Author Archives: ghw

how to disagree

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Hey, you! Yes, you! Non-academic reader. This post is for you as well as my academic readers. What are your thoughts? Apropos of my previous post (and future ones), I like these paragraphs on the gap between scholars in academia and the general public from Gerald Graff‘s Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education:

Part of the problem lies … in the peculiar difficulty of representing intellectual developments in the press. A vulgarized version of a theory or critical approach is inevitably easier to describe in the confines of a brief news article than the best, most sophisticated version of the theory or approach. A doctrinaire assault on ‘dead white males’ can be easily summearized in a column inch or two, whereas it would take many pages to describe intellectual movements that are complex, diverse, and rife with internal conflicts. Glib falsifications can always be produced at a faster rate than their refutations.

Then, too, few readers of the popular press are in a position to recognize misrepresentations of academic practices, a fact that relieves anyone who wants to debunk these practices of the responsibility to do their homework. So feminism, multiculturalism, and deconstructionism are understood not as a complicated and internally conflicted set of inquiries and arguments about the cultural role of gender, ethnicity, language, and thought but as a monolithic doctrine that insists, as D’Souza formulates it, ‘that texts be selected primarily or exclusively according to the author’s race, gender, or sexual preference and that the Western tradition be exposed in the classroom as hopelessly bigoted and oppressive in every way’ [‘Illiberal Education,’ Atlantic 267.3 (March 1991): 52] … [A]nyone who takes these views to be typical of academic revisionist thinking simply knows nothing of the reality…

There is still another reason why myths about the academy have flourished, however, and this is one for which the academy has itself to blame. Academics have given journalists and others little help in understanding the more difficult forms of academic work. As this work has become increasingly complex and as it increasingly challenges conventionally accepted forms of thinking, the university acquires an obligation to do a more efective job of popularization. Yet the university has been disastrously inept in this crucial popularizing task and often disdains it as beneath its dignity. If the university has become easy prey for ignorant or malicious misrepresentations, it has asked for them. Having treated mere image making as beneath its dignity, the academy has left it to its detractors to construct its public image for it. (34-35)

Well, I’m not sure I agree with the characterization of the academy as arrogant in those last few lines, but it’s true that if we largely ignore the image that the public has of what we do, we allow those who don’t like what they think we do to take control of that image.

fall 2004 courses, revisited

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Posting in a hurry: Okay, I’m not teaching a course on the eighteenth-century novel. Rather, I’m teaching the second of our composition courses. Like Chuck, I’d like to design an election-themed course, and I would also like to incorporate some student blogging. I’m thinking of using linguist Deborah Tannen’s book Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue. (Booksense) My training in teaching composition is mostly in rhetoric with a smidgen of linguistics (thanks to Linda Coleman and Jeanne Fahnestock). Thus, I do not intend to offer expertise on politics or policy issues because my knowledge of these things is no greater than the average citizen’s. Instead I will focus students’ attention on the discourse of the campaigns, the news outlets, and the various commentators, and I will provide students with a variety of critical tools for analyzing that discourse. My own take (not particularly original or especiallly insightful, I’ll admit) is that American citizens are not well served by the prevailing political discourse, which is more focused upon scoring quick points with the media than it is with thoughtful consideration of the issues.

  • Does it have to be this way?
  • Can we understand how this situation came to pass?
  • What might we do to remedy the situation?

I welcome all input for planning this course. And, although I’m still not sure about this idea, can anyone suggest some election-themed fiction? Works do not have to be contemporary.

open letter to stephen metcalf

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Dear Stephen,

Well, I just read your hatchet job thought provoking essay on Wilco, and I have an uncanny coincidence to report.

You write, “To a listener accustomed to the Minutemen, Wilco sounds like Hootie and the Blowfish.” Wow, I was going to write something very similar, but with a few slight differences: “Listeners accustomed to the Minutemen should try listening to some music that has come out since the Minutemen stopped recording music twenty years ago.” See? Uncanny, I tell you.

Your essay is the most brilliant thing I’ve read since that 1984 piece complaining that the Minutemen’s Double Nickles on the Dime didn’t measure up to the Beatles’ 1964 album Meet the Beatles. Or that article that appeared in 1964 complaining that the Beatles didn’t sound enough like Sinatra.

Keep up the good work of staying two decades behind the times! Oh, and you might want to send a memo to guitarist Nels Cline: you see, recently he’s worked with both Wilco and the Minutemen’s Mike Watt. He probably doesn’t know that rock critics like you would frown on actual musicians failing to recognize the distinctions of cool that you work so hard to establish. Just a thought.

Sincerely,

George Williams

what’s a blog for?

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Matt once asked, “Will blogs kill listserv?” I don’t think they will, but clearly academic blogs have an openness to them that academic listservs, journals, and monographs do not. Over dinner one night at SHARP 2004, someone said “Who would want to read that?” with the trace of a sneer when my blog came up in conversation. Well, I get about 400 hits a day on my blog. How many people on any given day read an academic article that you’ve published? This is not to say that my blog represents anywhere near the amount of scholarly effort that an article does, but the fact is that more people will read what I publish myself here than in any other forum where my work will appear.

As a result, I think I’ve realized a pretty serious goal (one among many) that I will pursue for this blog: making clear to people who are not scholars of language and literature what scholars of language and literature do for a living. A number of other things have gradually led me to this realization.

  • Attending the KC Bloggers meetup on June 24 and meeting people from a variety of backgrounds who were, like me, as interested in literature as they are in technology (and other topics, of course). These people are readers of my blog (and I of theirs), so why not write about what I do in the same way I would if we were talking at an informal gathering?
  • The responses to this entry at Erin O’Connor’s Critical Mass. I asked O’Connor’s readers what they think English professors do and what they think we should do; their answers reveal that many of them don’t like what we do, but that they also don’t really know what we do. I say this solely because of the answers to my “How did you come to your conclusions?” question.
  • The comment threads on this entry regarding Tupac Shakur on the summer reading list and this entry on the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report at Joanne Jacobs’ site. The comments that are most hostile about the state of literary studies reflect the most ignorance.

I am not about to turn this particular entry into a magnum opus containing my take on the current state of literary studies. However, as I wrote last December, those who say that the study of literature is dominated by approaches that are silly, trivial, over-politicized or un-necessarily theorized are dead wrong. For reasons I will explain in a later post, I am unpersuaded by anecdotal evidence, no matter how voluminous, that seeks to support this point of view. If you want to make an argument about the influence of certain theorists, then get serious and do something systematic; information technology is your friend.

Well, if you’re still reading this long post, I’ll just close with what I wrote at the end of the comments thread on O’Connor’s site.

Wow, thanks to everyone for their responses to my questions! I am struck by the diversity of opinions; clearly this is not just a two-sided issue.

A few things occur to me after reading through these responses:

First, while there are many assertions about what English professors should not be doing, not many have articulated in any detail what they should be doing. It’s one thing to say, for example, that we should inculcate a love of literature, but it’s quite another to explain how to do that.

Second, no one explains that they came to their conclusions concerning research based on exposure to the one outlet where the overwhelming majority of that research appears: journal articles. Have you read many of them in the major journals? There’s a great deal of interesting, sophisticated but accessible stuff there. I have my students at all levels research and read at least one recent article in every class I teach. It is a grossly inaccurate assertion to say that it’s all heavily influenced by theory in its various flavors (or by “political correctness”). You can always find work that you don’t agree with (and I challenge you to name one discipline in which this is not true), but this does not mean that most of it has no value. (Note that I am not saying that theoretically-inclined work has no value.)

Third, aside from some vague references to “the Classics,” no one here or over at Joanne Jacobs’ site (in the discussion on Tupac Shakur) actually goes into much detail about the classic literature that they love, which I find curious. What is it that you love about your favorite author? How did you develop that love?

Finally, there seems to be a general sense that a definition of “the canon” or “the classics” has always been around and that we are only just now tinkering with it. This is patently and demonstrably false.

I am not attacking the value of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton (or Aristophanes or Sophocles, for that matter) when I say that we can find specific points in history when readers and critics did not place them high upon the pedestal of great literature. Opinions have always shifted.

To take one example, in England, the genre of the novel (including those we now consider classics) was initially greeted with the kind of disdain that some reserve for gangsta rap or videogames today. Or to take another, in the early twentieth century, T. S. Eliot resuscitated the critical fortunes of the seventeenth-century “metaphysical” poets after they had been held in low regard for generations.

More generally, opinions on what constitutes great literature have always been in flux, as a reading of the early sections of any textbook survey of literary criticism will reveal. Contrast, for example, the attitudes of eighteenth-century critics with those of the Victorians in the following century.

And works of literature have been entering and exiting the list of “classics” for centuries. Although it was written as long as 1300 years ago, Beowulf was not taught regularly (or even made available in a contemporary edition) until after transcriptions were made in the late eighteenth century. A poem titled “A Funeral Elegy” was attributed to Shakespeare by Don Foster in the 1990s and added to the collected works editions typically used for teaching; then scholars decided this poem was not by Shakespeare, and it was taken back out again. The Interesting Narrative of Afro-Briton Olaudah Equiano, an eighteenth-century bestselling autobiography every bit as engaging as Ben Franklin’s, is now attracting a great deal of scholarly attention and is taught with much more frequency than it was even ten years ago; this is in large part because of a meticulously researched Penguin edition of the work (full disclosure: done by my dissertation advisor), which by the way you can find in just about any bookstore, evidencing its appeal beyond the “ivory tower.” These are three examples among many. Scholarship matters: it affects what we do or do not read.

I’m heartened that so many people are concerned with the fate of reading and writing, and I’m going to work on doing a better job on my own ‘blog of explaining what it is I’m doing in my research and teaching.

my fall 2004 courses

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On the off chance that you, dear reader, are one of my students, I would like to invite you to sign up for my classes this fall:

  • English 350: Introduction to the Novel
  • English 433/533: Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing

I only have 2 students signed up for the first class and 4 for the second. Both were relatively late additions to the course calendar, which explains why registration has been slow (or else I have cooties). I had been scheduled to teach Shakespeare, but that class (which filled up with many former students of mine) is now being taught by one of my colleagues.

You can read descriptions of these courses on my homepage.

Update, August 6: Well, my English 350 has been cancelled. Instead, I’ll be teaching English 225: Composition II, First Blood.