Brief Return

Well, it's been a busy three months. Since July, I've written two more chapters: a completely new one on Pearl, and a revision of an older paper on Wynnere and Wastoure. Both were more of a slog than I'd expected them to be, though for different reasons. Pearl kept feeling wrong, for some reason, despite that fact that I was connecting ideology, religion, and utopia pretty well, and despite having Bowers' The Politics of Pearl as an encyclopedic, if not always coherently argued, guide. I even managed to come up with a coherent thesis for the entire dissertation: Allegory and dream-vision can open up utopic spaces to provide new places in traditional discourse where theories of social change can be articulated. Not only do I have an approach for the unwritten parts of the dissertation, but I also have a guide for revising what I've done so far—just as soon as I get some of those older chapters back from my committee.

The Wynnere and Wastoure chapter, on the other hand, was tough because I had an older document that needed a lot of elaboration. After cutting away the theory—most of which is now or will be in the dissertation's theory chapter—I had gone from 19 pages to nine. The argument in the older paper was a little scanty and primitive, too. By the end, I had moved from the argument that "Wynnere is a future the poet endorses" to suggesting that Wynnere and Wastoure is pointing its readers toward a more modern idea of the commodity (goods possessing both use-value and exchange-value). I'm not entirely sure it does, but at least I've read more Marx. And, thanks to JGB, Slavoj Žižek.

Because writing the last two chapters has been a headache, I'm taking the week off from the dissertation. With any luck, I can approach my next topic, Piers Plowman, with a new freshness, or at least without looking like Chris Farley after a ten-minute rant on "Weekend Update."

Aside from the dissertation, I've started the soul-devouring process of the job search. Right now I have seventeen prospects, some of the better than others: a few tenure-track medievalist positions, a couple of lecturer posts, and one or two postdocs. My hope is to get a job that, if it is not an actual tenure-track professorship, would at least allow me time to publish and lick the dissertation into shape sicut ursa ad infantes suas. Thankfully, most of them aren't due until the end of the month, so during this week off, I'm going to write my cover letters and ensure my CV's accurate.

In other professional news, I'm going to Kalamazoo in the spring, under the aegis of Exemplaria (if I'm allowed to say that yet). This means I've got to boil down my theory chapter into a twenty-minute, coherent talk that will minimize the number of objects thrown at my person. Around the same time, I was also asked to contribute to the new edition of Approaches to Teaching the Canterbury Tales. Also a thing needing writing, but also a thing not due until next year. The CV grows slowly, but it grows.

Finally, this last week I've been teaching my lead-in to Beowulf, which I've called "monsters and ennui." I began with a lecture that stressed the highly Christian context of the poem and the culture. The second day was a discussion of "The Ruin," "The Wanderer," and "Dream of the Rood," deliberatly in that order, on the theory that we could trace an appropriation of "pagan grimness" into a "program of Christian allegory." (I recognize that these ideas might be problematic to any genuine Anglo-Saxonists who read this blog—hence the scare quotes—as such, any guidance on how to better approach this topic would be much appreciated.) Friday, for sheer fun, was The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle and The Wonders of the East, both Orchard's translations; I asked them to consider both of them as context for Beowulf, whether directly—if a medieval reader read this anthology scarred cover to charred cover—or ideologically—as I think the poet probably did. Teaching was fun, not in the least because I could teach my world lit class with some degree of confidence for a damn change. This week was also fun because three of the people writing letters of recommendation for me were observing me teach—one every day. I think I did okay.

So, that's the past three months. That, and nearly defeating zombies in Last Night on Earth, and watching a lot of television via Netflix (The Wire is way more awesome than I had first believed), and the usual level of graduate social drinking.

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.

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.

Doctor Why,
or the hazards of being an academic with nothing to analyze

Recently a friend goaded me into watching Doctor Who. Since I was deprived of the british childhood I so clearly deserved, I haven't seen it since it came on PBS in the eighties, and I half-remember it as mildly entertaining. However, rather than start with the First Doctor (William Hartnell) and move forward, I started with the BBC's 2005 renovation of the franchise, with the Ninth Doctor (the incredible Christopher Eccleston).

This was, as that incarnation of The Doctor might say, a "fantastic" idea. The new series is clever and well-written, and has cracking special effects that make a pile of living plastic believable, for starters. I watched them all—the Slytheen episodes, the Chula medship that turns everyone into gas-mask zombies, the Daleks (and then more Daleks!)—and loved them. However, since Netflix has decided to postpone releasing Series 2 (perhaps they think Scotsmen are less engaging than Northerners), I had a brand-new obsession and nothing to fill it with. So, naturally, given a show with a forty-three year history, I ordered more episodes from Netflix, this time starting at the beginning.

Bad move.

First of all, like a good number of things at the BBC, the old series was filmed in video, giving it that "soap opera actors have invaded London in pepperpots" feel. As such, I personally have a hard time accepting this as fiction; I had the same trouble with Red Dwarf a few years ago. [1] Hurrah, then, that the BBC seem largely to have given up that feel with the advent of digital technology.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, is the fact that these shows are awful. Now, before I get screaming letters,[2] let me say that the ideas aren't generally bad. What's bad, though, is the writing; George Lucas could out-write some of these people on a bad day with a hangover. Remember Science Fiction in the Sixties? Remember why MST3K made a decade's worth of episodes out of Science Fiction from the Sixties? That's the old Doctor Who, right up to Peter Davison (Fifth Doctor) [the sixth and seventh were kind of awful for other reasons, most of them having to do with the Eighties].

In his book Strange TV, M. Keith Booker writes that SF television had a rough patch between the mid 1970's and the late 1980's; he argues that Roddenberry's decision to relaunch Star Trek as a television program was the jumping-off point for nearly 15 years' worth of sold SF television. Since I don't have the book in front of me,[3] I'm paraphrasing, and I don't recall whether he also said this: what separates these modern shows from the old SF—the stuff we now see as "camp"—is the writing. Not the effects, though those have gotten better; not the ideas, since those were always good. It's the writing that makes the difference.

Television is now in its fourth generation, and, despite the challenges this nebulous "digital age" presents, it will likely remain with us for a while yet. As such, it's grown as a storytelling medium. Now, with shows like The Sopranos or The Venture Brothers or Rome, we expect top-notch stories that make us care about the characters; in short, we expect television to give us the same quality of story that we get from film, or novels, or drama. The fact that the new series of Doctor Who delivers on a level that the old series did not is a sign that the medium has begun to mature—and that's a good thing, because if humanity needs anything else, it's another quality medium in which to tell stories.

Of course, all this may change with the next series. Hurry up, Netflix, you bastards! [4]
_____
Notes:
[1] Other shows filmed in this way: Are You Being Served?, 'Allo, 'Allo!, Mr Bean, Blackadder. I have problems with the former two because they're inane drivel, but for some reason it works for things with Rowan Atkinson in.
[2] Please post your howlers to . . . (Eee! Book Seven comes out in July! And it'll suck! eee!)
[3] But you should. By the blood that Mahund bled, it's a good book. His prose is clear—a rare thing in academic books—and he's funny, too. Amazon; Half; WorldCat
[4] Things I am also waiting on from Netflix: the first series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, the second series of Rome, the third series of House, and, ironically, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

I suspect the compulsory lists are because I've been reading High Fidelity again. It's nice to have books that make me think but don't automatically shift me into analytical mode.

How you know you've arrived, Pt 1.

You know you're in the business when you start getting rejection letters. Mind you, this isn't rejection from the big boys--Speculum, say, or the JMEMS--but from a small conference proceedings journal. I'm not mad, really, because their comments were right: that essay was really space cadet, mostly because it'd been cut down from my thesis and I'd not made the argument clearer in the revisions. In all fairness I thought the deadline was later (that's what I get for not going to the business meeting) and thus went at it in a bit of a rush.

Still, rejection's annoying, and part of me suspects I'll never amount to anything, but we carry on regardless, eh?

De arte docendi

Or, "Reasons that I really love my job."

Here's the latest: like most of us with a two-class teaching schedule, I have one sheep class and one goat class. Not surprising, the goat class is the (insanely) earlier of the two, and while it does have its moments,* it's largely a dud. Enter the second class, whom I dishonor by calling sheep.

We're discussing a moment in the Tale of Genji today in which Genji demonstrates that he's grown (Chapter Four, for those of you following along at home). In the first class, I can't even get simple answers to questions like, "what happens next?" In the second, however, they sidetrack me into a discussion of aesthetic vs. intellectual knowledge, followed by an attempt to read Genji's actions as having roots in his childhood, which means I have to derail that branch of psychoanalytic criticism with the Bookerian "literary characters don't have minds" explanation. Neither discussion was expected, but both were rewarding, and I was pleased that when they didn't understand, they asked me to explain until they did (or until they got tired of me talking, but don't burst my bubble).

That's the kind of teaching I like. Give me juniors and seniors in the humanities every time!
_____
* One of my favorites occurred this past week. It's the first day back after Spring Break, and we're doing The Tale of Genji, and they're all huddled in the back. So, as you do, I walked in and said, "Neither Genji nor I will bite. Why are you huddled in the back?"
"We're afraid of you," said one.
"Good."
"We're afraid of your talons."
Mind you, these are college-age kids, and this guy's a good 20, 21 maybe. "What talons?" I say, looking at my hands.
"I've seen Wolverine. I know how it works."
Flash forward to Wednesday, when this person's sitting up front. "Ah," I say, "you've more courage today."
"No," he says, "I just have my sword and shield."
See? Precocious--but not educationally speaking.

What Got Done

Everything but the notes for Genji. Yes, even the dishes, and even the surprise "Oh yeah, the laundry I didn't fold today" pile.

Working on the lecture notes now, though it's early in the morning and I really need drugs.