May 08
After 50 Years, Will Quality Management Shoot Down minnesota review?
crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com
A cultural-studies institution declines to “do more with less.”
Founded in 1960, the minnesota review has long served as a leading outlet for literary fiction and poetry, and, under Jeffrey Williams’ editorship since 1992, established itself as a foremost outlet for cultural-studies scholarship and reflection about the increasingly sorry state of the profession under managerial domination. It has grown into a uniquely influential voice in literary and cultural studies. Every issue features essays by and interviews with leading intellectuals in a wide variety of disciplines.
In 2005, Jerry Graff called it “essential for keeping au courant with the best current thinking in the areas of literary and cultural theory.” In the same year, Paul Buhle called it “the standard-bearer for dissenting views on American literature and culture” that his students in the American Civilization program at Brown read with “near-religious fervor,” outlasting “nearly all of the journals of its type founded in the 1960s and 70s.” During Williams’ editorship, mr garnered more mentions in the Chronicle of Higher Ed than any other academic journal.
But now the quality trolls at Carnegie Mellon, one of the most aggressively “well-managed” institutions in the country, with every tub truly on its own bottom, threatens the survival of this venerable humanities institution with the ceaseless renewal of the doltish mantra to “do more with less.”
Continue reading "After 50 Years, Will Quality Management Shoot Down minnesota review?"Permanent link • (3) Comments
Talking Pathetic Fallacy Blues, a.k.a. Gary
And here I was, so sure Lawrence’s post would be about that scene in Willingham’s Jack of Fables in which Jack meets the Pathetic Fallacy, a morose, balding entity capable of bringing things to anthropomorphic life - who wants to be known as ‘Gary’, or possibly ‘Lance’.
Permanent link • (2) Comments
May 07
Chicago Grads Launch Culture-Struggle From Below
crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com
“We theorize utopias and live a life of slaves.
All for an ounce of prestige…and some letters on our graves."
In 2004, the Bush mob’s infamous executive arrogance in the Brown decision jammed the brakes on the organizing of graduate student employees at private universities (previously green-lighted by a bipartisan unanimous NLRB decision consistent with the law governing grad employees at public institutions, affirming the victory of GSOC-UAW at NYU).
Despite the setback, organizing is once more on the front burner at private universities in the U.S., including by committed, activist grad employees at the University of Chicago, outraged by an unfair stipend arrangement and by some of the lowest wages for teaching in the country (as low as $1500 per quarter). As a result of graduate employee agitation, commonly through collective bargaining, 3/4 of university employers pay for graduate employee health insurance; the University of Chicago does not. Among the graduate employee organizers that I met there last month was one who was funding his degree by working for his department chair as a gardener.
Continue reading "Chicago Grads Launch Culture-Struggle From Below"Permanent link • (1) Comments
May 06
Talking Pathetic Fallacy Blues
Something that takes up again the theme of popular music, and something posted earlier: Paul Rodriguez, commenting on Rohan’s post about lit crit on or about the spherical public, made a distinction that caught my attention, between “criticism of style” and “criticism of content.” Now I might have misunderstood what was meant, but it brought me back to my travails in grad school, in particular suffering through some courses I thought were overly inflected toward cultural studies. The problem, I thought, was that we were reading books solely for the interestingness of their content and not for the interestingness of their style, for what they were talking about, not for how they said it. For example, if one took how Iola Leroy was written and made it about some Philadelphia lawyer’s family of the same period, the book would be utterly unreadable.
This kind of feeling helped me feel sorrier for myself, which is very important for some graduate students. But some time later, I got to thinking more, and things got more complicated. The specific object that complicated things was John LeCarré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. After completing my fourth reading of the book, this time with the express intent of evaluating whether or not it was a good book, that is, one that couldn’t be pigeon-holed as genre fiction, and finding that it was really that good, it suddenly occurred to me that my judgment was compromised because I really liked the content of the book. I liked a whole lot what the book was talking about, spies skulking about Europe, cerebral emotionally disaffected males, etc. etc. So who was I to talk down someone else’s reading for content? & I could list off other examples, such as Raymond Chandler & the Los Angeles of the 30’s he conjures. Heck, even Ulysses interests me for its content, the sense it gives of exposing hundreds of hidden details in the life of the city.
So it would seem difficult to extricate style and content. A more recent case exposes the problem yet again, Nick Tosche’s Where the Dead Voices Gather.
Continue reading "Talking Pathetic Fallacy Blues"Permanent link • (16) Comments
Authentic Frontier Gibberish
[Title ref: not that you need it]. The frontier in this case is the 1960s, which was a motherfucker of a decade that knew where it was at. Or so I hear. Continuing the haphazard process of transferring my numerous CDs to jpg format so as to bung them on my MP3 player, I unearthed Vintage: the Very Best of Moby Grape, which I hadn’t listened to for ages. Now it goes without saying that Moby Grape were excellent. They were simply excellent. But one of the nice things about the Vintage best-of is the way it includes not just variants and demos and things, but snippets of in-studio conversation. For example, here is producer David Rubinson speaking to drummer Don Stevenson by way of asking him to have another go at ‘Fall on You’ (from the band’s superb 1967 debut album);
Don would you do me one favour, just for me? Play that rhythm that you play in the bridge all the way through the tune. Dum tackum, coomcoom tackum, coomcoom tack--Just try that. Right? You know what I mean? Try driving from the top to the bottom man. Just make the cuts. Alright? Because it lifts right off the ground in the bridge, man, and there’s a reason for it. You get into a groove and it drives like a motherfucker and that’s where it’s at ... Alright! From the top! Ba-pa-ba-pa-ba-pa that’s where it’s at!
I suppose it’s the sense that we’ve eavesdropping on actual unguarded 1960s-chatter that makes me like this so much. They really spoke like that. If I wrote a character from the 60s who said something like ‘you get into a groove and it drives like a motherfucker and that’s where it’s at’ I’d be ridiculed. Yet it turns out that that truly was where their groove was at. Vintage indeed.
Permanent link • (24) Comments
May 04
Nussbaum on Philosophy does Shakespeare
Martha Nussbaum reviews three Shakespeare books in The New Republic. She sets up three criteria early in the article:
To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher’s study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare’s plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what?
A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, does poorly on all three counts. Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays, does better, but not much: “McGinn does not offer anything subtle or new; he just identifies familiar philosophical themes that figure in the plays. The impression conveyed is that Shakespeare has gotten a good grade in Phil 101, with McGinn as his professor and his superior in understanding. This is a terrible way to approach Shakespeare’s complexity.”
Nussbaum then goes on to praise Stanley Cavell’s work on Shakespeare by way of getting to the third book under review, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama, by Tzachi Zamir. Cavell scores high on her first two criteria, but not the third. Zamir scores well on all three.
Permanent link • (26) Comments
I Remember The Way That You Smiled
Y’know, they just down make callow, ironic folk-hop for 20-something white hipsters like they used to. At least that’s one theory. From a Pitchfork review of the Deluxe reissue of Beck’s Odelay:
From the nervy opening chords of “Devil’s Haircut” (based on the garage-rock classic “I Can Only Give You Everything") to the signature sax riff of “The New Pollution” (lovingly pilfered from forgotten tenor player Joe Thomas’s “Venus"), Odelay is the album every record-diving MPC-phile wants to make. Though the LP was a huge commercial success, its sound was never successfully equaled by savvy opportunists. Chalk it up to the increasingly complicated legalities of sampling, as Beck explained in a 2005 interview: “Back [on Odelay] it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now it’s prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70% of the song and $50,000.” And, of course, it’s the little lifts - the sex-ed dialogue on “Where It’s At”, the snippet of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony #8 in B Minor” on “High 5”, the dozens (hundreds?) of unique drum hits and perfectly placed sonic scribbles - that makes Odelay such a deep and engaging listen even after all the headphone sessions and Best Album of the 90s accolades. Tellingly, when Beck and the Dust Brothers tried to recreate their signature style on 2005’s Guero they couldn’t pull it off, inadvertently reinforcing Odelay’s lasting appeal in the process.
This is interesting. Could it really be true that lawyers killed that signature mid-90’s alt-sampling sound? Or is Beck making excuses for the fact that Guero was so-so? If so, chalk up another loss in the IP wars. And, once again, it would seem to be economically self-defeating for the greedy rent-seekers. It’s obviously stupid to insist on pricing your half-second horn blares right out of the market.
I happen to have been listening to Odelay on the nice headphones, noodling around with Photoshop. That’s a satisfying combination.
Permanent link • (4) Comments
May 02
Time to Make the Sausages
Some Friday links: Iron Man gets good reviews in NYTimes, Salon, and Slate, while Times readers talk about their favorite action heroes.
Over at Language Log we learn that “general abstract nonsense” and “logical abstract nonsense” are terms of art, with the latter a subfield of the former. Unlike “Theory,” as the term is sometimes used at The Valve, these are not terms of opprobrium; rather the opposite. Only the cool mathematical kids dabble in varieties of abstract nonsense.
Meanwhile Larval Subjects has hosted a long discussion on the subject of the difficult style, that style whose difficulty is offered up as a necessary means to the higher truth. Sinthome doesn’t buy it; Kotsko has coined a term, “Academic Stockholm Syndrome." A good time was had by all. (Think of it as counterpoint to Holbo on argument.)
For those interested in historicizing and culturally situating the neural sciences, Pink Tentacle has published pictures from an early 19th century Japanese anatomy treatise. Here’s the brain:
(Hat tip to Of Two Minds.)
Over at Scienceblogs, Jonah Lehrer (Proust Was a Neuroscientist) has a post about Literature, Psychology and the Elites. He’s bouncing off a post by Razib (of Gene Expression) that concludes:
Why does any of this matter? For one, I think that it is somewhat peculiar that many of us find fiction from the past more engaging than popular contemporary works. Aupelius’ Golden Ass gets my attention; most contemporary fiction does not. I am arguing here that this is partly due to the fact that in the past those who read copiously were, on average, much more like me than they were like the typical human. Not only were readers by and large men (usually of some means and comfort), but they were often also disproportionately eggheads who were eccentric by their nature. How many elite scholars were there such as Claudius who were not attracted to the public life of politics and do not appear in the annals of history? With the printing press, cheaper paper, and the rise of mass literacy, things changed, the distribution of taste shifted. And so did the distribution of genres.
So am I full of crap?
Well, is he? Enquiring minds want to know.
Permanent link • (9) Comments
April 30
Some Uneducated Speculations on the “The African Novel” in Tanzania
When I was in Arusha, Tanzania--doing other things--I greedily purchased the few African novels that were available for purchase. This meant frequenting bookstores that sold novels to two very distinct markets: novels for white people and novels for Tanzanian students. I feel safe in saying that the comparatively high level printing, binding, and prices of the former pretty much limited those books to tourist and expatriate buyers (or were certainly printed with that market in mind), while the very specific pedagogical function of the latter confined their relevance to a similarly particular sub-section of the Tanzanian population: young people still in school. In the first category, you had both canonical English literature--penguin editions of D.H. Lawrence and so forth--and literary supplements to the tourist industry, stuff like this, with books like Out of Africa and Green Hills of Africa straddling the gap. The second market was for novels used as textbooks, a mixed bag which I’ll look at in a moment. I was therefore an eccentric purchaser, poorly served by either marketing strategy: I was in search of an object, “the African novel,” which hardly exists as such in the local commercial consciousness.
Continue reading "Some Uneducated Speculations on the “The African Novel” in Tanzania"Permanent link • (1) Comments
Let’s You and Him Fight
David Crystal is a gem! (Google says I’m the first one to make that terribly obvious joke online. I win the internets!) I’ve just finished David Crystal’s The Fight for English, my first go at one of his books. Mention at Language Log had gotten me started, but when I told a friend about it, he was surprised I hadn’t read any before. Now I’m surprised too. Crystal is entertaining and informative, taking a dry subject and making it into a juicy story.
But this newness for me goes beyond Crystal. Only in the last few years have I been reading what linguists have to say about grammar, mostly on the internet, with Language Log being a central source. In real life I am an adjunct composition teacher, one with a higher than average emphasis on sentence quality. To riff on Gertrude Stein, writing is about sentences and paragraphs. But I’ve had to train myself in the details, to improve my own understanding, since I had no real training in this stuff, other than what I learned in French and German classes, and to improve my explanations to the students. Just what am I asking them to do?
The linguistic perspective on these questions has thrown me a bit. I had the world neatly divided into dries and wets, fusty prescriptivists like Safire and Kirkpatrick, and loosey goosey descriptivists, liberation theologists of grammar. And I suspected I was a bit on the fusty side. Linguistics blew this binary up. Linguistics is dry. Perhaps not politically dry, but it’s rigorous, even tediously so. Nothing I’ve read could be called hippy thought. Yet it’s thoroughly descriptivist, or at least it seems, in its online manifestations, to take supreme delight in skewering prescriptivism.
Of course the situation is still more complicated than this. If it’s a fight, I’m going to have to take more beatings before I start to wise up.
Permanent link • (9) Comments
April 29
Racism, Censorship, Cartoons
The New York Times recently had an article on 11 Warner Brothers cartoons “that have not been shown in authorized release since 1968,” but they keep showing up on YouTube, and keep getting removed. Warner Brothers has kept them under wraps because it regards them as racially offensive. As far as I know, I’ve only seen one of them, Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs. I think it’s hilarious, a superb cartoon, and racist. I also think it should be reissued so that those who want to see it, may do so.
But I’m not here to argue those questions. Rather, I just want to create some pointers to the most recent round of discussions on this matter. Here’s a link to Cartoon Brew where at least 49 comments have been made so far, many of them having links to other remarks. Michael Barrier has posted comments on Coal Black by several several people. I find it instructive to read through these comments, which are all over the map, and wonder. What’s happening here?
I would like to think that critical developments of the last three decades given us useful tools for thinking about the aesthetic and cultural issues presented by these cartoons.
Permanent link • (1) Comments
April 28
Edward Champion on Sven Birkerts and the Frightening Fitzroya
Permanent link • (6) Comments
ALSC & The Valve
Does anyone with a longer history at The Valve (or anyone else, of course) have any comments on this piece from Inside Higher Ed on the current state of the ALSC--and of The Valve?
Exactly why the group has struggled is a matter of debate. For some of its founders and leaders, the problem lies in the fact that the association has largely abandoned one of its two original missions, continuing to serve as a forum for genuine literary criticism but generally ceasing to engage in the culture wars as it had early on, to “work for change in the profession, and to contest the influence of the destructive forces that had brought it to this low state,” as John Ellis, the group’s founding secretary/treasurer and a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said in a letter last year to the association’s then-president, Morris Dickstein, a professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.
Ellis and other critics saw signs of the triumph of what he called “quietists” over “activists” in many trends within the association: conference programs featuring sessions on “eco-feminism” and “A Case for Green Cultural Studies,” a one-sidedness in the association’s main journal, Literary Imagination, and the “mainstream” approach of the ALSC-sponsored Web site, the Valve, among other things.
Permanent link • (21) Comments
April 27
Organizing Abraham Lincoln
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
An award-winning play about organizing grad employees opens May 3 in Philadelphia.
ADMINISTRATOR: Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste. I go by many names. Doctor, Boss, Sir, Chairman, Gentleman, Scholar, Dean, Pillar of the Community, Cheap Bastard, but you can call me the Administrator. --Joe Camhi, “Screw U, a play in one act” performed at Portland Community College
One of the things that many folks don’t grasp about the shift to administrative domination of the university is that it has been intentionally accomplished, by a culture-war from above. If you read the truly appalling discourse of university administration, you find that it long ago moved to an emphasis upon transforming organizational culture--targeting faculty culture for change and aggressive re-engineering. This administrative movement shot into high gear in the mid 1970s after anti-union labor economist Clark Kerr and his pet Carnegie Commission gazed with trepidation at the then-rising faculty union movement. Just as the 1960s had been the “decade of student power,” Kerr wrote, the rising culture of faculty solidarity seemed certain to make the 1970s the “decade of faculty power.” What we need, Kerr suggested, is a “management science of reaction.”
And boy, did he get what he wanted. Administrations have succeeded hugely in substituting for faculty values their sick culture of competition, quality engineering, market responsiveness, and mission-centeredness--academic capitalism, in the indispensable formulation of Leslie, Slaughter and Rhoades. The studies I’ve read conclude that university administration has achieved a profound “corporatization of the self” in most faculty, despite occasional “concrete opposition” in faculty institutions, chiefly unions.
Continue reading "Organizing Abraham Lincoln"Permanent link • (1) Comments
Literary Criticism in/and the Public Sphere
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. (Walt Whitman)
It is a commonplace of the history of literary criticism that the character of criticism changed when and because criticism entered the academy and became professionalized, somewhere around the turn of the 20th century (and ever after). The nature and consequences of this change have been examined and re-examined often over the years, in books such as John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969), Morris Dickstein’s Double Agent: The Critic and Society (1992), Geoffrey Hartman’s Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars (1991), Christopher Knight’s Uncommon Readers: Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, George Steiner, and the Tradition of the Common Reader (2003), or the essay collection Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet (1998)--to name just a few.
Brian McRae’s Addison and Steele Are Dead: The English Department, Its Canon, and the Professionalization of Literary Criticism (1990) is certainly among the more lively and provocative books I’ve read on this topic. As his title suggests, McRae frames his consideration of English departments as professional and institutional spaces with arguments about what features in the work of Addison and Steele “render it useless to critics housed in English departments"--not, as he is quick to add, that “their works are without value, but rather, that they are not amenable to certain procedures that English professors must perform” (11). The short version of his story is that professional critics require difficult, complex, ambiguous texts to do their jobs (e.g. 146); the “techniques of simplicity” that characterize Addison and Steele propel them, as a result, out of the canon. As he develops his argument, McRae offers an interesting overview of the 19th-century and then 20th-century critical reception of Addison and Steele. He explains the Victorians’ admiration for these 18th-century predecessors largely in terms of the different understanding that prevailed about the relationship of literature, and thus of the literary critic, to life. Rightly, I’d say (based on my own work on 19th-century literary criticism), he sees as a central Victorian critical premise that literature and criticism are public activities, that their worth is to be discussed in terms of their effects on readers; hence the significance attached, he argues, to sincerity as well as affect. Especially key to McRae’s larger argument is his observation that the 19th-century writers were not “academicians” or “specialists in a field” (89):
Continue reading "Literary Criticism in/and the Public Sphere"For Thackeray and his contemporaries, literature is a public matter, a matter to be lectured upon before large audiences, a matter to be given importance because of its impact upon morals and emotions. For the present-day academic critic, literature no longer is a public matter but rather is a professional matter, even more narrowly, a departmental matter. The study of literature has become a special and separate discipline--housed in colleges of arts and sciences along with other special and separate disciplines. The public has narrowed to a group of frequently recalcitrant students whose need for instruction in English composition--not in English literature--justifies the existence of the English department. (92)
Permanent link • (17) Comments