Modblogging: a roundtable at MSA X?

Edubloggers go two places: the faculty lounge and the seminar room.

The best blogs fit the first category—in the faculty lounge we can ask questions about pedagogy and share fears about research without fretting over how we’ll look to our committee members and peers. Take, for example, Sisyphus’s recent remarks about a class observation: there is no equivalent forum, at least at my university, that would have allowed her to articulate in such detail her response to and concerns about this observation while inviting both support and structured feedback. This sort of thoughtful back-and-forth is what blogs do best.

That’s not to say that edublogs are all rainbows and milkshakes: for every blog that fosters supportive dialog among a community of instructors there is another blog dishing gossip about faculty and students. (Exhibit A: the surprising honesty of one of Scott Eric Kaufman’s readers.)

But just because the call-and-response structure of blogs is more suited to the faculty lounge doesn’t mean they can’t be adapted to do the work of the seminar room: medievalists and comp/rhetors regularly use their communities to tackle disciplinary questions. Here are just some of the more active seminarian medievalists (Shana Worthen has a fuller catalog):

• Alliterative
• Blogenspiel
• Corner of 10-century Europe, A
  
• Digital Medievalist: Scéla
• Heavenfield
• In the Middle
• Mern Þonke
• Modern Medieval
• Unlocked Wordhoard
• Wormtalk and Slugspeak

I was going to give a list of comp/rhet blogs too, but I don’t want to spend all afternoon doing this. Just go to Schizzes and Flows and read Scot’s blogroll.

Here’s my question: Why isn’t there a modernist lit seminar room out there? There are a couple blogs dedicated to the subject—Beyond Modernity hosts weekly essays on the theory and context of mod/pomo studies, and the blogger at Modern Kicks digests goings-on in the world of post-1900 art history.

There are plenty of other bloggers out there writing on 20th-century lit, but it’s rare to see posts about their work. I’ve certainly not said anything about Proust or Virginia Woolf in my time posting here, but part of that comes from not knowing if there’s an audience out there; when a medievalist asks for help compiling a bibliography it’s because he knows his readers will have answers. (Though asking, in the parlance of blogs, is blegging—blugh.)

Would it be possible to create a more visible community of modbloggers?

I’m hopeful that there might be enough simmering interest in this subject, if we can just find the right folks, to put together a roundtable for MSA X (Nashville, Nov. 13-16). If you’re at all interested, I’d love to hear from you! You can email me (mshapiro at gmail dot com) or just comment below.