Author Archives: ghw

the convergence of academic fields

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Back in June, Erin O’Connor asked why scholars in English departments would concern themselves with video games. Specifically, she asked

  • “What does an essay collection on the ecology of video games have to do with the discipline of English?” and
  • “Why is this study originating from within an English department?”

O’Connor asks important questions about academia and the field of English studies. Her readers’ comments, unfortunately, often provide more heat than light. I’m going to assume her questions were not rhetorical and point to two things that provide some contextual information that might help one to answer O’Connor’s questions:

First, an introduction to Ecocriticism provided by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

Second, this analysis, by Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Grand Text Auto, of the writing in a forthcoming videogame.

[Thanks to
Dennis Jerz, Jill Walker, and Jason Rhody for pointers to the second item above.]

Okay, now I must go back to reading through my summer notes on eighteenth-cenury evangelical periodicals.

lessig on the issues that garner our attention

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I agree 100% with Lawrence Lessig when he writes that we should discuss the policies the candidates are proposing and the likely effect of those policies on the future of our nation rather than chase the scandale du jour. However, this kind of policy discussion requires a much more sophisticated understanding than most of us currently have of the “cause and effect” claims contained within fields such as economics, foreign relations, and social psychology. For example, if we adjust this interest rate over here, what effect will that have on rates of home ownership over there? Do we even know how to evaluate the different possible answers to that question?

Furthermore, the press would have a hard time boiling down into a pithy headline an announcement by one of the campaigns regarding, say, a particular position on our relationship with North Korea. Remember the news stories about how confusing the new overtime rules are? The story wasn’t “Here are the new overtime rules”; instead, it was “These new rules are confusing to everyone.” This is how the press handles things that are complicated, apparently.

The campaigns (and their supporters) know this, and so in order to capture the attention of the press, they put other, simpler issues out front. We end up with a public discourse that focuses on “Did he or didn’t he?” questions that appear to have easy answers.

But it also strikes me that these “ridiculous questions” (How many times has the president been arrested? Did Kerry shoot himself to earn his Purple Heart?) all fall within the boundaries of epideictic rhetoric. They are meant to put into the voter’s mind powerfully affective concrete examples from a candidate’s life that will establish and reinforce either a positive or negative view of that candidate. Epideictic rhetoric like this does not, perhaps, serve our needs as voters very well, but it does serve the candidates’ needs in that it’s very effective at pushing people to vote one way or the other.

[Cross-posted at American Dialogues]

a good day

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The UMKC September Project events yesterday went very well. Not as many people showed up as I thought were going to, but the conversations that took place were fantastic, probably the most satisfying exchanges I have yet had at this school. Unfortunately, none of the conservative groups or individuals to whom we extended invitations attended. One of my colleagues suggested that this is because the concept of dialogue with a diverse set of opinions is inherent to a liberal ideology but not to a conservative one. I hope this is not true.

Many valuable exchanges took place, but a few have stuck in my head. I’ll start with one and perhaps add more if I have time.

On the subject of freedom, when Zell Miller spoke at the Republican National Convention, he said this:

For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.

It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.

It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag who gives that protester the freedom to abuse and burn that flag.

As my colleague Steve Dilks pointed out, however, this simple-minded statement ignores completely the work of many people who are not soldiers and who play an active and essential role in articulating, advocating, and preserving freedoms. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and their followers, come to mind. No war was fought to earn women the right to vote in America: suffragettes did the work. Legislators write into law the official recognition of freedoms, and judicial bodies consider the constitutionality of those laws. Someone has to negotiate and put into writing the peace treaties that mark the end of war and that represent the beginning of freedom. Writers and speakers have historically created the framework by which a people decide whether they will believe in and support certain freedoms. Soldiers clearly have sacrificed a great deal, but Miller’s statment is, in a word, ignorant.

At the start and finish of the two events I attended, I reminded everyone that we were taking part in a very large project. A recent email from the national September Project organizers read as follows:

September Project events [took] place on Saturday, September 11 in
all 50 states. In total, there [were] 460 US libraries, schools, colleges,
community colleges, universities, jails, community centers, and parks
holding events.

With the recent addition of September Project events in Venezuela
and Singapore, there are now 8
countries participating: Australia, Japan, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain,
Switzerland, the US, and Venezuela.

washburn.silver.jpg
Thousands of people gathered on this day to exchange ideas about important issues, and we owe the original concept to the work of just two people: David Silver and Sarah Washburn.

our responsibilities

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“I began with a desire to speak with the dead,” wrote Stephen Greenblatt at the beginning of his 1988 book Shakespearean Negotiations.

I was awake this morning at 6:30. Crack of dawn on a Saturday. I have a lot to do today.

I dreamed of the dead last night and woke up blogging. My uncle Carl died of cancer about six years ago. Last night he was so glad to see me, and we talked about buying a van.

So much to say, today.

This past summer, in a Guardian Review article by Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, I was struck by this memorable quote:

The terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like America, the West, or Islam, and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, must be opposed … We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanist education. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other and live together, but for that kind of wider perception, we need time and a patient and sceptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation, that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.

The quote is from Edward Said, in the 2003 preface to his Orientalism.

[Danielle Sered has created a useful, brief webpage at Emory University on Said and orientalism.]

“We will never forget,” reads the bumper sticker. The problem is not forgetting; it’s alchemy, the mysterious practice by which being sick and tired of violence and death gets transformed through a shady practice into a desire for more violence and death.

Let’s try something else. Read. Learn. Talk. Take a look at the NY Times special section on 9/11, the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, and the September 11 Digital Archive..

[CC-licensed Flickr photo by Geoff Gallice]

campaign 2004 and document analysis

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So, documents were made public that seem to indicate some nefarious goings on with regard to Bush’s time in the National Guard. Then people began to question the authenticity of these documents. You know, you think they’d ask those of us who do work in the history of writing, reading, and publishing to help out with these issues, but no…

  • From Little Green Footballs: “Bush Guard Documents: Forged“:

    • I opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoftís Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date ì18 August 1973,î then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian.

    And my Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as ìauthentic.î

  • From the Daily Kos: “ TANG Typewriter Follies; Wingnuts Wrong“:

    You see, a “typeface” doesn’t just consist of the shape of the letters. It also is a set of rules about the size of the letters in different point sizes, the width of those letters, and the spacing between them. These are all designed in as part of the font, by the designer. Since Microsoft Word was designed to include popular and very-long-used typefaces, it is hardly a surprise that those typefaces, in Microsoft Word, would look similar to, er, themselves, on a typewriter or other publishing device. That’s the point of typefaces; to have a uniform look across all publishing devices. To look the same. You could use the same typeface in, for example, OpenOffice, and if it’s the same font, surprise-surprise, it will look the same.

    So kudos on discovering fonts, freeper guy.

I guess Plato was onto something when he had Socrates say this:

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.