May 12
Part-time Faculty Win Job Security
crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com
A new union of faculty serving part-time wins raises and employment security in its first contract.
About six weeks ago, I reported on the decision by the Union of Part-Time Faculty to make job security the core demand of their first contract negotiation at Wayne State, where graduate employees and faculty serving on a full-time basis are already unionized.
In the tentative agreement reached between the administration and UPTF-AFT, the faculty forced the administration to accept job security after 6 consecutive semesters (to one-year renewable contracts with seniority protections) and, after 6 more terms, 2-year renewable contracts with seniority protections.
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The War Between Wells and James
Over at Torque Control there’s a good account of, and interesting comment-thread discussion about, last Thursday’s day-symposium on ‘Science Fiction as a Literary Genre’ at Gresham College in London. I couldn’t make the actual day, which was a shame for me, as it sounds like it was a cracker. Luckily Niall Harrison gives good accounts of the papers presented by Neal Stephenson, John Clute, Dr Roger Luckhurst, Andy Sawyer, Dr Martin Willis and Professor Tim Connell. Some interesting points get aired in the comments, not least the divide between university-academic critics or science fiction and the gentlewo/men-amateur scholars, theorists and reviewers, with which the genre is particularly lavishly supplied. I’m particularly sorry I missed Roger Luckhurst’s paper, and not only because he’s a friend of mine and both a ferociously clever man and an excellent speaker; but because, indeed, it was on an especially interesting topic. Click the link and you’ll see: the relationship between SF and Literary Modernism. Niall summarises: ‘he talked about three different implications of modern: modernity, meaning a philosophically and scientifically enlightened society as we have had for the past few hundred years (in theory); modernisation, meaning the technological and ecological consequences of the industrial revolution and urbanisation; and Modernism, meaning the literary movement at the start of the twentieth century. Sf ... is a literature of modernity and modernisation but has an ambivalent relationship, at best, with Modernism.’ In the comments Nick Hubble stands up for Luckhurst’s thesis:
In defence of Luckhurst (whom I don’t know), it has to be said that his position is extremely radical for a specialist in Modern and Contemporary Literature. I should note at this point that this is also my field and so I had absolutely no problem following him because I’m familiar with the idiom and the general outlines of the positions ... What was especially striking was that he more-or-less said that sf was THE literature of modernity and concluded that what was modern about it was the absence of Modernism. People in the field of Modern and Contemporary Literature do not usually say this kind of thing (and that’s putting it mildly). So for me, that was EXCITING. I can see that others might be underwhelmed but that is because they don’t share the same underlying assumptions as people who work in Modern and Contemporary Literature. This was succinctly defined by Luckhurst as being that Henry James won the war with Wells and so came to dominate the modern definition of literary fiction. Of course, the reason others don’t share this assumption is because it is demonstrably false - only in the minds of academics and the literary elite did James win this war; the heirs of Wells, from Orwell onwards, inherited the real world and modernism burnt itself out by 1940. Therefore, what we were seeing in Luckhurst’s paper was the beginning of a sea change (well, it’s been coming some time) by which received academic opinion is transforming itself and recanting the last 100 years or so.
This is, as the thread notes, one of the core arguments of Luckhurts’s recent (and excellent) cultural history of SF, Science Fiction (Polity 2005). I reviewed this book when it came out, for an academic journal, and although I was very positive I also carped a little. Looking back the carping was ungracious: I complained that for a self-proclaimed cultural history of SF it was a shame Luckhurst didn’t include discussion of film and TV SF. But this was actually a reviewerish faux pas, criticising a book by somebody else because they didn’t choose to write it exactly as I would have done. You see it so happens that I also published a history of SF, in which one of my main arguments was that since the 1970s SF has, by and large, jumped media from written to visual forms--but of course it’s asinine to criticise Luckhurst for thinking for himself rather than sharing my peculiar views. The other of my main arguments is that SF begins in 1600. Luckhurst takes the much more orthodox view that SF begins in the latter half of the 19th-century, which is to say, at the same time (more or less) and determined by the same cultural logics (more or less) as Modernism. And as such his overall thesis was much more radical, and much more exciting, than I gave it credit for in my review. So, sorry about that: and you should buy Luckhurst’s book. It’s very good indeed. Better than mine, if I’m frank.
Now, positing Modernism in terms of ‘a war between Wells and James’ is, clearly, a slightly polemical way of putting it; and asserting either the victory of James, or dedicating oneself to a Maquis-style battle on Wells’s behalf, lacks a certain nuance. It’s a shorthand, not an all-encompassing critical description. Keen says ‘I’m not denying the influence of James—I suppose I am trying to reflect the bifurcated culture: James only won in realm of elitist literary culture and the academic modernist industry (he didn’t win in the wider world).’ He goes on ‘admittedly, those spheres are very influential and have cast a distorting material effect over the wider culture’. I wonder whether he’s right to assert that ‘current Modernist studies are showing signs of this position [i.e. the victory of James] breaking down; but as is so often the case, the immediate result of this will be a massive retrenchment with hordes of top scholars declaring contemporary literature to have gone wrong and demanding a return to James (this is starting to happen).’ Coincidentally I have recently been rereading James and my reaction has been a sort of ingenuous surprise at how good he is. That looks rather stupid written down there like that, but its been my reaction, prompted in part by a long period (going back to my undergraduate experience) of not especially liking James. I’ll say more about that in a day or two. But for now I’ll close with this: in my history I cover the period of Modernism in two chapters, one for ‘high’ cultural Modernism and one for Pulps like E E Doc Smith, although my main thesis is (given the, I argue, deeper roots of the genre) they’re basically the same thing. By this I mean that both popular sf and High Modernist art are responding in similar ways to a similar cultural logic: that, in a nutshell, High Modernism is sf. Proust’s Recherche, say, whatever critics have said about it, is actually a time-travel story deeply indebted to Wells’s Time Machine. Similar cases can be made for Kafka, Marinetti, Eliot etc. Enough! Or too much.
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May 11
Tudor Booty Call
First off, let me apologize for the title. Not that I could come up with anything better, but it’s not only lame, but lame in an academic way. That is, it’s an attempt at jazzing things up, but it’s hopelessly outdated. As is the term “jazzing things up.” My first experience with such lameness was in Robert Pinsky’s workshop, back in the mid-80’s. We were discussing the difference between poetry and song lyrics, Professor Pinsky’s example was Bob Dylan. And we all did (to ourselves) a Jon Stewart avant la lettre “Waaah?” He might as well have mentioned Rudy Vallee. (Nowadays I have a much higher opinion of both Dylan and Vallee. And I know I’m in no position to call anyone else lame.)
Anyway, over at {LIME TREE} K. Silem Mohammad has a 100 Best-Loved Poems list going. I love lists! And the most recent poem is Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me,” only K. Silem is calling it something else, and he’s juxtaposing it with some hippety hop, Mike Jones “Back Then” (actual working YouTube here), which he says is the “inverse” of the Wyatt, which reminds me of how my friend Jennifer Clarvoe has written some of what she calls “inverse poems,” mirror images, as it were, of canonical poems. Only she doesn’t have any of them online, nor does she have a clip on YouTube.
But reading the Wyatt again sparked one thought.
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May 09
ALSC Reissues CFPs for Three Seminars
Posted on behalf of John Talbot, ALSC Conference Committee Chairman, and Michael Gouin-Hart, Executive Director, ALSC
The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC) is re-issuing the calls for papers for three seminars scheduled to take place at the 2008 ALSC Conference in Philadelphia, October 24-26: “Editing Dickinson and/or Whitman”; “Literary Magazines: Meeting Places”; and “Uniform Spines: Book Series.”
The submissions deadline for these seminars has been extended to Monday, June 9.
Additional prospective members and current members alike are encouraged to apply. Please see below for details.
Submission form and deadline. Submissions must reach the convener of the session by June 9. They should be sent to both (1) the convener of the seminar and (2) the Association’s office at . On your e-mail’s “subject” line, please give your name and other information in the following form: “ALSC 2008, [Name of Session] abstract by [First Name, Last Name].” For details regarding submission length, please refer to the individual instructions for each session.
- If you do not send copies to both the convener and the ALSC, we cannot guarantee that you will receive an e-mail notice acknowledging receipt of your proposal.
- You must be a member of the ALSC in good standing to participate. ALSC members receive a discount on conference registration.
- For more details about the conference program and information about how to join the ALSC, visit our website at www.bu.edu/literary.
General Description of the Seminar Program
The 2008 Conference in Philadelphia will continue the tradition established in 2004 of offering seminars designed to increase participation of the membership in the conference and giving them another excellent reason to attend. Modeled on what has worked successfully for such organizations as the Shakespeare Association of America and the Modernist Studies Association, these three seminars will each be led by a distinguished member of the Association.
Each seminar will have fifteen (15) guaranteed places, and each person accepted for a seminar will receive an official letter of invitation to the conference and will be listed in its program. Seminar participants will write brief position papers (2-4 pages maximum, double-spaced), and will circulate their papers to the other participants and read all the papers prior to the conference. The listing of the titles in the conference program should help participants obtain travel funding for the conference from their home colleges and universities. Senior scholars are eligible to apply for these seminars, but graduate students and junior faculty especially are encouraged to do so; we hope that senior scholars and others will spread the word and encourage their graduate students and junior colleagues to apply. The three seminars will run concurrently. Those admitted as participants in each seminar will participate in the actual discussion, but anyone at the conference is welcome to attend one of the seminars as an auditor—not a participant—provided there is sufficient room.
Seminar One: Editing Dickinson and/or Whitman
Convener: TBA
Can Dickinson’s poetry be properly edited? What is one to do with all of those manuscripts attached to flowers or bees? What are modern editors to do with successive editions of Leaves of Grass? And why are there no modern editions of, say, Drum Taps? In this seminar, we will discuss various historical approaches to problems associated with editing Dickinson and Whitman. We will then try to come up with some new solutions (or perhaps we will decide that there are not any). Please send half-page abstracts or short papers (2-4 pages) as Word attachments to . All perspectives welcome; we hope to include participants who have lots of experience in editing these poets as well as participants who have none.
Seminar Two: Literary Magazines: Meeting Places
Convener: Andrew McNeillie (Oxford University Press, founding editor of the new literary magazine Archipelago)
The concept of the “literary” might be a relatively recent one but this is no reason to dismiss it as a johnny-come-lately. It’s been around for a century and a half, or more, in some interpretations, and before it the concept of ‘poetry’, although ever complex, is as old as time. Most of us have iconic literary magazines that played key roles in our individual development and the formation of personal preference. Beyond that too, in historical terms, magazines of other eras (some even as short-lived as the May-fly) are living tissue preserved in which we can trace meaning in the making, at the cross-roads or meeting place, before criticism (beyond editorial agenda) and scholarship have quite stepped in to condition reception. This seminar wishes to concentrate on Anglo-American literary magazines of the last century and invites some contextualized case-histories of individual publications, the aim being to see what lessons they might teach for the possible creation of new literary periodicals today. Please send half-page extracts or short papers (2-4) pages to Andrew McNeillie, Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP. ()
Seminar Three: “Uniform Spines: Book Series”
Convener: David Yezzi (Executive Editor, The New Criterion)
Everyman Library, the Pléiade, Penguin Classics, the Library of America, the Loeb series, the Harvard Great Books—how have these influential book series, and others like them, shaped literary studies, the tastes and habits of readers, editors, scholars, and writers? What may it mean for works of literature to be included or excluded from such series? What sorts of possibilities and limitations do such series pose? This seminar invites consideration of any aspect of the relationship of book series to literature, literary culture, or the culture at large, of which literature is one part. We welcome investigations of book series in any language and from all historical periods, including speculation on the future of book series in the digital age. We are also interested in the impact of major serial editions of significant authors. Please send short papers (2-4 pages) as Word attachments to David Yezzi ().
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Friday3: Other Disciplines
Tim Burke had just gotten back from a visit to Maine’s College of the Atlantic and has blogged about it:
The college doesn’t have departments, and its faculty try very consciously to branch out and explore connections between different kinds of knowledge and methodologies. There is a lot of emphasis on guiding students towards independent study and in changing the curriculum to respond to new problems and shifting student interests. They focus on what they call “human ecology”, which I think is potentially specific enough to give the curriculum a clear set of boundaries while flexible enough that it doesn’t get stuck in a particular place and time or in a specific social or political project like a fly in amber. ... The students I met, as well as the faculty, also seem to have a very clear drive towards applied and practical uses of what they teach, though not at all narrowly vocational. The emphasis on student independence pays off, from what I can see: the students I talked to were among the most confident, uninhibited and yet non-snobby undergraduates I’ve met.
In praise of Deadwood: Alan Taylor reviews a comprehensive American history aimed at the general public: Richard Kluger, Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea. He finds it an inadequate antidote to American triumphalism:
To achieve his goals, Kluger needed to make a cleaner break with the tropes of Turner’s day. Indeed, he missed a golden opportunity to reform Turner’s frontier thesis--which can be rescued from its distorting character types. Although Turner got almost all of the details wrong, he knew where to look for the distinctive nature of American society. The frontier thesis rightly regards expansion as central to the development of American institutions and values through the nineteenth century. That expansion created this nation’s wealth, and its distribution of property and power, and much of its historical memory. But that distribution of property and power was profoundly unequal--it was, in other words, at odds with the democratic aspirations also generated by the frontier experience. Before HBO’s series Deadwood succumbed to David Milch’s rhetorical excesses, it brilliantly explored the tension between frontier illusions and realities--and particularly between the frontier ambitions of common people and the consolidating power of capital. Had Richard Kluger similarly illuminated that tension, he would have earned the pulpit to preach history to his readers.
Alan Wolfe reviews John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Atlantic Books, 2007), a biography by Richard Reeves. "In contrast to both Continental and analytic philosophy, give me John Stuart Mill any day, and give me a biography as fascinating to read as the one written by Richard Reeves.”
I am no philosopher, so perhaps I can be forgiven for thinking that Mill has gotten a raw deal from those who are. For a book I have just completed on what we can learn from the tradition of liberal political philosophy, I read a good deal of Mill and came to value him, not only for his seductive writing but also for the relevance of his ideas to such contemporary issues as free speech, women’s suffrage, and the role that religion should play in a democracy. It therefore bothers me that Mill is not taken as seriously as he should be, either in philosophy or in my own discipline of political science.
Reeves calls Mill “unquestionably the greatest public intellectual in the history of Britain — and perhaps even the world.” Such praise is too excessive, even for me. But I share Reeves’s argument that, as well known as Mill may be, he nonetheless deserves a rediscovery.
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May 08
After 50 Years, Will Quality Management Shoot Down minnesota review?
crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com
A cultural-studies institution declines to “do more with less.”
Founded in 1960, the minnesota review has long served as a leading outlet for literary fiction and poetry, and, under Jeffrey Williams’ editorship since 1992, established itself as a foremost outlet for cultural-studies scholarship and reflection about the increasingly sorry state of the profession under managerial domination. It has grown into a uniquely influential voice in literary and cultural studies. Every issue features essays by and interviews with leading intellectuals in a wide variety of disciplines.
In 2005, Jerry Graff called it “essential for keeping au courant with the best current thinking in the areas of literary and cultural theory.” In the same year, Paul Buhle called it “the standard-bearer for dissenting views on American literature and culture” that his students in the American Civilization program at Brown read with “near-religious fervor,” outlasting “nearly all of the journals of its type founded in the 1960s and 70s.” During Williams’ editorship, mr garnered more mentions in the Chronicle of Higher Ed than any other academic journal.
But now the quality trolls at Carnegie Mellon, one of the most aggressively “well-managed” institutions in the country, with every tub truly on its own bottom, threatens the survival of this venerable humanities institution with the ceaseless renewal of the doltish mantra to “do more with less.”
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Talking Pathetic Fallacy Blues, a.k.a. Gary
And here I was, so sure Lawrence’s post would be about that scene in Willingham’s Jack of Fables in which Jack meets the Pathetic Fallacy, a morose, balding entity capable of bringing things to anthropomorphic life - who wants to be known as ‘Gary’, or possibly ‘Lance’.
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May 07
Chicago Grads Launch Culture-Struggle From Below
crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com
“We theorize utopias and live a life of slaves.
All for an ounce of prestige…and some letters on our graves."
In 2004, the Bush mob’s infamous executive arrogance in the Brown decision jammed the brakes on the organizing of graduate student employees at private universities (previously green-lighted by a bipartisan unanimous NLRB decision consistent with the law governing grad employees at public institutions, affirming the victory of GSOC-UAW at NYU).
Despite the setback, organizing is once more on the front burner at private universities in the U.S., including by committed, activist grad employees at the University of Chicago, outraged by an unfair stipend arrangement and by some of the lowest wages for teaching in the country (as low as $1500 per quarter). As a result of graduate employee agitation, commonly through collective bargaining, 3/4 of university employers pay for graduate employee health insurance; the University of Chicago does not. Among the graduate employees that I met there last month was one whose earnings as a gardener offered far better pay than his teaching.
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May 06
Talking Pathetic Fallacy Blues
Something that takes up again the theme of popular music, and something posted earlier: Paul Rodriguez, commenting on Rohan’s post about lit crit on or about the spherical public, made a distinction that caught my attention, between “criticism of style” and “criticism of content.” Now I might have misunderstood what was meant, but it brought me back to my travails in grad school, in particular suffering through some courses I thought were overly inflected toward cultural studies. The problem, I thought, was that we were reading books solely for the interestingness of their content and not for the interestingness of their style, for what they were talking about, not for how they said it. For example, if one took how Iola Leroy was written and made it about some Philadelphia lawyer’s family of the same period, the book would be utterly unreadable.
This kind of feeling helped me feel sorrier for myself, which is very important for some graduate students. But some time later, I got to thinking more, and things got more complicated. The specific object that complicated things was John LeCarré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. After completing my fourth reading of the book, this time with the express intent of evaluating whether or not it was a good book, that is, one that couldn’t be pigeon-holed as genre fiction, and finding that it was really that good, it suddenly occurred to me that my judgment was compromised because I really liked the content of the book. I liked a whole lot what the book was talking about, spies skulking about Europe, cerebral emotionally disaffected males, etc. etc. So who was I to talk down someone else’s reading for content? & I could list off other examples, such as Raymond Chandler & the Los Angeles of the 30’s he conjures. Heck, even Ulysses interests me for its content, the sense it gives of exposing hundreds of hidden details in the life of the city.
So it would seem difficult to extricate style and content. A more recent case exposes the problem yet again, Nick Tosche’s Where the Dead Voices Gather.
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Authentic Frontier Gibberish
[Title ref: not that you need it]. The frontier in this case is the 1960s, which was a motherfucker of a decade that knew where it was at. Or so I hear. Continuing the haphazard process of transferring my numerous CDs to jpg format so as to bung them on my MP3 player, I unearthed Vintage: the Very Best of Moby Grape, which I hadn’t listened to for ages. Now it goes without saying that Moby Grape were excellent. They were simply excellent. But one of the nice things about the Vintage best-of is the way it includes not just variants and demos and things, but snippets of in-studio conversation. For example, here is producer David Rubinson speaking to drummer Don Stevenson by way of asking him to have another go at ‘Fall on You’ (from the band’s superb 1967 debut album);
Don would you do me one favour, just for me? Play that rhythm that you play in the bridge all the way through the tune. Dum tackum, coomcoom tackum, coomcoom tack--Just try that. Right? You know what I mean? Try driving from the top to the bottom man. Just make the cuts. Alright? Because it lifts right off the ground in the bridge, man, and there’s a reason for it. You get into a groove and it drives like a motherfucker and that’s where it’s at ... Alright! From the top! Ba-pa-ba-pa-ba-pa that’s where it’s at!
I suppose it’s the sense that we’ve eavesdropping on actual unguarded 1960s-chatter that makes me like this so much. They really spoke like that. If I wrote a character from the 60s who said something like ‘you get into a groove and it drives like a motherfucker and that’s where it’s at’ I’d be ridiculed. Yet it turns out that that truly was where their groove was at. Vintage indeed.
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May 04
Nussbaum on Philosophy does Shakespeare
Martha Nussbaum reviews three Shakespeare books in The New Republic. She sets up three criteria early in the article:
To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher’s study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare’s plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what?
A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, does poorly on all three counts. Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays, does better, but not much: “McGinn does not offer anything subtle or new; he just identifies familiar philosophical themes that figure in the plays. The impression conveyed is that Shakespeare has gotten a good grade in Phil 101, with McGinn as his professor and his superior in understanding. This is a terrible way to approach Shakespeare’s complexity.”
Nussbaum then goes on to praise Stanley Cavell’s work on Shakespeare by way of getting to the third book under review, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama, by Tzachi Zamir. Cavell scores high on her first two criteria, but not the third. Zamir scores well on all three.
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I Remember The Way That You Smiled
Y’know, they just down make callow, ironic folk-hop for 20-something white hipsters like they used to. At least that’s one theory. From a Pitchfork review of the Deluxe reissue of Beck’s Odelay:
From the nervy opening chords of “Devil’s Haircut” (based on the garage-rock classic “I Can Only Give You Everything") to the signature sax riff of “The New Pollution” (lovingly pilfered from forgotten tenor player Joe Thomas’s “Venus"), Odelay is the album every record-diving MPC-phile wants to make. Though the LP was a huge commercial success, its sound was never successfully equaled by savvy opportunists. Chalk it up to the increasingly complicated legalities of sampling, as Beck explained in a 2005 interview: “Back [on Odelay] it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now it’s prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70% of the song and $50,000.” And, of course, it’s the little lifts - the sex-ed dialogue on “Where It’s At”, the snippet of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony #8 in B Minor” on “High 5”, the dozens (hundreds?) of unique drum hits and perfectly placed sonic scribbles - that makes Odelay such a deep and engaging listen even after all the headphone sessions and Best Album of the 90s accolades. Tellingly, when Beck and the Dust Brothers tried to recreate their signature style on 2005’s Guero they couldn’t pull it off, inadvertently reinforcing Odelay’s lasting appeal in the process.
This is interesting. Could it really be true that lawyers killed that signature mid-90’s alt-sampling sound? Or is Beck making excuses for the fact that Guero was so-so? If so, chalk up another loss in the IP wars. And, once again, it would seem to be economically self-defeating for the greedy rent-seekers. It’s obviously stupid to insist on pricing your half-second horn blares right out of the market.
I happen to have been listening to Odelay on the nice headphones, noodling around with Photoshop. That’s a satisfying combination.
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May 02
Time to Make the Sausages
Some Friday links: Iron Man gets good reviews in NYTimes, Salon, and Slate, while Times readers talk about their favorite action heroes.
Over at Language Log we learn that “general abstract nonsense” and “logical abstract nonsense” are terms of art, with the latter a subfield of the former. Unlike “Theory,” as the term is sometimes used at The Valve, these are not terms of opprobrium; rather the opposite. Only the cool mathematical kids dabble in varieties of abstract nonsense.
Meanwhile Larval Subjects has hosted a long discussion on the subject of the difficult style, that style whose difficulty is offered up as a necessary means to the higher truth. Sinthome doesn’t buy it; Kotsko has coined a term, “Academic Stockholm Syndrome." A good time was had by all. (Think of it as counterpoint to Holbo on argument.)
For those interested in historicizing and culturally situating the neural sciences, Pink Tentacle has published pictures from an early 19th century Japanese anatomy treatise. Here’s the brain:
(Hat tip to Of Two Minds.)
Over at Scienceblogs, Jonah Lehrer (Proust Was a Neuroscientist) has a post about Literature, Psychology and the Elites. He’s bouncing off a post by Razib (of Gene Expression) that concludes:
Why does any of this matter? For one, I think that it is somewhat peculiar that many of us find fiction from the past more engaging than popular contemporary works. Aupelius’ Golden Ass gets my attention; most contemporary fiction does not. I am arguing here that this is partly due to the fact that in the past those who read copiously were, on average, much more like me than they were like the typical human. Not only were readers by and large men (usually of some means and comfort), but they were often also disproportionately eggheads who were eccentric by their nature. How many elite scholars were there such as Claudius who were not attracted to the public life of politics and do not appear in the annals of history? With the printing press, cheaper paper, and the rise of mass literacy, things changed, the distribution of taste shifted. And so did the distribution of genres.
So am I full of crap?
Well, is he? Enquiring minds want to know.
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April 30
Some Uneducated Speculations on the “The African Novel” in Tanzania
When I was in Arusha, Tanzania--doing other things--I greedily purchased the few African novels that were available for purchase. This meant frequenting bookstores that sold novels to two very distinct markets: novels for white people and novels for Tanzanian students. I feel safe in saying that the comparatively high level printing, binding, and prices of the former pretty much limited those books to tourist and expatriate buyers (or were certainly printed with that market in mind), while the very specific pedagogical function of the latter confined their relevance to a similarly particular sub-section of the Tanzanian population: young people still in school. In the first category, you had both canonical English literature--penguin editions of D.H. Lawrence and so forth--and literary supplements to the tourist industry, stuff like this, with books like Out of Africa and Green Hills of Africa straddling the gap. The second market was for novels used as textbooks, a mixed bag which I’ll look at in a moment. I was therefore an eccentric purchaser, poorly served by either marketing strategy: I was in search of an object, “the African novel,” which hardly exists as such in the local commercial consciousness.
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Let’s You and Him Fight
David Crystal is a gem! (Google says I’m the first one to make that terribly obvious joke online. I win the internets!) I’ve just finished David Crystal’s The Fight for English, my first go at one of his books. Mention at Language Log had gotten me started, but when I told a friend about it, he was surprised I hadn’t read any before. Now I’m surprised too. Crystal is entertaining and informative, taking a dry subject and making it into a juicy story.
But this newness for me goes beyond Crystal. Only in the last few years have I been reading what linguists have to say about grammar, mostly on the internet, with Language Log being a central source. In real life I am an adjunct composition teacher, one with a higher than average emphasis on sentence quality. To riff on Gertrude Stein, writing is about sentences and paragraphs. But I’ve had to train myself in the details, to improve my own understanding, since I had no real training in this stuff, other than what I learned in French and German classes, and to improve my explanations to the students. Just what am I asking them to do?
The linguistic perspective on these questions has thrown me a bit. I had the world neatly divided into dries and wets, fusty prescriptivists like Safire and Kirkpatrick, and loosey goosey descriptivists, liberation theologists of grammar. And I suspected I was a bit on the fusty side. Linguistics blew this binary up. Linguistics is dry. Perhaps not politically dry, but it’s rigorous, even tediously so. Nothing I’ve read could be called hippy thought. Yet it’s thoroughly descriptivist, or at least it seems, in its online manifestations, to take supreme delight in skewering prescriptivism.
Of course the situation is still more complicated than this. If it’s a fight, I’m going to have to take more beatings before I start to wise up.
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