Presentation writing (before the panic sets in)

MSA X will be my first national conference, so I find myself devoting the depth of attention to a 20-minute presentation that a freshman devotes to his first response paper—I’ve spent as many hours writing the context paragraph of my presentation as I spent writing the three-page critical background for my last chapter. I should probably pick up the speed a bit.

The great pleasure of this writing (so far) has been thinking emphatically about the audience, small though it will be. Dissertation writing has taught me stylistic sadism: no reader is immediately visible—four months might pass between occasions when my advisor can look over my work—so there is no immediate corrective to my torturous syntax. I’ve certainly listened to enough presentations to know the degree of clarity I like, and I’ve been mentally turning that dial higher: 10 am on a Saturday morning is likely not the time most people like to think about Proust and japonisme.

Some back-patting for you, dear reader-writers: reading output by strong bloggers this last year has helped me find an audible style, I think; at least it has begun to teach me how my colleagues process information.

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 to examples of as many styles of academic blogging as we’ve been able to find and to ask them to comment on what they find engaging and what they find dull. This produces some focus-groupy insight into what readers look for in a blog, and every semester they say they dig tonal variation.

Today’s group spent a few minutes looking at Ann Althouse’s blog. Althouse is our law school’s token conservative—what passes for a conservative in Madison, in any case—and her blog seems about as successful as you’re going to get in academia: Technorati ranks hers among the 5,000 most popular blogs out there.

Her style is fascinating. In the course of a 48 hours this week she critiqued Clarence Thomas’s theory of constitutional law, attacked the idea of a federal marriage amendment, embedded a ridiculous Natalie Portman video, linked to several articles without comment, and posted a picture she took of a squirrel in her front yard.* (And more—Althouse is a prodigious poster.)

Don’t worry, patient reader: I’m not about to start posting pictures of my cats or neighborhood squirrels, but I will rethink the tonal narrowness of this blog. If I must write about comparative modernism, then I might at least learn to do so in a jauntier way.

* In case you are unsure how a law professor who disputes strict constructionism and a federal marriage amendment can count as a conservative, remember that this is Madison.

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 to write in a new genre of I get as baffled and stammery as a freshman accidentally placed in a Russian history seminar.

We’re trained to understand that writers encountering a new genre will lose their mechanical and analytical aptitudes, but it’s been a few years since I’ve had this experience. (Note to any undergraduates who happen to be reading this: don’t be the first student to ask your young instructor to write a letter of recommendation.)

But here’s the thing: in the last year I’ve seen work from a half dozen students who write equally stylish dissertation proposals, grant requests, data analysis, and cover letters, and no doubt these same writers are crafting essay prompts, answering students’ emails, and reviewing peer work. Is this a skill—something trainable—or is it a kind of talent to be able to switch fluidly between genres of writing? Should multigeneric writers be held in the same esteem as polyglots?

(Edited 10/21 for clarity and expression.)

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 extreme: if a student tunes out and fails the class, he loses his scholarship and falls out of higher education before his fingers grip the windowsill. To invite students’ engagement, the professor—Larry Edgerton—designs the syllabus as an intellectual slalom: from sonnets and short stories to a play (Midsummer Night’s Dream, script and performance) to a novel (Jane Eyre) to movies (a full week of Hitchcock) to orchestral works and paintings.

This is an unusual course, and a rare crucible for new ideas about the arts education canon. According to the usual rules, 18-year-old students should learn Charlotte Brontë alongside Emily, Jane, Charles, and George in a windy, wordy tour of the second century of the English novel, or in a Blake-to-Tennyson survey of a 19th-century English letters. But what happens if those same 18-year-olds discuss Jane Eyre on Thursday and the next Friday watch The 39 Steps? (One of Hitchcock’s early masterworks, 1935: like JE, set in the desolate north; like JE, concerned with the persecution of the innocent and the mechanisms of redemption.)

Three things happen:

1. Students don’t drift, or at least not in the quantities you would expect 4 long weeks into a summer course that began mere days after high school ended;
2. Students can’t ghettoize analytical reading as a technique relevant only to 19th-century novels, and begin to find thematic associations in the larger world;
3. Because they trace thematic movements across media and across eras, students become comfortable anchoring cultural signifiers in historical and cultural contexts.

Not all students exhibit all symptoms, of course—I don’t hold up intermedial instruction as a pedagogical panacea—but these effects suggest to me that if the goal of an introductory course is to inculcate students in the habits of analytical reading we might be doing them a disservice by organizing 100-level literature courses by medium, nation, and period.

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 keep:

Personality bloggers write about themselves and their experiences and their lives, and topic bloggers write about other stuff—which, a lot of the time, tend to be written by men, but that’s partly because it’s easier for them to slightly isolate them[selves]—putting my pod psychologist hat on—it’s easier for them to [get] distance from the topic. (19:55 to 12:10.)

With all respect to the Tech Weekly team, this sounds like ’90s-style Men are from Blogger, Women are from Livejournal nonsense. Provided that this gendered difference in blogging styles actually exists—and all we have are anecdotes—isn’t the likelier explanation for this divide wrapped up in issues of economics and gender performance?

Putting on my blog psychologist hat, I suspect that I blog about literary critical issues because my understanding of maleness is, to some extent, defined by romantic stories of public academic discourse between men going back to Plato. As a consequence, it seems unlikely that a hiring or tenure committee will penalize me for my blogging, though, even if they do, as a white man with an advanced degree I am likely to be able to find another high-paying job.

I’d like to be able to argue that the great French diarists and lettristes of the 17th and 18th centuries, like the Marquise de Sévigné, model how we understand women’s public writing; however, since I know zilch about how Sévigné shaped modern discourse I’ll stick to the safe claim: the tradition of public debate among Euro-American women is, compared to Plato, fairly recent. Add to this consideration the statistic that the great majority of bloggers who have been Dooced in the last 10 years have been women and it begins to seem clear that the social and financial pressures pushing women away from topic-blogging are more concrete and relevant than any wispy, unsourced psychological argument.

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 all I’ve got.)

Kureishi’s argument, in all its shocking novelty, is that universities teach creative writing less as a professional skill than as a therapeutic technique: “The fantasy is that all the students will become successful writers – and no one will disabuse them of that.”

Consequence: writing programs end up looking rather like “mental hospitals.” You fill in the rest.

I’ve never been in a CW course, so the thrust of Kureishi’s argument sounds as appropriate to me as to anyone else who’s seen Wonder Boys and kind of assumes Michael Chabon knows what he’s talking about.

More interesting than Kureishi’s remarks are Williams’s arguments why creative writing courses inspire this sort of attack:

1. Literary writing is on the decline, becoming, like contemporary jazz, accessible to few. Williams argues that, gallingly, “Phenomena like MFA programs and creative writing courses just serve as reminders of how difficult it is for a literary writer to make a living without institutional support.”
2. Creative writing students are aesthetically at odds with literary scholars. Williams: “if you hold the [...] idea that the only kind of writing of value is literary writing, then you’re very likely to see much of your students’ work as worthless.” (This conflict isn’t only aesthetic: creative writing and literary studies programs can compete for the same funds.)
3. CW programs flood the market with literary content; according to statistical rules, some of this content must be jaw-droppingly good. Cultural elites, like OPEC warily eying the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, see this as a threat to their dominance: “The presence of so much talent and good work threatens ideas about canonicity, or about the central importance of a handful of successful contemporary literary stars.”

Arguments 1 and 2 exceed my purview. I dislike contemporary jazz as much as the next idiot (sorry, Gary Giddins) and I’ve read almost no student creative writing (sorry, Brendan).

Argument 3, however, I can write about, especially as it pertains to Hanif Kureishi.

Kureishi appears alongside Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and Timothy Mo as a vaguely foreign-seeming writer in a country obsessive about national pedigree, but it takes only a few proper nouns from his British Council bio to see how firmly he’s ensconced in the literary mainstream: King’s College, Whitbread, National Theatre, and on.

To argue that Kureishi is, in Williams’s formulation, one of those “contemporary literary stars” fighting the new astronomy that would expand the literary universe, we would look for marks of approval from the canon-makers. Yet Clark Blaise’s 1990 Times review of The Buddha of Suburbia (byline: Director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa) isn’t too hot on Kureishi:

It is difficult to turn from screenwriting [...] to the conventional Bildungsroman, in which nothing exists without a textured, modulated, layered consciousness. In ”The Buddha of Suburbia,” Karim’s emerging consciousness is not spacious enough to contain the worlds of Haroon and Eva, his mother and her new boyfriend, Jamila and Changez, or his own growing understanding of acting and theater. The book reads like three novellas flattened into one long narrative.

My translation: reading Buddha as though it were a rewrite of The Sorrows of Young Werther shows us that Kureishi is insufficiently obedient to the Anglo-Germanic canon.

Look, I haven’t read Buddha and I’ve heard at best middling things about it, but faulting a novel for its fidelity to a 215-year-old literary genre is a sign of a canonical laziness. Would Blaise argue that Pip’s expanding consciousness in Great Expectations is not spacious enough to contain the worlds of Estella and Magwitch? It’s certainly not, but the book’s a doozy nonetheless.

Propelled by market forces, creative writing programs historically taught the rules of the canon. They have given us – as Williams writes – the sort of young, white, Ivy League graduates who populate the Times Best Books list every year, but they have also indoctrinated writers from outside this socio-ethnic elite into the rules of the canon.

This week’s fiction double-issue of the New Yorker opens with a story by Nabokov. (First sentence: “On the stairs Natasha ran into her neighbor from across the hall, Baron Wolfe.” You fill in the rest.) The pseudo-diverse group of writers who follow were trained, with one or two exceptions, at American universities: Uwem Akpan (MFA, U. Michigan), Tobias Wolff (MA, Stanford), Edwidge Danticat (MFA, Brown), Mohammed Naseehu Ali (BA, Bennington), Allegra Goodman (Ph.D., Stanford), Mary Gaitskill (BA, U. Michigan), and George Saunders (MA, Syracuse). Provided we count Annie Proulx’s degree (MA, Sir George Williams U.) as functionally American, the one exception is Haruki Murakami (BA, Waseda U.), although his New Yorker piece is the only one that isn’t fiction.

Clearly these creative writing programs are working in the sense that they teach a certain small percentage of their students how to write for the mainstream of the American literary audience, but in the process of doing so they are also teaching their students how to write in accord with the canon.

When Kureishi argues that creative writing programs fail to create strong writers, it’s not because those new writers threaten his canon but because they are too enmeshed in it.

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 of Turkish literature we see at play the problem of contexualized scholarship that sinks my idea of a countercanon. How few professors of English literature, writing about or teaching literature on a global scale, are sufficiently competent in cultural histories to acknowledge both the contexts and the methods of language use in more than a few closely-related cultures? What, ultimately, is the standard of expertise in the teaching of a literature at a cultural remove from your own?

A war of words at the bottom of the alphabet

In the last few years, the Virginia Quarterly Review has become the poster child for a successful reimagining of literary periodicals. Ted Genoways, VQR’s brilliant young editor, applied the aesthetic flexibility of zines (comics, sarcasm) to a venerable lit periodical, and began funding serious international reporting and photojournalism in a way you rarely see outside the major papers and Atlantic-league magazines.

For this reason, the current row between VQR and ZYZZVA casts interesting light on two answers to the question of what literary periodicals should do in the age of blogs. Here are the relevant links:

• April 29: On VQR’s blog, Waldo Jaquith posts a (now censored) list of amusingly nasty things VQR reviewers wrote about submissions
• May 5: Ted Genoways apologizes
• May 20: Howard Junker, editor of ZYZZVA, takes issue with Genoways’s apology
• May 20: Genoways replies with an attack on ZYZZVA’s submission-review practice
• May 21: Genoways returns to ZYZZVA to make his case for the role of the contemporary literary periodical

I’m pretty sure that this means I will now have to take advantage of ZYZZVA’s almost-free-issue offer (vs. $14 for an issue of VQR) to discover what “literature pickled in formaldehyde” smells like.

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 discomfort with confronting difference, the English literature I have come to know is white and male. Looking back on my literary career, I am beginning to worry that I have for too long bought into the separate-but-equal mentality of the canon.

Where other literatures have come into my education they feel decontextualized, tokenized, colonized: the sheer talent of a Toni Morrison, for example, would invalidate the canon’s premise were she not acknowledged, so there she is, with Ralph Ellison and Maxine Hong Kingston. But I don’t understand Morrison, Ellison, or Kingston in anything of the depth with which I understand Henry James, Thomas Pynchon, or even Zadie Smith.

Smith, because she writes something like World Literature, seems to escape some of the literary ghettoization of the American canon. Still, World Lit can’t always escape the gravitational pull of academics’ ghettoizing impulse: over and over again Kazuo Ishiguro explains to white interviewers that he doesn’t model his fiction on Yukio Mishima and Junichirō Tanizaki (Chekhov is his greatest influence, followed by James). Interviewers and reviewers, even (especially?) from academic publications, tuck Ishiguro into an ill-defined Japanese Lit.

There are dangers in assuming all authors are like Ishiguro, of course: I’m not sure Philip Roth could give a disquisition on the range of styles deployed by Tanizaki and then come back to explain the stylistic influence of a certain Polish translator of Chekhov. Still, it seems not unreasonable to imagine that authors of the twentieth-century novel, in all languages, are employees of one of the more culturally heterogeneous firms around.

Back to my problem: as a product of my time and place I know the canon as it is espoused by my university, and I know the canon as it is espoused by my authors. (Woolf and Rushdie are graciously forthright about the books they think people should be reading.) But I don’t know, and I don’t know how to know, the canons that boom outside the walls of my little University, the list of 100 Essential Books They Won’t Teach You In College.

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 based on assumptions about how they experience jazz: when they listen to an album, the casual reader assumes, they do so informed of its context and its rules. We assume they have listened to that album multiple times, over a range of contexts and occasions—when their father would put on his favorite records in his study; when hanging out with friends in their dorm room; when they are putting together dinner on a Thursday night and need to feel a deeper connection with the world than rolling out pizzas for the grill might otherwise invite them to be.

We would expect a literary analyst to come at a text, even the first time s/he reads it, with a greater understanding of the text’s moves than would a more casual reader. But do these the assumptions about contextual range that take hold when we look at a list of essential jazz albums apply when we gauge literary expertise?

This is the essential hazard facing young academics: there are few texts I could write about with the authority Remnick has whenever he writes a word about jazz. I have a chapter on In Search of Lost Time that I am pleased with, but I can’t pretend to have read that text as frequently or for as wide a period of my life as Remnick can say he has listened to Art Blakey’s Moanin’.