Et al., et cet.

One of the great pleasures of working in the Writing Center is having the opportunity to experience how students approach academic writing for the first time. Watching talented students stumble over comparatively easy rules—et al for et al., “Quotatation”. for “Quotation.”—reminds me every day how arbitrarily academics have settled questions of style.
Incidentally, why do we [...]

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Dissertation-writing as apprenticeship

In his Goals of a Liberal Education (PDF), William Cronon argues that a liberal education seeks to teach a certain worldview—a preference for curiosity, for empathy, for clarity of language, and so on. An illiberal education, by implication, teaches professional skills but leaves students’ worldviews untouched.
Cronon also has a thorough study of the purpose of [...]

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The personal may be political, but is it academic?

For the last few semesters I’ve taught a 90-minute course on academic blogging for my Writing Center—it was as a result of having taught the course a few times that climbed out of pseudonymity and began to tilt my writing slightly more towards the profession.
The course is really just a blog zoo: we introduce attendees [...]

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Is genre competence a kind of fluency?

In filing an application for a travel grant, I have been drafting a statement of the significance of MSA X for 1) my field of study, and 2) my career. I spend 40% of my workweek in the Writing Center engaging with student writing from a huge range of disciplines, but the moment I have [...]

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The summertime canon

Yesterday I finished TAing a seven-week interdisciplinary course for incoming first-year students. There is no greater academic high than the experience of 18 students focused almost exclusively on your course for 10 hours a week, but the pressure of that concentrated attention threatens to explode through cracks in the syllabus.
The pressures on these students are [...]

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Blogging, women, and a swipe at ’90s gender psychology

As I’m sure you know, the WordPress license agreement mandates a monthly blog post about blogging. What could I do?
Responding to Emily Gould’s self-exposé in the Times Magazine, Jemima Kiss on last week’s Tech Weekly podcast suggested that gender differences on blogs are most pronounced in the kinds of blogs men and women tend to [...]

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Canons and Kureishi

A Grinnellian friend who blogs at Less Than a Shoestring pointed me to Ryan Williams’s response to the Guardian’s synopsis of Hanif Kureishi’s critique of creative writing courses at the Hay festival.
(I’ve not heard audio from Kureishi’s talk, so though I hesitate to read Charlotte Higgins’s description as wholly representative of what Kureishi said it’s [...]

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Journal Club #3: Hülya Adak, Jale Parla, and Nergis Ertürk on Turkish and world literature

Katy, Dana, and Ryan’s thought-provoking responses to last Friday’s post (Finding the Countercanon, below) sent me back to the cluster of essays on Turkey and world literature at the beginning of January’s issue of PMLA (123.1). These articles are, frustratingly, behind a paywall, but the titles below link to abstracts.
When we look to English-language readings [...]

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Finding the countercanon

Sometime this summer I’ll pose for an Author Shot to replace that trippy anonicon, but for now I have to ask you to take my word for it that I’m a white man. With a beard, if that matters.
Perhaps because of my privileged upbringing (private school) and context (exurban midwest), or perhaps because of a [...]

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What is expertise?

I’ve been appreciating the riffs on David Remnick’s 100 Essential Jazz Albums at Why not blog? and Yellow Dog—though my public library probably isn’t so happy about the influx of transfers—but these lists have thrown me into something of a crisis about expertise.
Donna and J. Rice—to say nothing of David Remnick—gain authority for their claims [...]

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