Author Archives: ghw

class meetings on secondary readings

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Back in February, KF posted a question to Palimpest: “How do you get your students to engage actively with a small piece of a long text before they’ve read the whole thing?”

I have the opposite question, I suppose: When you’ve assigned 2 or 3 articles of secondary reading, how do you provoke, manage, promote, (what-have-you) class discussion?

In my course on “Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing,” we’re reading a good many secondary articles here at the beginning of the course (like Darnton and Feather). Discussion is going pretty well, but I feel like we’re perhaps moving a bit too quickly through the material and that we might not be doing it justice.

One way I try to frame discussion is through some basic questions:

  • What are the main points of this essay?
  • What are its strengths and weaknesses?
  • How does it differ from / disagree with other material we’ve read?
  • How does it apply to the issues we are considering?

So what do you do?

[Cross-posted at Palimpsest.]

“cremaster cycle” comes to kansas city

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The Star this morning reports that Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster Cycle” is playing this month in Kansas City: “The entire ‘Cremaster’ series will be shown on three succeeding Wednesdays this month at the Tivoli Cinemas, courtesy of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s Electromediascope series of experimental film, video and new media.” Well, better late than never, I suppose. Tickets to this Wednesday’s showing of parts 1 and 2 are already gone, but starting Thursday you can get tix for next week.

Wait a minute, the Nelson has an “Electromediascope series of experimental film, video and new media”? Cool.

poem by poet laureate

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With 9/11 just a week away, L points me to this poem, “The Names,” by Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States.

blog for kc september project

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As part of the KC September Project, Iím looking for thirty volunteers from the Kansas City area to write one blog entry each for a ìKC September Projectî blog, one for each day of the month.
What kind of guidelines should you follow in writing your entry? The September Project site has this to say: “Share and discuss your ideas about democracy, citizenship, and patriotism through public talks, roundtables, and performances” and “The September Project is a collection of people, groups, and organizations working to create a day of engagement, a day of conversation, a day of democracy.” I think readers’ needs would be best served by you sharing your thoughts about, for example, key terms like “democracy,” “citizenship,” and “patriotism.” But there are also other key terms that are at stake in American public discourse right now: “freedom,” “terrorism,” “strength,” “rights,” “courage,” “marriage,” and “leadership,” to name just a few. Take a look at the much-blogged NY Times graphic comparing “The Words Speakers Use” from the two conventions.
Consider the following some very gentle suggestions, rather than hard and fast rules: The best writers have a distinctive voice that comes through in their writing, and I don’t want to suggest anything that would change the nature of that voice in your writing for this project. I would like to see all of us be as persuasive as we can to as wide a range of audience members as we can, and this means avoiding polemic and ranting (and if you’ve read my blog long enough, you know that I’ve done my share of both though I’ve started moving away from that). If our goal is “conversation,” then we must leave room for other voices. When public discourse relies upon vituperation, a large part of the audience just automatically tunes out. Start by attacking gay men and lesbians and you’ve already lost the die-hard liberals; use terms like “radical right” or “wingnut” and there go the conservatives. Your audience becomes smaller and smaller until you’re in the oft-mentioned “echo chamber,” talking only to people who already think like you. And what’s the point in that?
Political candidates have a vested interest in attacking their opponents, not in listening to them and perhaps being persuaded by them. Citizens, however, have a vested interest in being persuaded by the best ideas and proposals. I would argue that these interests are diametrically opposed to each other. I am more interested in creating an environment that fosters conversations among citizens about ideas of substance. I am not interested in creating an environment in which we argue about the candidates or (worse yet) repeat the talking points to each other that are handed down to us from the candidates’ campaign managers.
We are so divided in America right now that I believe it’s time we start to work on finding or establishing common ground. This is not about civility or “pinky-in-the-air” manners; it’s about getting as many people as possible to agree on something, at the very least to listen to each other. (You can see that my reading Deborah Tannen has influenced my thinking about this.)
Please keep these suggestions in mind as you write about whatever it is you write about. I will not reject anything that you send in to me. If a wide range of political positions is represented in a thoughtful way, then I will consider this project a success. I would, however, like you to avoid endorsing or atttacking particular candidates or parties, because I believe that is the quickest route to turning an exchange of ideas into a shouting match. People automatically respond to you in a particular way if they figure out you are for one side or the other. Discuss ideas instead, however, and I believe you have a greater chance at a rewarding conversation.
Please send me your entries via email as soon as possible, and I will post them to the blog day-by-day.
If you know other bloggers who might be interested in participating, please email them directly and forward them the above suggestions.
I also hope that you will be able to make it to some of the events taking place on 9/11.
Thanks again for your involvement in this project, and enjoy your weekend!

darnton on the history of the book

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Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?“

One can easily lose sight of the larger dimensions of the enterprise because book historians often stray into esoteric byways and unconnected specializations. Their work can be so fragmented, even within the limits of the literature on a single country, that it may seem hopeless to conceive of book history as a single subject, to be studied from a comparative perspective across the whole range of historical disciplines. But books themselves do not respect limits either linguisteic or national. They have often been written by authors who belonged to an international republic of letters, composed by printers who did not work in their native tongue, sold by booksellers who operated across national boundaries, and read in one language by readers who spoke another. Books also refuse to be contained within the confines of a single discipline when treated as objects of study. Neither history nor literature nor economics nor sociology nor bibliography can do justice to all the aspects of the life of a book. By its very nature, therefore, the history of books must be international in scale and interdisciplinary in method. But it need not lack conceptual coherence, because books belong to circuits of communicaiton that operate in consistent patterns, however complex they may be. By unearthing those circuits, historians can show that books do not merely recount history; they make it.