assuming your Shakespearean keeps up his aggressive publishing schedule until retirement).

$100K a year, most places, will get you between five and seven full-ride scholarships. It'll hire a visiting, full-time instructor (or maybe two). If you're going for facilities, that'd finance about 1.5 million in construction -- enough to renovate a good-sized building, or acquire and renovate a few good-sized off-campus houses (for e.g. offices or programs).

Point is, if you're giving up those kinds of things to get books, those books need to deliver. And the problem with scholarship in the Humanities is that the overwhelming majority don't even come close. I mean, if every English-speaking college and university library on the planet buys a book, that's basically 1000 copies; none of the proceeds from those go to the college, and very little go to our Shakespearean.*

So that leaves attracting new students as the sole means of breaking even, and it takes a lot of students to make up for a $500K recruiting investment. A book that sells strictly to university libraries, no matter how well-reviewed, is just never, ever going to do that.

And that's the problem with Humanities scholarship in a nutshell. It's remarkably expensive to produce traditional monographs, and the ROI is remarkably negative. That doesn't mean that Humanities scholarship isn't valuable. It just means that of all the problems that any University needs to solve -- student access to education, understaffing in student services, oversized classes, too few parking lots, epidemic STDs, unimpressive career placement, poor town/gown relationships, dilapidated buildings, and so on -- it takes a peculiar kind of myopia to say "let's spend $500K on an ecocritical reading of Gower's minor works."

That changes, though, if a book ends up being popular and visible. The college loses money on the book itself, no matter how you slice it -- the publisher and writer remain the only ones who get paid. But a good, popular book and the publicity that comes with it can bring in enough students to make the investment seem less insane -- if you pull a Stephen Greenblatt and make it to The Daily Show on a regular basis, you're probably getting enough prospective student attention to make the books a worthwhile investment for the University.**


quote:

Have you read Katharine Eisaman Maus' Being and Having in Shakespeare (it seems right up your alley), if so what do you make of it?

Haven't read it yet. But I've got a sabbatical coming up and it's on the list.


* Royalties there will be between $1500 and $5000, depending on the publisher.

** Not that Harvard especially needs it.

jeeves1215
Jul 29, 2011

Brainworm posted:

This is a hard one. I think James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the life... represents the leading edge of a trend in interesting and rigorous Shakespeare scholarship written for a more-or-less popular audience; other examples include Harold Bloom's Invention of the Human or Greenblatt's Will in the World.
...
Point is, if you're giving up those kinds of things to get books, those books need to deliver. And the problem with scholarship in the Humanities is that the overwhelming majority don't even come close. I mean, if every English-speaking college and university library on the planet buys a book, that's basically 1000 copies; none of the proceeds from those go to the college, and very little go to our Shakespearean.*


Interesting points which raised a lot of questions for me.

First of all, I've been meaning to ask what your opinion of Greenblatt is, and New Historicists in general. If it's an approach you respond well to.

Secondly, what does a standard book contract in the humanities look like? If there is a standard for agreemont.

Also, what is the argument for Universities and Colleges to encourage Humanities research? I have always assumed that it was reputation based, they want to be seen as being involved in academic discourse and improve their perceived standing. But the financial breakdown you give does make it sound like really expensive publicity. I'm just wondering if there is more to it.

Finally what generally do you see that there is to be done in Shakespeare studies? I don't have a source at hand but I'm told 500 books and articles on "Hamlet" alone are published within a year and I do wonder how many way's you can really talk about one text or author. It seems like, from the outside, that a lot of the work these days is not on the plays themselves but simply using the play as a jumping off point to discuss something else.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

jeeves1215 posted:

Interesting points which raised a lot of questions for me.

First of all, I've been meaning to ask what your opinion of Greenblatt is, and New Historicists in general. If it's an approach you respond well to.

Well, I think that a combination of the basic premises of New Historicism and "American" (Yale School) Deconstruction is basically inescapable. What that combination amounts to is the idea that, basically, everything is a text. You can't read Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" against the actual Dover Beach; anyone who pretends to do this is actually reading "Dover Beach" against a set of other Dover Beach-related texts -- photographs, stories, memories, and so on -- and pretending that those texts constitute a sort of objective reality.

As far as that basic premise goes, I like New Historicism. And as far as the effects of New Historicism go, I think they've been mostly positive: we've seen a recovery of what were once minor texts, and a renewed focus on sermons and pamphlet material that's allowed for a more adequate representation of Renaissance culture.

At the same time, I don't think I can ever forgive Greenblatt, Dollimore, and company for the subversion/containment debate. What that debate amounted to, basically, was an entire generation of scholarship that wasted a tremendous amount of time on the question of whether it was possible to write a politically subversive play. It's like the Shakespearean-scholar equivalent of arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, except it also had the effect of making it nearly impossible to publish a book or article that didn't address the subversion/containment question.

The result, I think, is that a lot of what are now minor critical movements (Ecocriticism, New Economic Criticism, Anti-Geography, etc.) had their application to Renaissance Scholarship retarded by at least a decade. That's definitely bad.

The second is that there's an entire generation of Renaissance Lit. people (myself included), who were basically trained to do nothing but New Historicism. Of course you can bring tools from other approaches to a New Historicist inquiry -- gender theory, for instance -- but the thing you get at the end is also always New Historicist.

That's not entirely a loss, but it does lose an awful lot. There was a time when, for instance, an Early Modern scholar might also have been a linguist (or a philologist), and those days are gone partly because those approaches don't support New Historicist inquiries very well. So there's a really valuable line of criticism that basically ends with M.M. Mahood and Helge Kokeritz and is, I think, unlikely to be picked up again anytime soon.

There was also a time when a Shakespearean would have been as much a dramatist as a lit. person, and those days are pretty much gone, too. "How would you stage this play?" isn't really a New Historicist kind of question; the last person I can think of who spanned both Drama and Lit. was Peter Saccio, who's now basically at career's end.

quote:

Secondly, what does a standard book contract in the humanities look like? If there is a standard for agreemont.

My experience has been that book contracts come in one of two flavors.

The first is "payment in advance," which is mostly what you get for editing an edition of Paradise Lost or Turn of the Screw, or what you get for contributing to an edited collection. For editing a complete volume, payment is usually a lump sum somewhere in the $1000-$5000 range, depending on the number of copies the publisher can expect to move in academic and popular markets. Back when Barnes and Noble was issuing paperback "Classics" versions of public domain texts, they'd pay in about the middle of that range.

Writing chapters for different collections sometimes pays nothing, and sometimes pays $50 or $100. Back when, I used to write pieces for the EBSCO databases at $50 a pop, which was a pretty sweet deal for a three or four page overview of Love's Labors Lost or McTeague. As a rule, book chapters that are actually fun to write don't pay anything, but chapters that are things like "A Glossary of Literary Terms" or "An Survey of Shakespearean Characters' Mothers" will pay somewhere in shouting distance of $100.

The second is basically a royalties arrangement -- which is what you get for textbooks, monographs, and (sometimes) for editing a collected volume of essays on a topic like "Popular Representations of Talking Cars." For some reason, regardless of the price of a book or how many copies it seems likely to sell, royalties end up being about a dollar a copy.

In addition, a publisher will do some amount of promotion and "tour" booking (read: speaking at college campuses and the occasional library, specialty bookstore, or club) for any book you write after a reasonably successful one. That's successful by academic standards, which usually means something more like "people cite it a lot" than "sold more than 5000 copies."

In both these cases, and almost all the time, initial print runs are small. My first book had an IRP of about 3000 copies, which was large at the time. Anywhere between 500 and 1000 is more typical for a book where the buyer is most likely to be a University library.

It's also generally understood that many pieces or chapters of a book will have appeared in some form somewhere else (usually as journal articles). Some publishers don't mind this, but my second book had a rider that specified that 20% of each chapter had to comprise material that hadn't appeared elsewhere. I haven't had a contract like that before or since, but some of my colleagues have seen similar provisions before.

quote:

Also, what is the argument for Universities and Colleges to encourage Humanities research? I have always assumed that it was reputation based, they want to be seen as being involved in academic discourse and improve their perceived standing. But the financial breakdown you give does make it sound like really expensive publicity. I'm just wondering if there is more to it.

Well, there are basically two reasons. One of them is that kind of reputation-based publicity. The other is an equally misperceptive idea that the only way to get good people is to offer them time to research and publish -- either in the form of a lighter teaching load, course releases, or sabbaticals.

So, look. I'm glad to have a sabbatical coming up. And I'm glad that I've had course releases to support my research and writing. And I also know that I have a limited amount of time every day, and so it makes an intuitive kind of sense to reduce the demands on my time if you want me to write more.

But that doesn't seem to be how things actually work. My own experience is that the busier I am in the classroom, the more I publish. I get things done with course releases, but not necessarily more things that I get done without them. The same is, I think, true of sabbaticals. I've got a book project underway, and it's gonna be done next August come hell or high water, Spring sabbatical or not.

That doesn't generalize well, but my point is that low teaching loads, sabbaticals, and course releases may be as much a hiring tool, a job perk, as they are a research expense. From a dollars and cents standpoint, a University may get better people with those benefits than they would out of paying higher salaries or delivering some other job perquisite.

quote:

Finally what generally do you see that there is to be done in Shakespeare studies? I don't have a source at hand but I'm told 500 books and articles on "Hamlet" alone are published within a year and I do wonder how many way's you can really talk about one text or author. It seems like, from the outside, that a lot of the work these days is not on the plays themselves but simply using the play as a jumping off point to discuss something else.

Well, if you think of research and publication as something less like "discovering facts" and more like "having an argument informed by research," the idea that people can publish however many articles on Hamlet starts to make somewhat more sense. There is probably a finite but immense body of knowledge related to Hamlet -- you know, a limited number of things every word or sentence could plausibly mean, and a limited number of historical events to which Hamlet could be usefully compared.

But there's no limit to the number of times people can say "Yes, and...," "No, if..." or "OK, but..." And that's basically what academic publishing does -- it's often less a discovery of new information than it is a constant and interpretive process.

Flappy Bert
Dec 11, 2011

I have seen the light, and it is a string


Would you have any advice on where I should start with Faulkner and Hemmingway?

jeeves1215
Jul 29, 2011
Don't have anything to add. But I wanted to thank you for the very detailed followup, I really appreciate it.

Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib

DerLeo posted:

Would you have any advice on where I should start with Faulkner and Hemmingway?

I'm not Brainworm, nor a student of literature, but for Faulkner, I'd start with Light in August, Go Down, Moses, or The Sound and the Fury. The first two are the most accessible of Faulkner's major works, while The Sound and the Fury should be fully comprehensible by the end, especially with the appendix.

In terms of stuff it might be worth doing, reading the Gospel of John before or after Light in August is a good idea.

elentar
Aug 26, 2002

Every single year the Ivy League takes a break from fucking up the world through its various alumni to fuck up everyone's bracket instead.

Brainworm posted:

OK. This is a little out of step, but last night I cracked open Treasure Island and had a moment...

Great take. Stevenson (and Treasure Island in particular) was underrated for such a long time until he got reclaimed through, among others, postcolonial readings. I find The Ebb-Tide. A Trio and Quartette to be a generally brilliant book.

DerLeo posted:

Would you have any advice on where I should start with Faulkner and Hemmingway?

For Hemingway, probably the linked short-story collection In Our Time, then The Sun Also Rises. Nothing of Hemingway's is a hard read, exactly, it's more getting accustomed to reading what he isn't saying, or what his characters say only briefly before their defenses kick in. For Faulkner, absolutely don't start in on The Sound and the Fury; again, I'd go with short stories as an intro: either "The Bear" or "A Rose for Emily" are good places before moving onto the other novels mentioned above. If you go with the former, good news: you're part of the way to reading Go Down, Moses. If you go for the latter, then it's a natural step to As I Lay Dying, and entry into Faulkner's stylistic experiments and his created landscape of Yoknapatawpha County.

elentar fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Nov 20, 2013

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

elentar posted:

For Hemingway, probably the linked short-story collection In Our Time, then The Sun Also Rises. Nothing of Hemingway's is a hard read, exactly, it's more getting accustomed to reading what he isn't saying, or what his characters say only briefly before their defenses kick in. For Faulkner, absolutely don't start in on The Sound and the Fury; again, I'd go with short stories as an intro: either "The Bear" or "A Rose for Emily" are good places before moving onto the other novels mentioned above. If you go with the former, good news: you're part of the way to reading Go Down, Moses. If you go for the latter, then it's a natural step to As I Lay Dying, and entry into Faulkner's stylistic experiments and his created landscape of Yoknapatawpha County.

I think this and Effectronica's post are about when I'm at. If your idea of fun is being confused for a long time, you could start with The Sound and The Fury. Otherwise, starting with both authors' short stories is a great idea -- probably the advice I'd give if I'd thought of it.

I have a hard time with short stories, though. So if you're in that boat, The Sun Also Rises and As I Lay Dying are good choices. They look a little different, though.

Sun is Hemingway's first real novel, and I always get the sense that everything after was either a variation on the same basic themes or an attempt at reinvention. Think Chuck Palahniuk and Fight Club. Every other CP book either explores masculinity, sex, etc. a little bit less successfully, or does something totally different that, if it's good, is good in an entirely different and slightly less interesting way.

Dying, on the other hand, is straight out of the beginning of Faulkner's mid career phase. People divide it differently, but you've basically got a five-year early career that ends somewhere between The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying (characterized by a pace of about one book per year), a ten-year mid-career that ends somewhere between Absalom, Absalom and Wild Palms (one book every two years), and a twenty-year late career that ends in death (and one book every three years).

An old professor of mine used to point out that it was all downhill for Faulkner after he started banging Joan Williams*. So Faulkner's career looks more like Shakespeare's**: early hits, mid-career works that successfully develop or tweak the signatures of those hits, and a solid late career that involves a lot experimentation but avoids runaway success. So you get some good reading out of the early career, loving excellent reading out of the mid career, and mediocre reading out of the late career (that will nonetheless be ruthlessly defended by the most pretentious people you know).

* The deep-down assumptions about what's important here, I think, say a lot for the guy. Who was, incidentally, James Frakes. Also known as the father of Jonathan Frakes.

** Or Radiohead's. Point is, the guy who argues for the value of Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a different version of the guy in the Plastic Ono Band shirt who's going to explain why King of Limbs is the best album ever.

jeeves1215
Jul 29, 2011
Sorry if this has been touched on before, but I am curious about Freud. My basic understanding is that his theory has been heavily discredited by most psychologists, but he still seems to be the leading figure in the humanities for psychoanalysis. Why is there that disconnect?

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

jeeves1215 posted:

Sorry if this has been touched on before, but I am curious about Freud. My basic understanding is that his theory has been heavily discredited by most psychologists, but he still seems to be the leading figure in the humanities for psychoanalysis. Why is there that disconnect?

That drove me bonkers, too. Basically, basically, I think Freud remains a lit-crit mainstay because Freudian psychology provides a whole bunch of useful terms for complex emotional and psychological states, and that those are useful when talking about, say, the actions and attitudes of characters in e.g. plays and novels. So a basic knowledge of Freudian ideas -- that we have conscious and unconscious motives, for instance -- is pretty useful when it comes to making sense of what goes on in a character's head.

Of course it's possible to do some really terrible criticism by assuming that, I don't know, Grendel had an Oedipus complex. But on the balance it's nice to have terms like "uncanny" and "ego" and "libidinal" as common labels for behaviors and attitudes that are otherwise tricky to describe.

Second, some Freudian terms trope really, really nicely. That is, they can be used to describe complex relationships between, say, texts and culture in ways that are both useful and that are also really, really difficult to do without their Freudian original. I've mentioned his work before, but Seth Moglen has done this really well in his work on American Modernism.*

Third, and maybe least interesting, Freud provided a sort of common and persuasive grammar for talking about the ways people's minds work -- or, maybe, worked in early 20th-century Vienna. And the result of this is that there's about fifty years of character-driven literature (call it 1920-1970) in which a "realistic" character is basically one who can be usefully described in Freudian terms. As a consequence, all kinds of oddities from that period -- stream of consciousness narrative or, say, any bit of sex in Portnoy's Complaint) -- are going to be meaningfully interperable against Freud in a way that they're not going to be meaningfully interperable against Milgram'a Obedience to Authority.


* Basically, instead of making the usual distinction between "high" and "low" modernism based on a whole bunch of stylistic criteria, Moglen starts with the idea that most Modernism is about loss of one kind or another, and makes a genre distinction based on whether that loss is characterized by mourning (in which the lost thing is identifiable and the mourner's recovery is possible) or melancholic (in which the lost thing cannot be identified and the mourner lives in a state of perpetual misery). And the result, I think, is a set of really useful textual relationships, even if the Freudian ideas of mourning and melancholy they draw on aren't represented in anything like modern psychological practice.

William Bear
Oct 26, 2012

"That's what they all say!"
I'm not sure if asking about the history of a rhetorical device falls under this thread's rules, so please correct me if it isn't.

I'm just curious: what's the earliest someone has ever said words to the effect of "Of course X, it's the year Y!"

Two examples from the early 20th century:

Semi-example from Woodrow Wilson, 1922:

quote:

Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date [emphasis mine] such questions should be raised.

Presumably in German or French, but a Swiss judge of a case about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 1935:

quote:

I hope the time will come when nobody will be able to understand how in 1935 [emphasis mine] nearly a dozen sane and responsible men were able for two weeks to mock the intellect of the Bern court discussing the authenticity of the so-called Protocols, the very Protocols that, harmful as they have been and will be, are nothing but laughable nonsense.

It attracts my interest because their optimism in progressivism we now know, at our point in time, to be overly bold.

Stagger_Lee
Mar 25, 2009
Freud's continued influence is maybe less surprising when you consider his most famous writings. His conception of the family romance is of course based on a reading of a very famous text, and The Uncanny/Das Unheimliche was another in depth reading of a short story. He wasn't just a psychologist who happened to develop some ideas lit people found useful; he was practicing something recognizable as modernish literary criticism at the turn of the century. He would consistently try to to make a move from his readings of literature to how the people who appreciate or write this literature must function as humans, which is really sketchy as a psychological practice, but the readings themselves are powerful.

Freud looks much less weird in a literary criticism anthology than many of the french philosophers or semioticians or however that we get obsessed with, simply because he talked about literature all the time.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

William Bear posted:

[...]I'm just curious: what's the earliest someone has ever said words to the effect of "Of course X, it's the year Y!"[...]

I dug around on this for a while, and the bottom line is that it's really, really difficult to find phrases by meaning rather than syntax.

What I can say is that the earliest text in which I can remember seeing anything like this sentiment is Dracula (1897). In Dracula, this looks like a weird set of overlapping geographic and temporal distinctions; the Romania that's home to castle Dracula (and the threats it represents) are a sort of old-world archaism that's only meaningful because it represents a way of living that has been (justifiably) supplanted by a sort of modern technocracy.

And so the overall sense in the book is one of tenuous historical progress -- you know, we can fend off the Draculas of the world as long as we keep our train schedules in line, reconstruct accurate timelines of complex events, collate shipping manifests, and keep notes in triplicate. Seriously. The book's vampire hunters are constantly infatuated with their own detective abilities and the technological infrastructure that allows them. On the other hand, Dracula and everyone associated with him just don't seem to understand the way these ways of thinking and living work.

So take Harker's conversation with Dracula in chapter 2, where he describes part of the estate Dracula will be buying:

quote:

"The estate is called Carfax, no doubt a corruption of the old Quatre Face, as the house is four sided, agreeing with the cardinal points of the compass. It contains in all some twenty acres, quite surrounded by the solid stone wall above mentioned. [...] It looks like part of a keep, and is close to an old chapel or church. I could not enter it, as I had not the key of the door leading to it from the house, but I have taken with my Kodak views of it from various points. The house had been added to, but in a very straggling way, and I can only guess at the amount of ground it covers, which must be very great."

"So," Harker says, "here's what I think, and here's something like detailed evidence backing what I think. And here's what I don't know." And he even brought pictures. Dracula's response?

quote:

I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day, and after all, how few days go to make up a century [...]

And blah, blah, blah about how Transylvanian nobility can't be interred with commoners.

In short, what you get here are two really different ways of thinking that, even though they represent two different cultures and geographies, take totally different views on time and how it works. Harker lives in "of course! It's the year 1897"-land. We have cameras. We care about backing claims with evidence, and we're ruthlessly detail oriented. Dracula, on the other hand, takes zero interest in any of these things. Pictures? No thanks. Etymology of an estate's name? BFD.

In shorter, I suspect that you're not going to find much of this "of course! It's the year X" attitude working before Dracula, though I say that knowing I could be really, really wrong. But my basis here is that in order for Dracula to have worked well as a novel, this conflict between "every year brings new innovations and changes" (Harker) and "every year is basically the same as the last" (Dracula) needed to be relatively fresh, if not entirely new.

As a backstop, it's worth looking at a book like Robinson Crusoe, which is a sort of Dracula-in-reverse. You know, native of an advanced culture crashes on a remote island, and starts remaking it in his image. There, I see a clear claim that Crusoe's way of doing things is innately better than, say, the cannibals'. But I don't see the same kind of temporal awareness you get out of Dracula; the cannibals aren't "behind" Crusoe in the sense that they've failed to adopt new and necessary ways of doing things. They're just horribly, unchangeably different.

Second, there's a clear sense that the island rubs off on Crusoe in some positive ways. The adventures Crusoe has while returning to England are all about demonstrating the ways his newfound independence and self-sufficiency make him a better kind of European. That kind of idea -- unless it's well-buried -- isn't even on the radar in Dracula. There's no sense that England, Harker, and all the rest need to change what they're doing, except maybe to do more of it in order to keep the casualties of occult old-world intrusion to a minimum.

That's a lot of broad-stroke sloppy reasoning, right there. But I think the idea's plain enough. I wouldn't anticipate finding much "of course! It's the year X!" much before the middle of the 19th century, and I'd be really surprised to find it in the 18th.

Business of Ferrets
Mar 2, 2008

Good to see that everything is back to normal.
That's really interesting. I guess I'm surprised that the idea of scientific, technological, etc. change wasn't more prominent in the writings of Renaissance and Renaissance-influenced authors. Did writers of that time simply not have the awareness of the change around them? Or did it just not make it into their work?

El Miguel
Oct 30, 2003

Business of Ferrets posted:

That's really interesting. I guess I'm surprised that the idea of scientific, technological, etc. change wasn't more prominent in the writings of Renaissance and Renaissance-influenced authors. Did writers of that time simply not have the awareness of the change around them? Or did it just not make it into their work?

There's a difference between "change" (even "change for the better") and the sort of "progress" (rooted in the Hegelian idea of History) that someone like Wilson and other early Progressives held. While many Enlightenment and Renaissance-era thinkers accepted a link between scientific advancement and moral/political advancement, they didn't see it as "progressive" in the way post-Hegelians did.

Brainworm
Mar 23, 2007

...one of these--
As he hath spices of them all, not all,
For I dare so far free him--made him fear'd...
Nap Ghost

El Miguel posted:

There's a difference between "change" (even "change for the better") and the sort of "progress" (rooted in the Hegelian idea of History) that someone like Wilson and other early Progressives held. While many Enlightenment and Renaissance-era thinkers accepted a link between scientific advancement and moral/political advancement, they didn't see it as "progressive" in the way post-Hegelians did.

Seconded. Broadly speaking, what makes the Renaissance different from, say, the Middle Ages is the awareness that things change in broad ways over time. For instance, if you look at medieval representations of, say, Alexander the Great, he's portrayed as a medieval knight. There are lots of reasons for this -- Medievals were pretty into iconography -- but, broadly, pre-Renaissance societies operated under the assumption that (at least in terms of modern history) things had always been as they were at any given "now."

So even though a Mediavel reader might have read or heard stories that were set in the distant past (say, history from Monmouth or Arthurian legends from Chretien de Troyes), there's little in those stories that makes a clear distinction between the past and the present, much less in any way that cleaves to anything like what we think of as history. There's no "Lancelot didn't ride a horse because we didn't breed them large enough until a couple hundred years ago."

That attitude is of course really different from an awareness of history, and an awareness of history is really different from an awareness that, say, technological progress and social change are inevitable concomitants to the passage of time. If Medieval society saw itself (unconsciously) as a sort of continuous present tense, I think Renaissance (England, anyway) saw all kinds of constant changes -- inflation, changes in agricultural methods, an ever-more-influential caste of wealthy non-nobles and competent civil servants -- as problems that needed to be solved, and as problems in the first place only on the basis that they presented a present that was disturbingly at odds with recollections of the past.*

A modern attitude, in contrast, wouldn't see any of these things as problems by themselves. Inflation's a good example. It's not necessarily good or bad -- it all depends on its economic causes and consequences.** Likewise, we'd tend to look at a rising new professional class (say, computer programmers or software engineers) as completely good news rather than bemoaning the loss of influence among whatever established classes now have to share their pie with the upstarts.

[*] One good book about these differences, incidentally, is Ian Archer's Pursuit of Stability.

[**] And the rate, I guess. Probably, nobody's gonna argue that the 6%/month Brazil 2013 plan was the endpoint of well-conceived fiscal policy.

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GabrielAisling
Dec 21, 2011

The finest of all dances.
What are some of the challenges you face as an instructor getting students motivated about whatever work you're focusing on? I get so angry at research papers because they're always invariably about something that I only marginally care about or even downright hate. I can spend hours reading scholarly articles and essays and analyses of topics I find interesting, but I never get the chance to do so for a class.

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