So many changes, so little blog...

*blows dust off again*
*coughs violently*

Do people even do blogs anymore, or has it been replaced by Instagram and Twitter and other things that I no longer understand but prohibit my students from using in class anyway?

At any rate, here I am again, blogging away in my "spare" time. Things have changed significantly since the last post. First of all, I got married to a wonderful woman who is my complete equal, "stormy heart for stormy heart." Second, my position at State U ran out of funding/was deleted/I got kicked out by an uncaring administration (which story is true depends on how bitter I'm feeling). As we are all too aware of these days, the job market for white male medievalists untenured donestres is especially low, so I despaired of a job for a little bit until a friend at Charter High school in "Saxella, AR"  suggested that there might be an opening in English; I applied, interviewed, and took the job, and began teaching 10th, 11th, and 12th grade English this past August. My department chair left in November, and the Dr. in front of my name merited a quick promotion, so here I am: English Department Chair at Charter High in Saxella. So it goes.

Some of my students are smart--it's nice to finally meet the kids who will test out of your intro classes--and some of them are... well, fair warning, State U: you're getting some uninspired seniors. It's a job, and some days it's a good job, and some days it's what I call "subbing for myself" and one of my colleagues called "academic detente."  But I get to teach Arthurian legend and Chaucer and Shakespeare, as well as Maus and a whole host of other things, and when it's fun, it's fun. So there's that.

But I miss all my old friends in Faytown and State U, and I'm really not sure that this is what the rest of my life is for. My wife got a job at Resort Town Community College teaching people how to do what she spent nine years getting paid to do, and there's talk of an opening in their English department. So who knows--I may well have an out. Pray to your gods I do.

The Archival Twin Dilemma

No, we're not rehashing old episodes of Doctor Who—which, thank god, because no one needs the Sixth Doctor inflicted on them. Although, come to think of it, today's discussion does feel a bit like you're being choked by a man in a ridiculous motley jacket. That is, what we're looking at is that moment when you find your scholastic twin in the archives.

I'm talking about something I think we've all faced at one time or another, the discovery that the brilliant reading you had was conceived, polished, and put forth years in advance of you. There's nothing worse than going through a journal, an essay collection, or even (most disturbing) an entire book, and realizing that you're sunk. I was going to say "you've been scooped," but sometimes the work you're reading is ten, twenty and (in one personal case) thirty years old, and that's not so much a scoop as a . . . well, a sinking feeling.

Take, for instance, my experience this summer. After a year off from writing scholarship, I decided to spend this summer being creative again. So I spent most of June writing an essay on Sir Orfeo that was kind of a mess, set it aside, and turned to some older projects that cropped up during my dissertation. You know how it is: as you're writing, you think of some "brilliant" ideas that won't quite fit in your main project. In my case they were an essay on the sword-hilt in Beowulf and another essay on the connection between communities in Le Morte Darthur and the modern concept of "heterotopia."

I discovered in short order that there was already a great book (a whole book!) on Malory and community, namely Kenneth Hodges' Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory's Le Morte Darthur. This was a rough blow since I'd spent the previous week writing a careful discussion of how the word "heterotopia" was for Foucault more about knowledge than actually-extant communities. Armed with that hermeneutic, I'd hoped to make the case that a) Malory's chivalry is plural, and that the deliberate failure to synthesize these competing chivalries undoes Caxton's utopian call for a single community bound by chivalry; and b) the failure of that system reminds us that micro-communities are fragile without something to unify them—that essentially heterotopia is not a useful substitute for utopia. Now, b) is hard to do without a), and 50% of a) is Hodges' argument. Dammit.

Something similar happened when I turned to Beowulf. I've long been fascinated by the scene in which Our Hero returns to Heorot, Grendel-head in one hand and melty sword hilt in the other, and presents the latter to Hrothgar as a souvenir of his fight. Hrothgar's response to the hilt is a long mathelode that amounts to, "um, yeah, thanks, but we're going with Grendel's head" and, because it's Anglo-Saxon poetry, a healthy dollop of "also, we're totally doomed as a culture. DOOMED!" Now, I think the reason Hrothgar does this is because Grendel's head and arm are unambiguously a symbol of the fight with Grendel, while the hilt has its own symbolic structures that threaten to make the story of Grendel a story of something else, namely how the Danes are—all together now—DOOMED.

You know who else said that? Seth Lehrer, in Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, back in 1991. Not in so many words (I doubt, for instance, that Lehrer's Hrothgar sounds like a Valley Girl), but the reading itself is close enough.

Now, I am aware that the standard critical response to this sort of thing is to deal with the critics' work and make a slightly different case, but I have a problem with that here. While I think the Beowulf essay (or, really, conference paper) is probably salvagable and worth playing up, it will still be tough to wade through Lehrer's readings and make them substantially different from my own. In the case of Hodges' "chivalric communities" and my "heterotopias of chivlary," there really isn't any difference except that I'd be using Foucault and using the phrase "heterotopia" instead of "chivalric communities." These projects look scuttled, which is a depressing sight to say the least.

But then again, they don't. In describing them to you, my reader(s), I see where the differences lie, and how it is actually convenient, for instance, that Hodges has done a lot of the footwork on communities so that I can make what would have been a book into the essay it needs to be. Hurrah! We're back in the game.

However, I'm facing another problem, which is that it is now the 26th of July. School starts in less than a month and I have quite a lot of class prep to do. It's also the case that I'm kind of tired; writing that Orfeo essay was harder than it seemed, and I think I'm still kind of wasted from the 4/4 load I had last year (and have this year).

The final problem, though, is Catch-22: I need a job that gives me more time to write, but in order to get that job I have to have publications, which I can't produce because this job is too time-consuming. *sigh* What a frustrating profession this is.

Back from Inner Space

So, here I am, back again. It's been a long and busy semester, as the cliché goes. I passed my Oral Comprehensive Exam on the 15^th of April, which is nice, as I am now ABD. For that exam, I wrote and defended what amounts to the rough draft of my dissertation's theory chapter, in which I explained what I meant by "medieval utopian function" by going through some general/Marxist utopian theory (Marx/Engels, Karl Mannheim, Joseph Gabel, Ernst Bloch, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Fredric Jameson) and a few of the more medieval-oriented discussions (Michael Uebel, Hilario Franco, Karma Lochrie) that did not focus specifically on the genre of utopias. Having identified the two uses to which general theorists put utopia—ideology and culture critique—I noted that the trend in medieval uses of utopian theory has been some ideology critique, primarily by finding spaces of hope (Lochrie) or social difference (Uebel). From both major sources (general/Marxist and medieval) I derived the following definition of the medieval utopian function:

A form of social dreaming before the modern period that critiques some contemporary ideological “truth,” such as a point of church doctrine, the nature of fame, or the order of society. Part of that dream includes some solution to the problem, a solution that may take any form from basic wish-fulfillment to planned and dialectically open-ended society. The solution may or may not have been effective in the dreamer’s own time, but it can inspire hope and social critique in our own age.

This is, of course, still pretty vague, but until I've done more readings in the the texts, it will have to do. Speaking of, right now, I intend to work with the following texts: House of Fame, Pearl, Winner and Waster, Piers Plowman, Regiment of Princes, and Vox Clamantis. I have some ideas about all of them, and I may float some of those ideas here as the year rolls by.

Oh—also, I received an award from my department: the Blair Rouse Fellowship, which is given for "Superior Academic Achievement by a PhD Candidate in English." It came with honor, and with money, and I'm thankful to my department for both.

Meanwhile, I have been assured that there will be no jobs whatsoever in the coming year, and that I have picked the worst possible time to try to begin a career in academia. I have yet to be sure if that's true, but it is a cause for concern. We'll see.

And Back Again

Hello all. I'm recovered sufficiently from the Written Comps (which I was told I'd passed, finally, about a month after I'd finished them) and from the holidays (which I may have passed), and the work staring me in the face has gotten large enough that I can ignore it by blogging. So, I'm back.

I haven't quite decided if I'll post the essays I wrote for comps. I think I might, just to show off what I did, and to see if it garners any response. One of them, "Negotiating Time's Boundaries: Identity, History, and Utopia in Four Medieval Works" might be all right, but the second, which features a bit of lit review and a foray into Chaucer's House of Fame, is a little more rough than I'd like, and I'm not sure how proud of it I am.

Right now, I'm working on both my prospectus and my Oral Comps paper; I've been encouraged to think of the former as the introduction to my dissertation, and the latter as my "theory chapter." I actually had been thinking of the introduction as the theory chapter, but this is probably for the better. The thing is, the more I sketch out the theory chapter, the less I'm certain how the dissertation will go. The theory should be integrated into the rest of the readings—otherwise, why have theory at all—but because I don't know quite how the theory chapter's going to turn out, or what claims I'll be making at the end of it, I'm not certain I know quite what comes after it anymore. I'll probably post the theory chapter, or bits of it, up here for your perusal; with any luck, I might get feedback.

So, yes, aside from that . . . I've also been questioning whether I want to put myself through the MLA this year. I should be done with the dissertation by the Spring of 2010, which is nice, but I'm worried about a number of other job-related things, including:

• not being sure where to get the money to go to Philadelphia (unless there's a chance of presenting a paper at MLA, in which case I could get a travel grant from the University)
• the scarcity of jobs available at the moment, and the explosion of candidates competing for those jobs
• competing with a number of scholars, many of whom have a larger reputation, more publications, and more experience than I
• not having the money for campus visits, should I get any

All in all, a grim prospect. So, I'm also thinking about applying for lectureships. I'm aware that there's going to be a lot of competition for those as well, but I'm also thinking that the lectureships might be a way to spend a few years working on publishing things and saving up money, so that by 2012 or so I might be a more viable candidate.

I don't know, though. We'll see.

Teaching is going all right; I have a Monday-Wednesday-Friday and a Tuesday-Thursday schedule, so I'm up here every day. Trying to figure out how to balance that and my own work is going to be a bit more challenging this semester. I do have two sections of Honors World Lit I, which means smaller classes and potentially smarter students. So far they've proved themselves keen on debate—at least, one section has. The other section's a bit lethargic, but that may just be me; my metabolism seems to crash around 1:30 PM, and class goes until 1:50. We jump into Gilgamesh this week, after a few days of discussing theory.

So, there we are. I'm back.

From The Didactic Edge

So we're almost a month into the semester here at UAF, and this time around I'm teaching Honors World Literature to 1650. Ideally, this means I get a batch of students who are "smarter" than regular students; whether it actually means that I'm not sure. I will say that discussions have been better than usual, as have papers. I'll get to the latter in a minute, but first, here's what I'm doing this term.

I've decided that, in addition to the university-defined goals of this course (reading, understanding, and writing about literature), my students will also discuss the utopian content of world literature. To that end, we started off with two theoretical essays--Lyman Tower Sargent's "The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited" and Ernst Bloch's "The Wishful Landscape Perspective in Aesthetics"--which established not only some of the generic utopian conventions, but also that what I'm looking for is not the utopian form so much as the utopian spirit, Bloch's "Not-Yet-Conscious" or "Anticipatory Illumination." They seemed to take to this pretty well, I think, and our recent discussions of Gilgamesh, Plato, Aristotle, Sappho, and Callimachus have borne this out, not in the least because the theory has allowed them to approach the material they know (Gilgamesh, the Apology of Socrates) as fresh.

I've also included a writing component instead of quizzes this term. The writing assignment is due every three weeks, and students are asked to write 2-3 pages over one of the works we've discussed over that three-week period. I've also provided them with three ways that they can respond to that literature:

1. Explain the utopian function in the work you have chosen. Identify the structural and/or narrative features of the text evoke hope, and propose ways we can use that hope content today.
2. Take two non-consecutive passages of a larger work (or two shorter poems by the same author) and discuss what these passages have in common and why that common theme is important to our understanding of the work as a whole.
3. Other than the approach I took in class, what critical perspective might also be useful for the work you’ve chosen (historical, feminist, postcolonial, etc.—see the “Critical Perspectives” handout on Blackboard)? Explain why this approach will be useful and provide a brief example of that reading.
   

Astute readers may recognize option two as a variant of Dr. Virago's "Crux Buster," which I tried to good effect last Spring in the English Lit Survey course.

I got their first response papers on Thursday, and have graded 14 of them (about 34% of the total [NB: I love my spreadsheet gradebook, because it lets me engage my bourgeois love for facts and figures!]) so far. A number of them responded to Gilgamesh, and of those, what they've said has ranged from expected mediocrity (vague thesis statements, insufficient evidence, etc.) to moments of blinding clarity. I've had well-written considerations of the value of Gilgamesh as a utopian figure, as well as a meditation on the Apology of Socrates that led into civic engagement and global unity. They haven't all been perfect, either—some of them have had trouble with the theory component—but it's a work in progress on both sides of the pedagogical divide.

So that's my teaching semester so far. I'm looking forward to the rest of it, honestly, and I'm hoping that the exercise will not only help my students become better (dialectically engaged, philosophically complex, socially aware) human beings, but--in the best academic tradition--will help me get a further handle on what I mean by utopianism.

Dissertation Interlude: The End of Utopia.

I've been reading outside my comps list this week, because I finished two things on it and thought I deserved a break. I'm not sure Russell Jacoby's The End of Utopia constitutes a "break," since it is about utopianism, specifically the lack of it in late-20^th-century liberal discourse. Jacoby is righteously angry at the slow transition from utopianism to acquiescence: we (meaning primarily American intellectuals and/or academics) no longer take the time to imagine the truly different, and the energy we used to devote to that imagining has been given over to surface-level differences. In his second chapter, Jacoby takes on multiculturalism, which he sees as problematic because it replaces thought on economic and social alternatives with a nebulously defined sense of "culture":

If the economic skeleton of culture were put on the table, patter about diversity might cease; it would be clear that the diverse cultures rest on the same infrastructures . . . . The economic structure of society—call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy—stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project . . . . The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the demise of utopia. (39-40)

One should note, however, that Jacoby is not against the idea of diversity, that is, of hearing more voices from the historically oppressed. His concern is that these historically oppressed groups, once existing on the margins of society, used to represent groups that could actually challenge the status quo. Now, however, such groups seek inclusion in the hierarchy, becoming "Women's Studies" or "African-American Studies" programs that seek to promote their "culture" while losing their status as ideological enclaves able to question the dominant ideology.

Louis Althusser writes that Ideological State Apparatuses (the tools through which ideology upholds and creates the state) are not only the "stake, but also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class struggle," in part because the ruling class cannot completely control ideological discourse, allowing the exploited classes "to find means and occasions to express itself there [in ISAs], either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle" (147). I would say that Jacoby's concern is that multiculturalism is too much of the latter and very little of the former: once the positions within dominant ideology have been established (Women's studies, gender studies, Latin American studies, etc.), those who occupy those positions are more concerned with showing that we are all the same, deep down.

I'm not entirely sure I agree with his argument, though I find parts of it very convincing. After all, it seems that we do offer up a "choice" between identities that changes our basic relationship to economic society very little—I can be "masculine" or "feminine"; "white," "black," "brown," or "red"; "German," "English," "!Xhosan," "Maya," or "Cantonese"; and still participate in consumer society. However, there is a difference in the way that each of these identities participates in consumer society, although Jacoby is right that such differences are fading as Globalization proceeds.

Because we (again, Jacoby seems to mean "American" when he says "we") all really participate in the same basic economic culture—late capitalism—we end up seeking some form of individuation, some bulwark of difference against the large, totalizing force of consumer culture. As Jacoby puts it, "it is the rootless, not the rooted, who fetishize their roots" (48). The problem, then, is that we stop at the surface-level: if we just put on a different hat or a new sarong, it will all be fine. Again, it is good to have multiple voices in the great social conversation, but those voices need to be saying something other than "we belong to the dominant ideology;" they need to be saying "we will change that ideology." Although Jacoby does not suggest (or has not yet suggested) this, we need to look deeper, and remember that the experience of being e.g. a woman in consumer society is different than being a man in said society, and that that difference can critique not only male consumerism but the notion of consumerism itself. We academics are, to turn to Althusser once more, the higher orders of the ideological apparatus; if we cannot engage that apparatus dialectically, if we cannot put our hands to the machine while we are this close to it, when will we? Part of our job as educators should be to open up even further those spaces in discourse where critiques of that discourse can be made; is this not what we mean by "getting our students to think?"

This is why the European (and in my case, English) middle ages are important to us. They are one of the many places in present-day discourse that represent alternatives. Something to take away from Jacoby is the need to be careful about the "utopianism" one creates: is it providing actual alternatives, or is it just a new hat for the same old social body? I don't want to create the scholarly equivalent of a capitalist at a Renfair. As much as I fetishize the middle ages—and I know I do, with my classics-driven education and my deliberately Anglo-Saxon clerical shorthand, and so on—it does not help to see the Middle Ages as the root of modernity. Instead, we should look at it as a dialectical position with the notion of modernity. As John Ganim and others have argued, the medieval (along with the orient) exists as the primo Western Other, the space in which the modern West can define what it is not. The medieval can provide the seeds for real alternative social orders, not just the wan hope of the pluralism Jacoby describes (pardon the pun on wanhope/despair), but a springboard into new ideas. I do not yet know what those ideas will be (that is part of the dissertating process, after all), but I do know that "the medieval," as a dialectical partner for "the modern," can produce those ideas.

The essential thing is to keep grounded: how does the reading I (or you, or anyone) provide speak to the conditions "on the ground" in the world? This ties, of course, with those notions of presentism that I ran across first in Eileen Joy's post (see here, and here for my response): our work should always exist as if it were important, because it may yet be.

Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Tr. Ben Brewester. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. 127-183.
Jacoby, Russell. The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

The Wossname of Small Things

A few things:
1) I am no further on my reading list than I was last week. Teaching every day is beginning to seem less and less like a good idea. (What administrator thought years ago that two six-week summer sessions was better than one 12-week summer session?)

2) On that note, however, I am giving a midterm today, and one that has garnered me the first compliment I ever received from a student about an exam—he said it was a good exam and very challenging. Nice.

3) Sadly, my friend and office companion JCP will not be returning for a PhD in the fall, because, as he put it, he does not feel up to the task of producing the kind of scholarship that is required of professional scholars, not even given world enough and time. Along with being severely missed, this leads to two admittedly very selfish problems:
a) He brought a computer to the office for general use, and I have appropriated it; I now hope he leaves the computer.
b) The desk directly across from me is empty, and there's a good chance they'll fill it with someone I don't like. (Maybe ALS could be convinced to move?)
Also, it means that, unless he returns to school, I will always be The Doctor and he The Master, which means that one day this will happen:



4) Based on the Speculum review, I have begun to read A. C. Spearing's Textual Subjectivity.

5) Based on the fact that her introduction convinced me that the "defective" branch is a valid object of study, I have ordered Kohanski's edition of The Book of John Mandeville.

6) Based on nothing at all, here is this, which still amuses me:

Checking In

So, I have a dissertation reading list now, and it's ginormous. I've got some Old English stuff, some Middle English stuff, and some critical stuff, and no, you can't see the list, because . . . well, see previous.

I have, however, finished the Old English stuff, with the exception of the Nowell Codex, which I have a) agreed to read all of, and b) won't read until I can read all of it, which is to say, until I have a copy of Andy Orchard's Pride and Prodigies. I've been keeping a Wiki of my notes (via the increasingly awesome and life-giving TiddlyWiki) on the theory that having organized notes will make the written comps a whole lot nicer.

So yeah, finished the OE stuff, and in addition to seeing exactly what Jeffrey Cohen found so cool about Guthlac, I've been fascinated by the chronological order that the Phoenix seems to keep. Seriously--what kind of bird keeps time? I was also curious about the way that Deor seems to configure himself not as a person but as a series of lived memories: when saying "þas oferrode, þisses swa mæg," he not only takes refuge in the suffering of others, he makes his (comparatively minor) suffering the equal of theirs, while at the same time putting himself on the level of his mythological and social ancestors.

Also, I got an abstract off to SEMA in time for them to extend the deadline—but hell, it's off now, so cool. As far as Kazoo is concerned, I am under the impression that next year's conference program will come out soon, and that I will apply directly to the panel that I think might take me. Then, in what seems to be conference tradition, I will wait until the plane ride up to actually write the inevitably postmodern, buzzword-filled paper, because apparently Kazoo is about the drinking and dancing.

(That was a joke, folks—but I have been keeping up with the Charlotte Allen issue.)

Meanwhile, I keep forgetting this, but I do live and work in a town that is annually invaded by Wal*Mart shareholders, who today seem to have decided to hold their little Nuremburg rallies outside my office. This is why God (or a reasonable facsimile) made mp3 players.

Little Things

I finished a draft of my Medievalism/Nostalgia/The Supernatural/Green Arrow paper on Wednesday, and it's sat on my desk since. Today, I re-read it, and while it's still rough, it's not as bad as I thought it would be or as those solidii would indicate. Now, of course, it's time to print it off, let it sit on my desk until next Wednesday, and see if it's improved any.

Meanwhile, one of my students, in the course of being counseled on her (lack of having a) paper topic, let slip that apparently several of my students find me intimidating. Now, I'm no small guy (I'm not a man-mountain, either, but I digress), and I have a beard and a brain (a bearded brain? . . . see how my mind works? If I weren't a medievalist I'd have been a Gothicist). Still, intimidating? Sheesh.

Anyway, WAQ returned my conference draft with comments, and suggested (and this is a direct quotatation) that I "put more bodies in" so it would jive with SEMA this year. So I will, though I don't see where I'm going to get them—perhaps the barber's?

All Up On Appleton House

Yeah, that was a lame title, but it does introduce the fact that I spent most of today working on a lecture about Marvell's famous country-house poem. It's a great lecture, too: it introduces the Civil War, it talks about Marvell himself, the genre of country-house poems, and then goes on for about six pages of textual readings. I approach "Upon Appleton House" as a kind of psychogeography, and while I know that's mostly about urban places, I'd like to think it applies to any land/mindscape. I take into account the ideological function of the prioress' speech and Wm. Fairfax's retort, along with the excessively martial fields (not a pun) that force Marvell into the sweet, self-deconstructing woods that are also his patron's daughter. It's a weird poem, to be sure, and I'm going to have fun with it.

Surprisingly, this has left me a little braindead, which is frustrating, because I still have to:

• Write the final for my world literature course;
• Heavily revise (or not) my Don Quixote lectures;
• Type out and subsequently revise my Son-Jara lectures;
• Write the last section of the "close reading" part of the Green Arrow paper; and
• Figure out what's salvageable from that same paper so that I can write a better one.

That's going to end up being what happens this week, if I'm lucky.

Late Night at the Social Club

I'm done with my talk on academic writing. It's basically a paraphrase of Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say/I Say, but with a little of my voice in it and of course nowhere near as entertaining or engaging. They'll hate it, but I don't care. They'll be learning.

I should have been in bed an hour ago; I should also have been done with The Protestant Ethic. Why is neither of those things true? Because a chance googling of Marlin Perkins lead to: the lemming; myths of lemming suicide; Lemmings the PC game; a Linux clone of Lemmings; Linux clones of games; Super Tux, a Super Mario clone; Lincity, a SimCity clone. The last ate two hours of my time. (This house cries shame!)

. . . meanwhile, one of my students has already emailed me a draft of an assignment that isn't due for a week. I'll read it in the morning.

Infelix Me

I've spent the past two weeks sick with the 97th Annual Departmental Flu, which I blame entirely on a certain colleague who just got back from England. While this isn't that bad—and I'm mostly over it—it did cause me to royally flub my Lysistrata lecture on Thursday. Curiously, it was only that lecture, out of the eight I've had to do in the past fortnight, but perhaps it was because I made the mistake of relying on memory to get things done rather than really going back and reviewing the text and my notes.

Actually, the past few weeks have been frustrating on another level, because while I have notes from the last time I taught World Literature, I don't have them all: I was in the middle of typing them up when the hard drive on the lappy gave out, and I was not yet the sort of person who backed things up all the damn time. Paranoia, born of multiple (hopefully not annual) crashes, was not yet a permanent resident of my skull. As a result, I've had to reconstruct the lectures for Gilgamesh and Lysistrata, and I've also discovered that the lectures for everything else are just awful. I guess trying to write the kinds of lectures I did for ENGL 2303 in the summer wasn't yet part of my game. So . . . research ahoy! Which is like Chips Ahoy only with less chocolate and more library. Mmm . . . . Library.

Otherwise, it's been kind of quiet. My birthday passed with little incident, because I was sick, and because I am indecisive and so are all my friends, so anything to do with it was very last-minute. The discussion of American Gods in MKB's Culture of Longing seminar (soon to be on a bookshelf near you!) [1] did not go very smoothly, nor will this week's of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which if I hurry I might just finish in time for class. I'm also sitting in on WAQ's impromptu (and very crowded) Old English kaffeklatsch currently held in his office; we're doing what we've done before, which is the "go away and read this, come back and we'll all stumble over the language and the translations, and then you'll all go away again." It's good practice, though, because someday, should I get tenure, someone is going to ask me if I can teach an Old English course, and I'd rather not have to say no, to which they'll reply so why did we hire a medievalist and I'll say because you needed someone to teach Chaucer, not Beowulf and then there would be fisticuffs. So, let's learn OE!

I still haven't heard from ETS about scoring the AP exam this year, but as I and several of my co-scoring friends (Hi Amalie!) have determined, they seem to be running a bit behind this year.

Meanwhile, the Graduate Students in English held a workshop on publication, which was largely successful even if Certain Persons turned it once more into the this profession is dark and will chew you up and spit you out in tiny pieces conversation. It was pretty good, and had some useful advice, such as:

• Write publishable articles and do the marketing, which seems mean "read lots of criticism so you can get an idea of what good criticism looks like and what journal(s) are more likely to accept the stuff you do."
• Q: When should grad students begin to publish? A: When you can use criticism without using it slavishly.
• "On the job market" is too late to start publishing; however, having been accepted is what matters (i.e. you can list something as "in publication" on your CV).
• Don't always be daunted by responses/rejections.
• KEEP sending them to good journals.
• Start from the best journal and go down; that way, even if it's rejected by them, it hasn't been locked up by some journal with low prestige.
• It's okay to publish outside your field at first; some people will look askance at out-of-field publications, but they shouldn't. DO try to have something in your field, and you shouldn't go on the market with publications not in your field unless you're prepared to defend yourself.
• Always write for publication. Assume that other people are already part of the conversation; don't summarize too much. You don't have to tell them everything you know.
• Try to form a writing group of two or three peers to co-read each other's work; often this group will last beyond your college years.
• Read what the journal says its goals are. Don't send things to journals that they won't publish. (Apparently Shakespeare Quarterly gets a lot of non-Bard articles). ONLY library time will tell you for sure.
• Look for what the journal wants: its house style, the content of its articles, the LENGTH (usually ~30,000 words) and format requirements. Make sure your stuff is up to their standards BEFORE you send it off.
• Spend one day or so every few weeks just sitting in the library reading journals.
• Make the cover letter short and to the point (My name is this; this is my article; please consider it for publication). Don't pour your heart out. DO put it on departmental letterhead.

Sound advice, all.

Right. I've got a lecture on the Ramayana to finish, and another lecture on how to write like an academic (as if I know) to build from scratch/borrow heavily from Gerald Graff.

NOTES:
[1] If you think I'm kidding about this, then you should know that the syllabus for this seminar contained a very telling typo: This volume will detail the development of the various kinds of national myths . . . .

First Week Annoyances

I'm teaching two classes this term: one section of World Literature to 1650 and one section of Survey of English Literature to 1700 (really to 1660). I don't mind teaching either class, really; in fact, I think the first "real" lectures in both classes went pretty well (the background to Gilgamesh and the "conversion" of Britannia into Anglo-Saxon England). What I mind is this: apparently the "enrollment limit" attached to each section means nothing to the people who do overrides. The cap on my survey course is something like 38; I have 43 as of this moment. What's worse is the section of World Lit: the cap there is supposed to be around 25, but is currently 32, and has been slowly creeping up since Tuesday. I have, then, 75 students; not so bad as Jeffrey Cohen's 80 in one section, but still no walk in the park.

This is doubly disappointing since my plan was—and to some extent remains—to follow a modified form of what Dr Virago suggests for teaching the research paper; since I, lowly worm of a grad student that I am, have no control over the books for my class, I can't assign They Say/I Say, so I've reduced that to a single lecture and handouts—and occasional "crux busters" instead of one every week or two. We'll see how it goes, but with 43 students there and another 32 in the other section, I don't know how much I can expect to get done.

Meanwhile, I'm still working on my reading list for comps; the primary-text list is just about done (I still need to make some decisions about lyrics and drama). From there, I ask another professor about theory, and then that list will be complete, and then I read it, and then I cry.

Nothing yet on publication; I still have every intention of going to SEMA this fall and possibly K'Zoo in the spring.

Unhealthy Behavior

All right, I'm back. Upcoming this year: another attempt at publication; SEMA in the fall (here's hoping!); and oh, my comprehensive exams, also in the fall. Sheesh.

Right now, I'm teaching a section of World Lit I and a section of Survey of English Lit I. Essentially it's the same schedule They wanted to saddle me with last summer, but this time I've taught both courses and have adequate preparation. Or will, when I get off the internet.

And why can't I get off the internet? Because they posted one of my class rosters today on ISIS, and I have spent the last hour with the roster in one window and Facebook in the other, stalking my students. I don't know if this is healthy (but the title of the post says otherwise), but it does let me get a "sneak peak" of my students so I can become biased no, wait determine who passes and fails based on taste er, better prepare my lectures. Yeah. That's it.

I'll do it again when the WLIT syllabus is posted.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking of trying to publish the paper I wrote for Alliterative Revival. While my adviser savaged it (as he is wont to do—I think it's part of the job of being an adviser: "Be the most horrible possible editor so that your advisees know what it's like to be ravaged by gorillas") he also offered many helpful tips toward publishing it, some of which I may take. It does need work, though; perhaps if I combine it with my paper from Discourse Analysis?

My last bit of "official" coursework ever is a seminar on "the Culture of Longing." It should be an interesting romp though American pop culture, especially the supernatural stuff. How will it fit with the medieval? Who knows? Maybe Jeffrey Cohen or Michael Uebel.

Blog Hiatus

Just to make it official, I'm putting this blog on temporary hiatus. Right now, between grading and being on the cusp of research, I'm too busy to blog.

I promise I'll be back in a few weeks, perhaps by or before the end of November, with plenty of strange and fascinating thoughts on discourses, utopias, medieval things, and how much my students annoy me.

See you in a few weeks!

De realitatis falsis
I'm teaching composition this semester, and at the moment I am grading their first papers, which are to varying degrees an analytical explication of the elements of short fiction. Most of them are all right, but I've come across a disturbing pattern of error in not only their prose but also their thinking: several of them have proposed that something is a "false reality" or that "reality [is] that nothing is as it seems."
As I understand it, these terms would seem to be paradoxical: the idea of reality, especially as we mean it in the post-Enlightenment world, is that there is a single state of being from which all our knowledge arises. To adapt and perpetuate a misinterpretation of Gertrude Stein, there is a there there, and it cannot be changed. What changes is our perception of reality, and that perception is what can be said to be "true" or "false." So why, then, have my students conflated their idea of reality with reality itself, to the effect that they feel it possible to say that reality itself can, on occasion, not be real?
In all likelihood, there are a number of factors at work, from the trickle-down Romantic idealism so popular in American bourgeois culture to the daily barrage of poorly constructed syllogisms that is our current political climate. I'm not out to lay the blame anywhere, but I am sincerely disappointed that not one but several of my students appear to think that reality itself can be unreal. Surrealism I can accept; dreams I can accept; but an unreal reality is too paradoxical for an old materialist like me.
It does lead me to ask, though: what do you think? Am I overreacting, or are there in fact reasons why our students can't tell the difference between "false perceptions of reality" and "false realities"?

Edit: Meanwhile, my parents are in town, and we had brunch (how bourgeois!) at La Maison des Tartes (how aristo!), which was very tasty. On the way back, we took the bike trail, and overtook not only several nice people but a very strange pair of animals: a Great Dane and a small pig, both with the same piebald markings. The Dane was friendly, but the pig was confused. Overall, an amusing afternoon.

A shiny penny for the first person to title this post

I read my evaluations from the survey course this week. There were high marks overall, with a lot of praise. The lowest marks were in "keeps student attention" or somesuch, but I'm not terribly worried, as even those were no lower than three on a scale of five. They did suggest I try to make my lectures more interesting, which I intend to do over time; they also suggested I somehow make the book less heavy, something I cannot do unless I work for Norton, or can get the University to only buy Volumes A and B of the NAEL rather than Volume 1—especially since I know that Volume C is useless, as we teach the 18th century course with the Longman Anthology. Insert rant about standardized book orders here, I suppose.

I also got a number of very nice comments; indeed, the only quizzical comment was the rather cryptic note that "there was a lot of yawning." Since there wasn't any context for that statement, I'm not sure what this person meant: was there a lot of yawning on my part? Among the students when I wasn't looking? In this person's head?

Ah well. They've asked me to teach it again in the spring, and I'm all for it; right now, I'll be teaching our "Writing About Literature" course, which given the coursework I'm set to do right now, will be a welcome relief. However, expect more posts about the Alliterative Revival and the analysis of discourse over the coming months.

Some regrettable news: fellow TA C---- P---- has decided to take a semester off to pursue mental health and well-being. It's for the best, but he'll be missed. Take care, C---- P----.

Utopian Musings

Utopia is the hope that the scattered fragments of good
that we come across from time to time in our lives can be
put together, one day, to reveal the shape of a new kind of life.
The kind of life that ours should have been.
— Nick Bostrom, "Letter from Utopia"

You lot. You spend all your time thinking about dying,
like you're going to get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming,
or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible.
That maybe you survive.
— Ninth Doctor, "The End of the World" (Doctor Who)

Sorry I've been out lately; work's got the best of my time, and what's left goes to, oh, old serials from Doctor Who, or having to call maintenance to vacuum out the water from my A/C on the hottest day of the year to date, or other little things. But I've been working, oh don't you think otherwise! Today was the second of three lecture/discussions on Paradise Lost, one of the many texts I've felt under-qualified to so much as attempt to teach. On Monday I was faced with lecturing on Donne, and discovered to my horror that Elegy 18 is not as innocent as I'd previously hoped (frankly, I always liked it for being clever, but several of my students pointed out that she has no say in what he demands, and is never really there at all other than as a thing to be possessed ["Oh my America! Oh my New Found Land!" etc.]) The week before was the Faerie Queene, which I'd like to think I handled all right. Overall, though, it's been a slog.

But I'm not here for confessional, your grace; I'm here toss out a dissertation idea. I want to deal with the medieval utopian. What is "utopia" in the middle ages, you ask? Well, I don't know yet, but when I do, I'll let you know. The scope of the project, though, is likely to include both elite (yay canon!) and popular (yay, er, this book) understandings, and may focus on dreams and dream-visions. If anyone out there knows of a good dream vision in, say, popular romance or a nice one-off chronicle, I'd be glad to know ye.

Meanwhile, I've been poking at the idea like a boy with a stick and a dead badger, and have begun generating the sort of philosophical musings that will probably—deus voluit and the creek don't rise—work their way into the first chapter.

No, you can't see them. What are you, some dead-badger-fetishist?

Oh, all right. Here, tell me what you think:

Writing on the Utopian in the European Middle Ages is dangerous, because there is a great temptation to conflate the Utopian impulse with Ecclesiastical notions of the millennium and have done with it. While the Millennium is an outgrowth of the Utopian, it is not solely one and the same. Rather than asking how they are alike, we might better consider the ways in which the anticipated Heavenly Jerusalem is not Utopian.
#
The particular fascination with the urban, built-form concrete Utopia is an early modern obsession, stemming from More's Utopia and (another text the name of which escapes me--JCL). The form "Utopian" thought took before this period—More's use of it in Utopia is no surprise—was metaphysical and theological; when it talked of cities at all, only Heavenly Jerusalem came up. Few would talk of building heavenly Jerusalem—such work was God's, not man's—and as such we expect few examples post-More to apply.
#
The question remains: what do we mean by the medieval Utopian? On the one hand, we can say, as Ernst Bloch does, that the Utopian represents a universal ideal of human freedom, an imaginary space where alternatives may be contemplated and hope for a new world nurtured. This level of definition seems however almost too encompassing: do we include as Utopian all sides of alterity, all moments of subversion, all instances of hope? The Carnivalesque, the queer, the millenarian, even the fundamental? "Yes" is the answer—yes, but not today. Not all at once.
#
As Nicola McDonald writes, “Modern narrative is often distinguished by the way in which it frustrates the conventional trajectory of desire, pulls it up short and resists the closure that is otherwise, in narrative terms, inevitable. Our desires, such narratives contend, are not finally satisfiable” (Pulp Fictions of Medieval England 13). It is no surprise that one modern descendant of romance is categorized as “fantasy”: those narratives in which it is even remotely possible for desire to be fulfilled must be separated from the vast, shambling herds of “real” fiction. We cannot hope for better than this life, in which, like Milton’s Satan, we have said “farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear / Farewell remorse” (Paradise Lost IV.108-9). Indeed, the world where all desires are known and met is often dismissed as a trivial place, not even worth experiencing—yet, as Fredric Jameson notes, “the complaint about the boredom of Utopias can much more clearly be seen to be so much propaganda for the excitement of market competition” (Jameson, Archaeologies 339).


There, that's the whole start of things. Nobody steal this or I'll. . . hurt you somehow.

At Week Four's End

Cometh the hour, cometh the man: this week has been the start of something early modern, by which I mean I've been reading sonnets for most of the week. The week began, as I mentioned before, with Malory, whose inclusion on this side of the test I justified by claiming that he was going through a bit of self-fashioning. The self-fashioning theme continued through the sonnets of Wyatt (Tuesday), Spenser (Wednesday) and Shakespeare (Thursday), and the works of Elizabeth (Friday).

On Thursday I got a little fed up with the lack of participation, and decided that since they'd had two days of sonnets, and since it was Shakespeare for chrissakes, they could do group work. I split them into groups of three, and had each group select three sonnets. Those sonnets had to be connected thematically—i.e., they couldn't just pick three sonnets that used red as an symbol. They were to spend the majority of class determining how their selected sonnets fit together, and how they might not fit together. How, I asked, did they support or disturb the dominant theme of the group? It went pretty well, I think: I heard from a few students I'd not heard from before, and instilled some confidence in them that they could produce viable, valid readings.

Today, though, there was none of that: I gave them a lecture on Elizabeth. It was, perhaps, shorter than I might have liked, but that's okay. I figure, I've done them the best I could, and if that didn't fulfill today's time requirement, who cares?

But the hell with all that: you're here for the statistics, aren't you? Actually, you're not here at all, but that doesn't matter. The numbers are:

A: 38% (6)
B: 50 %(8)
C: 6% (1)
D: 6% (1)
F: 0% (0)

Still, no-one's failing, so that's pretty good. I did have one student come up to me today and ask me whether it was all right if she deliberately sabotaged her own grade so that she'd get a C. My response was that it was her right to make the grade she wants to make, but that she should do her best; what I didn't tell her was that she would have to nigh on fail miserably on the remaining classwork to make anything less than a B.

Next week: Colonialism and the Other!

Didn't I have a curve somewhere?

So, as promised, I've finished grading. I also delivered a lecture this morning in which I partially used Malory to talk about two key theories: Stephen Greenblatt's ideas about self-fashioning, and Benedict Anderson's origins of nationalism. Both theories are, of course, about periods after Malory, but I am one of those people (you know, those people) who see Malory's text as a step toward English nationalism and toward ideas of the self. Whether that's because it actually is used in the Early Modern age as a tool for moral development, or whether it's that I've decided to read Caxton's preface in earnest:

humbly beseeching all noble lords and ladies with all other estates, of what estate or degree they been of, that shall see and read in this said book and work, that they take the good and honest acts in their remembrance, and to follow the same. . . . For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee.

In any event, I talked too much today, but that's the way it goes. Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes you're ambushed by a giant lecture. Ah well.

Anyway, statistics: as of this morning I have all the exams graded, and including this morning's attendance, we see the following figures.

Exam Grades:
A: 44% (7)
B: 44% (7)
C: 6% (1)
D: 0% (0)
F: 6% (1)

Current Grades
A: 44% (7)
B: 44% (7)
C: 6% (1)
D: 6% (1)
F: 0% (0)
18 enrolled; 2 withdrawals
16 total current students

I had one 100% A, and frankly, with 88% of the class passing at or above expectations, I wouldn't give a curve for all anything. That said, I was pretty proud of this last exam—but the next will be sneakier indeed.