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This is a pretty specific question, but I imagine you'll know the answer: what's Michael McKeon's reputation like in the field of British literary studies? I'm curious because I'm taking a grad class with him in the Fall (but am myself from another discipline, hence my lack of knowledge about his reputation), and people seem to speak of him with awe.
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# ? May 23, 2009 04:15 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 12:29 |
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striking-wolf posted:This is a pretty specific question, but I imagine you'll know the answer: what's Michael McKeon's reputation like in the field of British literary studies? I'm curious because I'm taking a grad class with him in the Fall (but am myself from another discipline, hence my lack of knowledge about his reputation), and people seem to speak of him with awe. At least two of his books (Politics and Poetry and Origins of the English Novel) are something close to must-reads for grad students in the field.* So probably the best way to put it is that he's a well-known and highly-accomplished scholar. In Restoration Lit, that's about as good as you can get -- there aren't any Shakespeares and there's little field writing for the popular press, so he's not likely to make the Colbert Report. *I read them for my comprehensive exams, only vaguely remember both, and briefly considered using Origins in my last Restoration Lit. section (but chose Watt's Rise of the Novel).
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# ? May 23, 2009 13:56 |
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Brainworm posted:At least two of his books (Politics and Poetry and Origins of the English Novel) are something close to must-reads for grad students in the field.* So probably the best way to put it is that he's a well-known and highly-accomplished scholar. In Restoration Lit, that's about as good as you can get -- there aren't any Shakespeares and there's little field writing for the popular press, so he's not likely to make the Colbert Report. Speaking of "must-reads," if you had to put together a top ten list for grad students, what would you have on there? I'm in the graduate program at National Taiwan University for ancient Chinese literature, and there's a definite interest here in approaching the Chinese canon with western methods, although for the most part it ends up pretty botched . So, I'm trying to do a little research on the side to compare and contrast approaches to the two canons.
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# ? May 23, 2009 14:19 |
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I'm an English Lit. student and I'll be starting my MA in the fall. Did you/do you ever deal with the existentialist angst I do when it comes to English studies? Half the time I feel like it's a wholly self-serving faculty with no real value beyond academia.
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# ? May 23, 2009 18:30 |
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Barto posted:Speaking of "must-reads," if you had to put together a top ten list for grad students, what would you have on there? I'm in the graduate program at National Taiwan University for ancient Chinese literature, and there's a definite interest here in approaching the Chinese canon with western methods, although for the most part it ends up pretty botched . So, I'm trying to do a little research on the side to compare and contrast approaches to the two canons. Holy hell this is a tough question. Most lit. crit. is rooted in literature first and critical theory second, so I've been burning some cerebellum thinking of proper literary criticism (as opposed to high theory) that might be both useful and portable to the Chinese canon, or that might at least bring up some useful thinking points. Long story short, I don't think I can pull up ten, and I'm not sure how well any of these will work. But here it goes anyway.
*Maybe Goldberg's James I and the Politics of Literature.
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# ? May 23, 2009 23:59 |
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SpaceMost posted:Did you/do you ever deal with the existentialist angst I do when it comes to English studies? Half the time I feel like it's a wholly self-serving faculty with no real value beyond academia. The tricky word here is value. Shakespeare clearly has value in the sense that there exists a Shakespeare industry of which I am a part. Will pays my mortgage. Without Shakespeare, there wouldn't be nearly so much demand for Renaissance Lit. professors, no reason not to bulldoze Stratford, and no mechanism for training a particular kind of powerful actor (think Patrick Stewart or Judy Dench). So I suppose I have some kind of value in that I train people to be more literate in that Shakespeare industry. But that's pretty loving weak if I'm trying to justify my existence. What I do also has a sort of leisure value. That is, I help people learn the skills they need to access a long-lived and long-enjoyed part of human culture. Like a sex therapist. I mean, everybody can read, just like everybody can gently caress. But you like it more when you do it better. So those are different kinds of value, and they're both real and both partly outside academia. But that's not what lets me sleep well at night. While I like being useful to other people, I'm at least as interested in being useful to me. I enjoy what I do because I find it inherently valuable inside my own head, not just because it's an instrument by which I can improve other people's lives (though I enjoy doing that, too). If that doesn't fly for you, think about this: I've never heard astrophysicists or, say, engineers ask this kind of question about their fields, although both fields have the same basic problem. I mean, astrophysics is cool, but I'm not sure it's useful. It doesn't have extensive extra-academic applications, for sure, and I doubt the sum total of human suffering would be meaningfully decreased if we modeled the mass of one black hole every hour from now until doomsday. And you can say the same thing about engineering. Yeah, it's clearly true that engineers design some pretty useful stuff, but it's also clearly true that the overwhelming majority of engineers don't. Every piece of useless poo poo you've ever seen had at least a few engineers behind it, and there is a baffling quantity of useless poo poo. Just for instance, a quick Amazon search for household, countertop blenders turns up well over 250 different models, which is about 245 more models than any first-world country could possibly need. But I doubt any engineering students lose sleep over the fact that the things they design will be absolutely inferior or completely unnecessary. That's not an indictment of astrophysicists or engineers. It just means that if you use "real value" as a touchstone for any profession, that profession's probably going to be found wanting. You can always make the case that the world doesn't need ninety-nine of each hundred people in it, but that's not really the point. "Value" in that sense isn't worth the angst. You can't choose to be valuable through a line of work any more than you can cure AIDS by eating the right number of carrots. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 00:56 on May 24, 2009 |
# ? May 24, 2009 00:54 |
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Have you noticed any trends in overall ability regarding gender? I've found a lot of women I know have trouble discarding the passive voice, and write in an overly wordy style. On the other hand, I've found many men I know have trouble with grammar rules, such as the placement of commas. Have you found that men are better writers, women, or is it split fairly equally? What do you think of genre fiction?
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# ? May 24, 2009 03:36 |
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do you have to have an MA in English to enter an English PhD program?
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# ? May 24, 2009 03:52 |
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How would you compare your role as an English professor in a very small, liberal arts based school to that of professors at larger, more diverse schools (state schools, basically)? If you can, that is. I'm curious. I have a BA in English from Temple University and learned absolutely nothing from the curriculum they offered. I had a few good professors, at least in the English department, but I'm not sure they taught me anything I didn't already know. For me, at least, I thought my education was basically worthless (besides the fact I ended up with a degree), and I feel that most, if not all, liberal arts majors at large universities end up being pointless wastes of money for everyone involved (the students paying for the education, the school for staffing/financing the departments). I think smaller universities can truly delve into the liberal arts with their students, but even then the whole system seems really self-perpetuating (liberal arts students get degrees in it, end up teaching liberal arts or supporting them, repeat ad nauseam) - at least in smaller schools you are really digging into material. TL;DR: I'm curious as to how you see your role as an English professor at a small liberal arts university - what do you strive to teach? How do you see yourself in the grand scheme of things at your school/in the higher, paid education system of the US?
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# ? May 24, 2009 04:14 |
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Aturaten posted:Have you noticed any trends in overall ability regarding gender? I've found a lot of women I know have trouble discarding the passive voice, and write in an overly wordy style. On the other hand, I've found many men I know have trouble with grammar rules, such as the placement of commas. Have you found that men are better writers, women, or is it split fairly equally?
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# ? May 24, 2009 04:18 |
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Let's get back to some fun topics! Hand D in "Sir Thomas More": Shakespeare or not?
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# ? May 24, 2009 05:10 |
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Defenestration posted:What the hell kind of question is this?
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# ? May 24, 2009 06:11 |
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Thanks Brainworm, I'm going to the university library on Monday to pilfer your recommendations. I've already spent a little time looking at Bloom's writing, and it looks very useful. If I ever produce anything worthwhile, I'll post an update!
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# ? May 24, 2009 08:05 |
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Radd McCool posted:A sociology question. Generally speaking, however, it's not impossible that men and women would tend toward certain communication (writing) habits.
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# ? May 24, 2009 08:40 |
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By the by I think a lot of astrophysicists ask that question of their field.
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# ? May 24, 2009 13:04 |
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Aturaten posted:Have you noticed any trends in overall ability regarding gender? [...] Have you found that men are better writers, women, or is it split fairly equally? A few years ago, I built a little engine that takes students grades' for different types of assignments and tosses them up against things Admissions and the Registrar know (gender, race, age, SAT/ACT scores, matriculating GPA, semester-by-semester GPA, admissions wave or rank, major, and so on).* What I'm about to say comes out of that data. Basically, women are way, way, way better students than men. This is more pronounced if you norm for SAT scores, and less pronounced if you norm for semester-by-semester GPA. Basically, this means that women get better grades than men, and standardized tests underpredict their performance.** The more interesting thing about this is that male students tend to describe the extreme upper and lower ends of the curve, while women cluster close to the top. So in a given, gender-balanced class, grade distribution looks something like this: Grade: M%/F% A: 50%/50% B: 30%/70% C: 80%/20% D: 90%/10% F: 95%/05% That is, top students are evenly gender divided, while good students are overwhelmingly female. Average and below average students are overwhelmingly male.*** Apart from the issue of overall quality, I haven't noticed that women write differently from men. Anecdotally, they are more willing to adhere to and document process. If I ask students my students to hand in a peer-reviewed rough draft along with their final papers, the noncompliants will basically be all men (as will the majority of plagiarism issues, since these correlate pretty well). Attendance is better, too. If I have a woman miss more than three classes, that means she's dropped the course and I haven't yet gotten formal notice. Going through my advising notes, there are a few other oddities. Women seem to have fewer LD difficulties than men, but whether that comes out of better management or lower (or less severe) incidence I can't say. Drug and alcohol problems that show up on my radar are rarer, too, but what that means is way open -- it could mean that women use less, or use in a manner or an environment less susceptible to discovery. quote:What do you think of genre fiction? Well, like most fiction, most genre fiction is terrible. But I suppose every genre has its geniuses and its classics -- that is, people or works that exhibit an exceptional understanding of the genre's vitals. But I only have one thing to say about genre fiction and it's not very interesting, so you might want to skip to something else. I send a book proposal to a romance novel publisher every Valentine's day, mostly for the rejection letter -- whatever else, genre publishers send insanely detailed rejections if you're on that "revise and resubmit" cusp. Anyway. The best one I've gotten is for a 2005 Biblical/Nautical treatment called Ark of The Heart, which mentions that: (a) there are two Biblical arks, so my title should make it clear that we're getting more Noah and less Nazi-melting gold boxes. (b) that this publisher is exclusively straight and bestiality-free, so I need to revise my plot treatments for chapters 1, 3-11, 13, 15, 14-24, etc. (c) the final chapter,**** which I included in it's entirely, was "whimsical and intelligent, but deeply moving" (italics in the original). * I designed this system back in 1999 and I've got a few dozen friends who use it -- we started sharing results seriously in about 2003 thinking we'd be able to sort something publishable out of the data. The more fools we. ** Incidentally, this is also true in other classes and majors we've looked at, including male-dominated fields. I've got a pile of data on Lehigh's College of Engineering that's really interesting. Basically, female students do better in Engineering classes and their prerequisites than male students, but are about five times more likely to change to another major. *** Based on our data sharing, this trend holds for just about every class -- the only exceptions are classes where there are too few female students for the stats to work. **** Doctor Balthazar abandons his post in the Ark's infant burn ward and rides out the rest of the flood clinging to the coffin of his panda, Jonas, who died three days earlier in an accident on the luau deck.
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# ? May 24, 2009 13:37 |
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xcdude24 posted:do you have to have an MA in English to enter an English PhD program? Nope. Most PhD programs run you straight through from the BA.
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# ? May 24, 2009 13:58 |
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Brainworm posted:Most of the time, bad writing by good students has real process problems rather than clear product problems -- that is, you get a solid piece of writing where there's a clear research gap or little improvement between drafts -- rather than a process-immaculate piece that I somehow intuit isn't up to a student's native abilities. So when I say I'll hit the best paper in the class with a B or lower, that's generally where it comes from; the product might be nice, but the process could be hosed.
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# ? May 24, 2009 13:59 |
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Brainworm posted:A few years ago, I built a little engine that takes students grades' for different types of assignments and tosses them up against things Admissions and the Registrar know (gender, race, age, SAT/ACT scores, matriculating GPA, semester-by-semester GPA, admissions wave or rank, major, and so on).* What I'm about to say comes out of that data.
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# ? May 24, 2009 17:23 |
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Brainworm posted:Nope. Most PhD programs run you straight through from the BA. Whoops, I had a mental lapse there. By MA I meant BA.
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# ? May 24, 2009 18:54 |
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How do you deal with/detect plagiarism, if you've encountered it at all? My university is pretty large and I haven't heard stories from my own department, but I imagine that there must be cases. I know most professors use electronic scanners to ensure legitimacy, but do you have any stories/methods that you use?
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# ? May 24, 2009 19:53 |
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Brainworm posted:Well, like most fiction, most genre fiction is terrible. But I suppose every genre has its geniuses and its classics -- that is, people or works that exhibit an exceptional understanding of the genre's vitals. But I only have one thing to say about genre fiction and it's not very interesting, so you might want to skip to something else. Your standards for what constitutes as interesting are far, far too high.
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# ? May 24, 2009 22:47 |
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Van Hagar Rules posted:How would you compare your role as an English professor in a very small, liberal arts based school to that of professors at larger, more diverse schools (state schools, basically)? This is a really good question, since liberal arts education is right now beginning a sort of systematic re-evaluation of its place in the higher ed. ecosystem. And this is tough. Every school has, or says it has, its own flavor, and to some extent each does. At the same time, it's really difficult to see substantial differences between undergraduate education at, say, Ohio State and U of Michigan. Each have their flagship programs, but their educational philosophies and the implementations of those philosophies seem largely identical. What I'm saying is, there's tons of room to disagree with what I'm going to say, and that's that liberal arts colleges are defined by their approaches to general education, and not principally by faculty/student ratios, class sizes, foreign travel, and so forth. In other words, what I teach as a liberal arts prof qua liberal arts prof isn't about my majors. Any decent college should have junior and senior level courses taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty who are current on field research (if not themselves active researchers), a major designed for both field coverage and selective depth, and classes that encourage majors to work with other majors and field professionals on collaborative projects as part of and increasingly self-guided learning process (which means discussion-based classes, which means no more than, say, 15-20 students in the room). I'd guess that this educationally necessary situation is more common at liberal arts schools, but liberal arts doesn't own it -- I'm sure you'd see it in the top half of US universities, regardless of their liberal arts disposition. But general education is totally different. Liberal arts colleges as a rule commit to making general education as extensive and rewarding as in-major education. I'm actually working on a report right now where I codify this GenEd commitment in the form of twelve insanely vague rules. So I'll pretend to clarity by quoting them here: Good General Education Programs
That's a lot of stuff, but what it basically means is that general education shouldn't be treated by faculty, administrators, or students as a second-class academic citizen -- it's not a set of requirements to get out of the way, and it's characterized by the same deeply-collaborative discussion-based experience as good upper-level courses. It should also have a clear set of purposes in line with students' personal, academic, and co-curricular goals and experiences, the college's institutional mission, and individual students' commitments to self-improvement. I teach at a liberal arts college because I think that a good GenEd experience, more than anything else, can make students better people. I don't just mean this in the sense that they become good citizens or more closely conform to our college's mission; I mean this in the sense that GenEd teaches students to see education as a deeply individual process of self-evaluation and self-improvement, apart from a forum for more general types of intellectual discovery. That's where students learn to see education as intrinsically valuable, rather than just an instrument one uses to get a better paying job or make better jokes at parties. In that sense, my field expertise matters much less to me than my overall abilities as a teacher and widely-literate intellectual, since those are the things that are really going to help my GenEd students build something useful out of their experiences with me.
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# ? May 25, 2009 04:17 |
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Brainworm posted:This is a really good question, since liberal arts education is right now beginning a sort of systematic re-evaluation of its place in the higher ed. ecosystem. And this is tough. Every school has, or says it has, its own flavor, and to some extent each does. At the same time, it's really difficult to see substantial differences between undergraduate education at, say, Ohio State and U of Michigan. Each have their flagship programs, but their educational philosophies and the implementations of those philosophies seem largely identical. That's a really interesting perspective on GenEd. I attend a rather large(T1) university, and my experience is that GenEds are just something you have to get out of the way before you delve into the "nitty gritty" of your upper-division major requirements. I finished all of my GenEds during the fall quarter of my second year, and I didn't really feel that much more "well-rounded" because of it. I'm a reading/writing guy, so I just took all my quantitative stuff pass/not pass, and i've probably regressed in that cognitive department since high school. I definitely found a few of the GenEd classes interesting(a couple of them literally changed the way I think about the world), but they won't by any means play a major part in my overall educational experience.
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# ? May 25, 2009 04:55 |
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Bolkovr posted:Let's get back to some fun topics! Yes. Yes indeed. quote:Hand D in "Sir Thomas More": Shakespeare or not? If I could take the payoff of the long odds: yes. It was pretty common for playwrights to work as script doctors -- the most famous example of this is Ben Jonson revising Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, which we only know about because Jonson recorded a bunch elitist complaints about it. ST is cantankerous and bloody, and not at all to his taste. Anyway. Most of the time this editorial work went uncredited, since lots of it was for revivals (which traded on the name of the revived play) or for occasional performances (that is, one-time revisions of a play for a specific audience, like The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet). So it's not at all surprising that More wouldn't make the First Folio if Shakespeare was a script doctor rather than author proper. But let's follow up on the FF. Heminges and Condell omitted Pericles and Two Noble Kinsman presumably -- at least as conventional thinking would have it -- because they were written in heavy collaboration. But the First Folio includes other collaborations like Timon, Henry VIII, and Titus, so my guess is that the omitted plays were not only collaborations, but also either a) commercial disasters b) occasional dramas, or c) simply unfinished (i.e. in heavy revision). The state of the More manuscript suggests at least (c), but the heavy revision might also indicate (a) -- a play that didn't work would have been revised before it was abandoned. I think there are compelling cases for why More is also (b), since the subject matter in some respects seems tailor made for a turns-out-this-was-a-bad-idea court performance. Period religious politics could have led a play about a Catholic martyr to be quickly shelved during Elizabeth's reign, but doctored in hopes of court performance under more tolerant conditions that never emerged. Or it could have been played as a private drama for closet Catholics, which would explain both why it never saw print and (maybe) Shakespeare's involvement (since there's a line of Shakespearean biography that suggests his Catholic sympathies). I know I've wandered from that original point about script doctoring, but here's where it comes in: in the 1590s, there are only about twenty men writing plays for the English stage. And they're basically divided between a few playing companies, (although many of them freelance). So if you've got a play from the 1590s with passages that look Shakespearean, they're probably Shakespearean. There just aren't that many other candidates. So the real issue is finding plausible reasons why a play was excluded from the First Folio and for why Shakespeare went uncredited as an author. I think More provides a bunch -- as I re-read this, I find myself increasingly convinced by my "private performance for closet Catholics" hypothesis.
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# ? May 25, 2009 05:00 |
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Josh Lyman posted:Can you post the factor loadings and DGP? I get my factor loadings from Admissions at various colleges. They put an insane amount of money into researching them because correlating e.g. SAT scores with GPAs shapes recruiting in big ways.* So I can't put them out here -- they're as close a thing to trade secrets as we've got. But if you want to do something that needs these numbers, I've never had trouble getting them from Admissions as long as I agree to restricted disclosure and/or some basic information sharing.** * As in, "I've just crunched some numbers, and it turns out SAT math scores radically underpredict Calc I grades for Korean-American student athletes. Someone help the soccer coach mail college-branded kimchee to every Unification Church youth group with average scores over 450." ** As in, "did you know your physically disabled students of color consistently outperform your matriculates from Dallas during Fall semester?"
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# ? May 25, 2009 05:28 |
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Junior G-man posted:How do you deal with/detect plagiarism, if you've encountered it at all? My university is pretty large and I haven't heard stories from my own department, but I imagine that there must be cases. If I've got a student copying papers the real battle's already lost. So my processes revolve around prevention. The first and biggest part of this is not putting students in positions where they think copying work is their only option, which means being constantly available to help anyone who's anxious about an assignment and giving out extensions where students have schedule stress. Of course that doesn't cover everyone. I use drafting extensively in all my classes and grade largely on process. And I require that copies of sources be handed in with projects (along with rough drafts, review comments, notes and so on). That's not principally to deter plagiarism, but it can't hurt. Also, I use verbal evaluations on major projects. Instead of handing papers back in class, I have a short conference with each student about what I thought worked or didn't, and listen to students' rationale for why they wrote whatever they wrote. Sometimes, especially in advanced classes, they're guiding their writing with good criteria that didn't occur to me as I read. Other times, they've got problems with some research or writing process that only become apparent in conversation -- you know, "I wrote Y because of X," where X is crackrock. I suppose someone could fake a project by grabbing some stock essay, revising it a few times, tracking down all the sources, and becoming conversant enough with it to explain how different parts are supposed to work. But I can't imagine that's worth it.
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# ? May 25, 2009 05:53 |
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I'm sorry if this has been asked before. What do you read for fun? Are there any contemporary authors that you enjoy?
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# ? May 25, 2009 07:56 |
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what's usually the average grade in your classes?
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# ? May 25, 2009 18:20 |
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TheChimney posted:What do you read for fun? Are there any contemporary authors that you enjoy? For fun, I stick mostly to magazines and journals. Make, McSweeney's, and The Believer are all good. I'm also a terribly intolerant reader. Just for instance, I picked up Michael Swanwick's Jack Faust, since I've done a lot of work with the Faust myth and thought a rewriting might be fun. Plus, it was up for a Hugo, so that can't be bad, right? Then I read: Swanwick posted:The very houses themselves dreamed of Holocaust. And I was like, gently caress you Michael Swanwick. gently caress you and your disregard for Strunk and White Rules I:17. II:4, II:6 and II:16.* And gently caress the Hugo voters at Worldcon for nominating a book with such a malignant goddamn sentence. It's not even worth burning.** But Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Klosterman, Dave Eggers, and Chuck Palahniuk have all done some good stuff. Stephen King's an incredible writer when he's not high (omit ~1980-2000). Toni Morrison's early work is at least interesting, but she's a lot better at writing herself into interesting situations than writing her way out of them (see Beloved). And Kurt Vonnegut is the 20th century's Charles Dickens. I know you'll never see him in a college lit course, but I'd bet half my liver you will in a century. The guy's craft is loving unreal. I mean, I'm just going to take emotional, mental, and social disorders of baffling complexity and lay them out, unsimplified, in a book that's as easy to read as Harry Potter. * Omit Needless Words, Write With Nouns and Verbs, Do Not Overwrite, and Be Clear. ** The other thing that kills me: books that could just as easily be movies -- that is, books that aren't stylistically interesting and roughly develop characters around a broadly-drawn plot that works by exposition rather than implication. It makes me want to stake the writer's head over a library door.
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# ? May 25, 2009 19:15 |
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xcdude24 posted:what's usually the average grade in your classes? For my first year writers, the high point on the bell curve's usually about a B- or a C+. That goes up for in-major courses and senior seminars, not least because students learn to Audit the Right Way,* and drop classes when they're overloaded or doing anything lower than a B. * The Right Way: If you're at a larger school and see a class you're interested in, just get the books and show up for the lectures. At a small college, ask the professor if you can sit in. As long as the class doesn't have people waitlisted, you should be golden.
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# ? May 25, 2009 19:22 |
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Thanks oodles for all the answers so far, Brainworm. This thread rocks my fictional pantyhose. What are your personal feelings on socializing with students? Relatedly, are you one of those professors who will invite students to their houses for class discussion over lunch/dinner? Why is the above sentence so ugly? What is your favorite board game?
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# ? May 25, 2009 20:31 |
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Fast Moving Turtle posted:What are your personal feelings on socializing with students? I am one of those. I try to have my classes over to my house at least once a semester -- that's been rocky this past year because I've been remodeling. Some parts of the house are a little ugly and some parts are a little unsafe. There's not enough house left for a dozen guests. But I've got a few students who've stuck around town for the Summer, so I've been having them over for dinner a couple times a week. They're interesting people, good to know outside the office and so on. Mostly we talk books and movies. A few of us do committee work for the city, so we see each other more often. The whole students-as-part-of-a-social-life thing can get tricky, though. Probably the most trouble comes form getting outside the mentor/mentee relationship and talking to each other as rough equals.* The other tricky thing is working around a sort of social perception that puts me in a position of responsibility -- actually, more like accountability -- whenever I'm around students. I can see some of the reasons for this, since most people think of professors as authority figures in the same way that, say, high school teachers are. And that's just silly. I mean, if a student drinks at my house, I'm responsible in the same ways any adult is whenever someone drinks at his or her house -- the drinker being a student is irrelevant unless I run some kind of As for kegstands program. But either way, this means I still watch myself a bit. I don't drink around students and I ask them not to drink around me (unless we're in a public place and we're all of age. But even then I don't buy for them like I would for any other friends). And the occasional crush needs close management. So a "no lawbreaking/no drinking/no sex" policy seems a good idea, even if it does cut out a bunch of stuff that's probably fine. quote:Why is the above sentence [from Swanwick?] so ugly? Let's dig into it a bit. First off, that sentence has a lot of words that don't mean anything: The very houses themselves dreamed of Holocaust. Those two bolded words -- just under a third of the sentence -- add nothing to its meaning. They're the stylistic and grammatical equivalent of saying "I, myself, believe..." Skilled writers don't do this, but competent writers will occasionally throw in an extra word or inflated phrase for the sake of rhythm or cadence: Lincoln posted:Four score and seven years ago... Which is of course a spondee and two iambs, quote:Four score and seven years ago. This is a delightful way to begin a speech or a poem -- the iambs are casual, but sound poised and balanced, while the opening spondee is a stronger line lead than anything beginning with an unstresed syllable. But you don't have to take my word for it. Crack open any piece of iambic poetry and you'll see spondees leading stanza breaks and other emphatic lines. Swanwick's sentence doesn't have any discernable rhythm as written: quote:The very houses themselves dreamed of Holocaust. so there's really no reason for those extra words. And if you cut them, you get: quote:The houses dreamed of Holocaust... which, because it's closer to iambic, sounds less stilted. Incidentally, it also puts a stress on "dreamed," which is kinda cool because it's the only entirely stressed word in the sentence and the word that drags it into metaphor. So if Swanwick had paid any attention to what he was writing, he could have cut those words to improve his sentence's cadence and removed the third of his sentence that didn't contribute to its meaning. And what does that sentence mean, exactly? The whole point of a trope is to draw attention to something specific yet intangible (what I.A Richards would call the trope's tenor). A good trope can do this in a bunch of different ways, e.g.: "He's got a brain the size of Wisconsin," meaning that he's smart, but also suggesting that the person expressing that sentiment finds smart people uninspiring. Wisconsin-ey. "A brain the size of Texas" would denote about the same thing, but connote a streak of individualism of which the speaker was aware.** "This coffee tastes like it was brewed in a dead man's colon" of course means that the coffee tastes bad, but it accomplishes this by linking the coffee's taste to a less specific kind of sensual revulsion, and implying that those degrees of sensual revulsion are about equal. You could do the same thing on a purely intellectual plane by saying "this coffee tastes like death." In both cases, you can see how the trope makes the sentiment expressed by either sentence more specific, generally by cramming what's actually a complex set of associations into a couple words or a single image. That's how tropes work. That's the point of them. So what do you get from "the very houses themselves dreamed of Holocaust?" Presumably, the houses are either Jews, Nazis, or any of the millions of people who have anything from vivid to passing recollections of either the Holocaust or its varied dramatizations. So let's stick with Jews and Nazis. Case A: The houses are Jews. Do Jews dream of Holocaust? Probably not. Concentration camp prisoners might dread death from disease or industrial-quality extermination, but "dream" seems pretty far from that. You could have a dream about unicorns or rainbow orgies, but neither of those are freighted with any kind of dread, foreboding, or fear, which seems to be the sentiment this trope emphasizes if the houses are supposed to be Jews. OK. So we're talking about these houses as post-Holocaust Jews -- survivors and their kids, say. "Dream" still isn't even close to the right word. The emotions in play there are maybe in response to nightmarish flashbacks or to being recently inducted into a historical narrative of persecution. Not exactly visions of sugarplums. Case B: The houses are Nazis. Do Nazis dream of Holocaust? Again, I'm betting not. Some Nazis might plot or conspire, and some might feel an unspeakable sense of dread at the depths of evil they're either perpetrating or conspiring with through silence, but I can't imagine "dream" operating well in either case. So whatever this trope is supposed to be doing, it isn't. The closest I can get to this is that the houses maybe have some kind of death urge -- unlike the Jews, these houses want to be exterminated, hence "dream" and "Holocaust." But that's just a series of terrible choices. If I've got a self-destructive friend, a fantastic Holocaust vocabulary has got to twist in some counterintuitive and precise directions to describe how he feels. More likely, given the book's content, Swanwick was trying to paint the houses as unwitting participants in a process of misery-generating industrialization whose logical terminus is Auschwitz. But he does this at the cost of writing a sentence that's incomprehensible unless you know the direction the book takes a few hundred pages later. He might as well write the words in a swastika pattern, raising a specific question the reader needs to keep reading in order to answer (i.e. why is this swastika here?) rather than burdening his readers with a needlessly cryptic and therefore forgettable trope. Also, the Holocaust provides a seriously lovely vocabulary for describing anything that isn't the coordination of Nazi death factories. It's sensational but doesn't carry any emotional freight. I mean, I know the Holocaust was bad in the same way nuclear war would be bad, which is to say that I know it in a way that's emotionally and intellectually weightless. It's like saying there are billions of stars, tens of billions of stars, or hundreds of billions. I understand at an entirely superficial level that one quantity is greater than another, but I don't think anyone finds those phrasings substantially different, like "billions of stars, no big deal. Hundreds of billions?! You're blowing my mind, Sagan." quote:What is your favorite board game? Oh, lots of these. Scrabble is OK. Tri-Bond is also nifty. Apples to Apples is fine, but you need to play with good people or it won't fly. Trivial Pursuit (Genus Edition) is awesome because you have to think like it's 1970 and the literature questions are all about Hans Christian Anderson and Peter Pan. * This is tough even with non-students or not-my-students. The dating pool around here is mostly early-20s, so one of a couple things happens: I have to talk around the job before we can have a real conversation, or I'm immediately a vehicle for working out pathetic sexual fantasies. ** From the pilot episode of Breaking Bad. Hank says this about Walter at his (Walter's) 50th birthday party, and anyone who watches the show can probably see the writer's thinking behind that line. If that seems like a stretch, think about how often someone like Hank uses metaphors in casual conversation.
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# ? May 25, 2009 23:23 |
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Do you require your Shakespeare students to see a play in performance each semester? If so, what do you do to prepare them? Do you feel that as an academic you are looking for something different in a performance than someone approaching it from the theatrical side? I know that as a longtime Shakespearean actor and director I am often willing to enjoy more experimental interpretations, because after working with these plays for so long they have started to look more like blank canvasses than priceless cultural artifacts. On a sidenote, I actually did direct a production of Romeo and Juliet where I tried to find overlooked moments of comedy, including interpreting the nightingale and lark scene much the way you talked about. It was... not well received. I also played the Nurse's "O woe!" bit for comedy (which people have certainly done before), because that scene always gave me the church giggles as a kid.
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# ? May 26, 2009 02:38 |
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Do you ever find yourself reading a terrible novel like "Twilight" or anything by Nora Roberts? I ask because I do this on a regular basis so I can "Know thy enemy." I am just hoping I'm not the only one. P.S On that note, does it bug you to put punctuation within quotations? I know that saying "Know thy enemy!" is incorrect, yet why even bother putting the punctuation within the quotes in the first place? It seems more natural to write "Know thy enemy".
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# ? May 26, 2009 04:47 |
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What are your favourite poems?
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# ? May 26, 2009 07:01 |
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I don't know if this makes a difference, but Slaughterhouse 5 was required reading in my high school Honors English class 7 years ago. I was just gonna ask you about contemporary writers and saw that you'd answered it, and your criticism of Swanwick is pretty much identical to what I thought of City of Thieves. "Only a single fish skeleton of cloud interrupted the endless blue sky." I was embarrassed to read it! Guess I don't have a question, sorry
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# ? May 26, 2009 07:28 |
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I guess your field requires a lot of reading. How long does it take you to read a typical length novel? What are your thoughts on speed reading?
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# ? May 26, 2009 10:17 |
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Brainworm posted:But Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Klosterman, Dave Eggers, and Chuck Palahniuk have all done some good stuff. Stephen King's an incredible writer when he's not high (omit ~1980-2000). Toni Morrison's early work is at least interesting, but she's a lot better at writing herself into interesting situations than writing her way out of them (see Beloved). I'll agree with you on Palahniuk so far as to say that his prose construction is really interesting and has a sort of frantic note to it that makes his books incredibly readable, but as to whether or not he will be considered part of the major works of our times is up in the air for me. While his prose is nice, his stories so very often rely on quirkyness or strangeness for their effect, all channeled through similar characters. Ellis, in my mind, is the far greater author because he seems to be able to channel different people in his writing, even if his discourse is always about the emptyness of modern life. I assume you have read Lunar Park and I was wondering what your opinion on it was? I think that he got a little too carried away by his own cleverness and failed to present a novel that is worthy of Less than Zero or The Rules of Attraction. Have you seen the movie version of Rules of Attraction? Any thoughts? I had to read Beloved (AGAIN!, it seems standard material for any course on American Lit.; somehow everyone manages to jam it in there) and I couldn't agree more. I always find the conclusion to the novel (after Beloved turns out to be a poltergeist redux) so disappointing. But I did get Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle in a course on nuclear criticism though
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# ? May 26, 2009 14:31 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 12:29 |
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What'd you think of "Catcher in the Rye"?
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# ? May 26, 2009 21:16 |