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Archive for the ‘Journal Club’ Category

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

Posted in Academia, Journal Club, Reading, tagged , , on 22 May 2008 | 2 Comments »

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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Journal Club #2: Alter & Oppenheimer on abstraction and fluency

Posted in Journal Club, Writing, tagged , on 24 March 2008 | 10 Comments »

Two weeks ago I discovered a fabulous new way to procrastinate: reading about the psychology of language. It counts as learning! It makes me a better writer!
My first find: Daniel Oppenheimer, a Princeton psychologist, won an Ig Nobel for his 2005 “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words [...]

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Modblogging Journal Club #1: Sheng-mei Ma on Kazuo Ishiguro

Posted in Journal Club, Modblogging, Reading, tagged , on 17 March 2008 | 4 Comments »

This is the very first Modblogging Journal Club post!
Today: Sheng-mei Ma’s “Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity: Performance in Whiteface” (PDF) from Post Identity 2.1 (Winter 1999).
Ma announces his argument with a grenade:
Although some critics may find it devilishly inappropriate, even unprofessional, to confuse fictitious characters and the fiction writer, surely [. . .] characters [...]

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Introducing Modblogging Journal Club

Posted in Journal Club, Modblogging, Reading on 17 March 2008 | 2 Comments »

A great friend of mine, a microbiologist who is now a postdoc in Seattle, used to talk about her lab’s journal club. As I understood it, journal club was exactly like fight club, although with less violence and more microbiology.
Informal reading groups have come and gone in my department, not least because we dissertators always [...]

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Can a dissertation be a story?

Posted in Dissertation, Journal Club, Modblogging, Modernism, Reading, Writing on 3 March 2008 | 2 Comments »

This week I read Barak Kushner’s The Thought War to fill in some of the historical gaps in my chapter, and I’ve found myself surprised by his writing. Though an Amazon reviewer calls it “dry, dull, and… like a jumped-up version of someone’s dissertation,” as someone who hopes to jump up his own dissertation [...]

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