poetry smackdown
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Category Archives: language-and-literature
my favorite part
I will, perhaps, someday write a two-person play about arguments over literary studies. It will take place at a cocktail party. The opening scene will probably look something like this:
[Literary scholar (standing by the cheese plate); Inebriated guest (stumbling in suddenly).]
IG: Hey… Hey!…You know whadyer prollem is?
LS (startled): Do I know you?
IG: You spen’ too mush time acting like yer a hissorian or a sosh… a soss… a sosheologiss. You shud luuuuuuuv lidderacher! Why doncha luv it? I luv it.
LS: I’m sorry. Have we met?
IG: Yer allays talkin’ about race… or class… or genner. I mean… who really carez about that stuff?
LS: Well, a lot of people, actually.
IG: You shud luuuuuuuv lidderacher!
LS: Yeah, you said that. And actually, I do love it. That’s why I’ve devoted my life to studying it.
IG: Don’ allays try to be a hissorian or a sosheologiss. Why you do that?
LS: No. I don’t do that, actually.
IG: Yeah, you do! Don’ deny it.
LS: So you read literary scholarship?
IG (angry): Yer bein’ snobby now? You think I can’t unnerstand what you do?
LS: I didn’t say you can’t understand it. I asked if you were familiar with it.
IG: Misser Bigshot over here. Thinks he’z so smart!
LS: Are you an English professor?
IG: Wha..? You think I gotta be a profezzor to understand what you do?
LS: Well, weren’t you saying I’m not qualified to engage with history or sociology? How is that any different than me asking if you’re qualified to engage with the field of literary studies?
IG: Wha…? Hey, yer tryin’ ta trick me!
LS: No, I just…
IG: You think yer so smart, doncha! I oughta… (passes out)Later…
IG: You know wha? I like you! Yer allright.
LS: Get your hand off my shoulder.
IG: You have to admit. Thiz kina exchange is prolly good for you stuffy academic types.
LS: Oh, yes. I feel so enlightened now.[Inebriated guest # 2 stumbles in.]
IG2: Hey! You know whadyer prollem is?…
gender and professional authorship in the renaissance
My friend and colleague Laurie Ellinghausen has an essay in the latest issue of Studies in English Literature (subscription required) entitled “Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay“:
Abstract: This essay offers a new perspective on the Tudor poet and maidservant Isabella Whitney’s way of constructing herself as a female author in the early modern literary marketplace. While Whitney is most often read as a writer desiring textual communities through patronage and the exchange of letters, I note that throughout her miscellany A Sweet Nosgay (1573) she continually emphasizes her isolation from family and community. This stance, I argue, helps Whitney develop a sense of herself as a professional writer who must, after losing her post as a servant, achieve economic independence through the sale of her own verse.
A student-edited edition of Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay can be found here.
This article is a great example of the kind of work in literary studies I’ve been talking about (see comment 97 here).
One of the strongest threads of inquiry in literary studies of the past decade (or more) is the development of the professional author. The professional author
- balances the demands of art and money in the marketplace, as opposed to navigating the equally complex relationships involved in a patronage system;
- practices self-representation to present the most attractive image to a large and largely anonymous audience in the print marketplace, as opposed to the more intimate situation presented by, say, coterie verse distributed in manuscript among a group of acquaintances;
- must develop an understanding of how that print marketplace works, from production to distribution to consumption.
All of these authorship-related developments (and more) took place in Britain between the Renaissance and the late eighteenth century simultaneously with the broader economic changes underway and the radically changing conditions of print production and a populace that was not only increasingly literate but increasingly convinced that reading was a valuable activity. It’s an extremely complex picture, though not one so complex that we cannot understand what’s going on.
Gender is an important category of identity with regard to professional authorship because for all of human history different expectations regarding labor have been applied to men than to women.
In “A Room of One’s own,” Virginia Woolf writes, “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” However, for several years now, we’ve been learning that Behn had predecessors. Laurie’s article is a valuable contribution to this line of inquiry.
that poet is such a spaz
Ray Davis has a great post over on The Valve:
“In mid-nineteenth-century Great Britain, a group of left-wing lower-class poets publish autobiographical free verse epic dramas. Critics name them the Spasmodics.”
Could the Winter 2004 issue of Victorian Poetry be hoaxing us?
reading: the state of the discipline
Each issue of the SHARP journal Book History (subscription required) includes an overview essay on the “State of the Discipline” of book history with regard to a specific topic.
- 2003 – “The Politics of Print: The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America”
- 2002 – “The Epistemology of Publishing Statistics”
- 2001 – “Sacred Texts in the United States”
- 1999 – “Terra Incognita: Toward a Historiography of Book Fastenings and Book Furniture”
- 1998 – “The Rise and Decline of Book Studies in the Soviet Union”
- 1997 – “Booksellers and Their Customers: Some Reflections on Recent Research”
The 2004 volume features “Reading,” by Leah Price. The essay begins with an amusing quote from William James concerning the distance between the experience of the world from a human and a canine point of view: humans fail to see the appeal of bones and smells, while dogs are surely puzzled by the act of reading, during which a human sits frozen for hours on end, staring at a handheld object. Price writes
James’s example points to one of the central difficulties of a history of reading: how to analyze an activity that’s too close for critical distance, and perhaps for comfort. What’s “alien” here is not simply the relation of readers to illiterates (human or canine), but also one reader’s relation to another. Writers on reading have lamented its unknowability or savored its ineffability as far back as Wilkie Collins’s 1858 essay “The Unknown Public.” This is the assumption that book historians have come to combat, either in practice (by uncovering the physical gestures and material artifacts that can make one reader knowable to another), or in theory (by tracing the origins of a Cartesian dualism that severs reading from the hand and the voice).2 For all the polemics that have shaped the fieldóabout extensive reading, about technological determinism, about whether to determine the texts read by a particular demographic group or to define the audience reached by an individual textóhistorians seem united in the urge to contest James’s characterization of reading as a literally “senseless” act.
This doesn’t, however, imply any agreement about what the history of reading is. As David Hall has pointed out, different scholars have understood the term to encompass enterprises as various as the social history of education, the quantitative study of the distribution of printed matter, and the reception of texts or diffusion of ideas.
Read the whole thing (as they say) for a report on, well, the state of the discipline.
I regularly teach Robert Darnton’s essay on studying the history of reading in an attempt to encourage students not to project their own reading habits and tastes upon readers who lived in previous centuries. As the work of Walter Ong reminds us, writing is a technology, thus artificial. Yet we have so internalized the acts of reading and writing that they seem natural, an essential part of being human. Literacy is a recent phenomenon in human history, and in fact, wide-spread literacy has existed in the Anglophone world for only 300 or 400 years. My position is that we should take this understanding and
- Avoid engaging in ahistorical romantic swooning over the power and beauty of literature. This is not to say that we shouldn’t swoon, just that we should not project our feelings across time.
- Lose our fear of (but retain our intense interest in) new technologies’ impact upon what it means to be human. Clearly our lives are enveloped by digital media, and while some observers see this development as a recent and radical break with the past, others view it more properly as part of a long history.
Last fall, a capacity crowd attended a local panel discussion of the NEA Reading at Risk report. (You can read my notes on this discussion here.) When the report came out, Matt K produced a response , the arguments of which are spot on, for the Electronic Literature Organization. There was also a panel discussion at the University of Maryland and other locations around the country. It’s heartening that so many are concerned about the fate of reading and writing. But let’s not forget that reading and writing have (long) histories that are much more complex and much more surprising than most of us realize. When we detect a shift taking place among contemporary readers, our first reaction should not be one of fear (words like “crisis,” “problem,” “risk” crop up regularly) but curiosity. Of course reading habits will change. They always have, and we would be foolish to expect to live in an age of stasis.