About Amardeep
Amardeep Singh is Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University. His book, Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction, was published in 2006 by Cambridge Scholars Press. He has also published essays in journals like Wasafiri, Semeia, and Himal Southasian.
Email Address: amardeep@gmail.com
Website: http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/blog.html
Posts by Amardeep
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Nose-Picking Is Encouraged (Teaching Notes on “Ulysses")
[Below is a modified version of a wrap-up lecture I used in an undergraduate class last week, closing out our unit on Ulysses. The class is titled “James Joyce and Modern Ireland,” and it is aimed at senior English majors.]
When I was an undergraduate at Cornell, I took a class on Ulysses with a senior Joyce scholar who, in a pretty egregious example of a pedagogical faux pas, “required” us to buy two of his own books on Joyce and modernism from the bookstore. He also told us, via the course description, that he expected us to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before the beginning of the term, which none of us ended up doing. I bought both of the professor’s books and never read them (recently, I finally threw them out). I also didn’t read Portrait of the Artist until around the time of my Ph.D exams several years later; my loss, for waiting so long.
Though my reading of Joyce was a revelatory and entrancing experience that fall, the class itself was somewhat of a disaster. For one thing, the in-class dynamic was quite tense, particularly around questions of gender in Joyce’s novel. As a rather radicalized, “politically correct” college student of the early 1990s, I was offended by Stephen Dedalus’ tortured relationship to women, a problem my professor wasn’t interested in (I didn’t have the tools to see that Joyce disagreed with Stephen as well). I was also bored by Joyce’s “mythic method,” and didn’t really know what to make of the dense grid of literary allusions and parodies in the novel. Early on, I got into some heated arguments with the professor in class, and then retreated into defiant (Stephen Dedalus-like) silence as the semester continued. By the end of the term, I had silently vowed that Ulysses was not going to be my “thing”; I ended up writing my senior thesis the following year on Salman Rushdie, and worked with another professor, who had taught me, brilliantly and engagingly, Borges, Barthes, and Octavia Butler.
Fifteen years later, the roles are reversed. Is it possible to do Ulysses with undergraduates, and get it right? That is to say, without boring them and overwhelming them with an endless proliferation of mythology, religion, and authorial hagiography? (The people who come to heap praise on James Joyce may not realize that they are in fact unwittingly burying him: Death of the Author by deification. Or should I say, deifecation?)
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Friday, March 28, 2008
William Deresiewicz in “The Nation,” And a “Long Sunday” Blogger’s Response
Start with William Deresiewicz in The Nation, for what ails the English department, according to him (via English @ Emory).
It’s been said many times that English enrollments have declined nationally because of “theory,” but that’s been shown, I think conclusively, not to be true. (A starting point might be this 2003 ADE report (PDF), which shows that the biggest decline in the number of English majors happened in the 1970s and 80s, though there was some recovery from the losses in the early 1990s—notably, the peak of the culture wars moment. But the ADE’s report also suggests there’s been a general decline in the Arts & Sciences as a whole; more and more students are getting degrees in other parts of the university, such as engineering, business, education, and the life sciences. A much smaller proportion of college degrees now are B.A.s than used to be. In short, the problem is not the turn to “theory” or the “epochal loss of confidence” Deresiewicz talks about, but a structural change in American higher education.)
Then, proceed to Ads Without Products, for CR’s response. The most striking observation for me had to do with the frame—what does it mean that Deresiewicz is publishing this essay in The Nation?
This move on Deresiewicz’s part feels like consummate culture wars base-touching, like he’s filling out the form that a venue like The Nation require those who would write on the literary humanities to complete before proceeding to other issues and arguments. (Why The Nation, ostensibly a left magazine, would implicitly condone or even require this sort of move is a long, long story, and one that is bound up with both micro-histories of the long standing academy vs. grub street turf war that has been going on in NYC for a long time as well as macro-histories of the anti-intellectualism of the American journalistic left… More on this another day…) (link)
Obviously, one wants to hear the “more on this” part, but there’s still quite a bit to chew on here as is.
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Thursday, March 13, 2008
A Little on Poet Alan Shapiro
I first learned about Alan Shapiro’s poetry a couple of years ago, when someone suggested I read his book Song & Dance. I loved it, and then when a colleague suggested Tantalus in Love, I ate that up as well. This spring, I decided try and teach Tantalus in Love in my “Introduction to the English Major” course at Lehigh, along with a couple of essays by Shapiro (including this moving memoir essay, from Virginia Quarterly Review, about which I have more to say below).
Earlier in his career, Shapiro was included in the movement known as the “new formalism,” where poets started to reconsider the classical forms, and come to use more rhyme, meter, and formal structures in their poetry. Shapiro was somewhat ambivalent about being described that way (by Robert Richman, in the conservative/reactionary journal The New Criterion), and Shapiro wrote an essay for Critical Inquiry called “The New Formalism” (Critical Inquiry 14, August 1987: JSTOR link), where he discussed his ambivalence about the movement.
Yet I am anything but cheered [to be referred to as a New Formalist]. And not because I don’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member, though this may be a part of it; but because I suspect that what Mr. Richman hails as a development may in fact be nothing but a mechanical reaction, and that the new formalists, in rejecting the sins of their experimental fathers may end up merely repeating the sins of their New Critical grandfathers, resuscitating the stodgy, overrefined conventions of the ‘fifties poem,’ conventions which were of course sufficiently narrow and restrictive to provoke rebellion in the first place. Any reform, carried to uncritical extremes by less talents who ignore rather than try to assimilate the achievements of their predecessors, will itself require reformation. If James Wright, say, or Robert Bly, produced more than their fair share of imitators, if they even imitate themselves much of the time, they nonetheless have written poems all of us can and ought to learn from. Maybe we have had too much of the ‘raw’ in recent years. But the answer to the raw is not the overcooked.
This strikes me as right on the specifics, but also worth considering as a general way of thinking about periodization in literary studies (not to mention, literary theory). Later in the essay, Shapiro dismisses the argument that form reflects a poet’s ideological inclinations (i.e., if one were to say the New Formalists, who emerged in the 1980s, were in effect practicing “Reaganomics” poetry), and he reminds us that T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound pioneered modernist free verse even as they espoused authoritarian politics.
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
Blogging and Peer Review—Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Experiment
In the January 22 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey Young writes about an experiment being conducted by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a Communications professor at UC-San Diego. Wardrip-Fruin is publishing segments of his book, Expressive Processing, on a blog, with the hope that feedback from commenters might be as effective as traditional peer-review. The book is to be formally published by MIT Press, who are encouraging the experiment, though they are also continuing with a traditional peer-review process as well. Wardrip-Fruin is using the CommentPress feature designed by the Institute for the Future of the Book.
Wardrip-Fruin has started putting sections of his book online at Grand Text Auto. The first chunk (section 1.1) is here. Wardrip-Fruin describes his project as follows:
Luckily, quite a number of books have already been written about digital literature, and many more have been written about digital media more generally. However, almost all of these have focused on what the machines of digital media look like from the outside: their output. Sometimes the output is considered as an artifact, and interpreted in ways we associate with literary scholarship and art history. Sometimes the output is seen in relation to the audience and the wider culture, using approaches from fields like education and ethnography. And there are, of course, a variety of other perspectives. But, regardless of perspective, writings on digital media almost all ignore something crucial: the actual processes that make digital media work, the computational machines that make digital media possible.
On one hand, there is nothing wrong with this. Output-focused approaches have brought many valuable insights for those who seek to understand and create digital media. But, on the other hand, it leaves a big gap.
This book is my attempt to help bridge the gap. (link)
After perusing sections 1.2 and 1.3 of Wardrip-Fruin’s book, I must admit I’m not sure I get it. What Wardrop-Fruin describes as “processes” seem to me to be mainly programming artifacts. Why not work out a theory of video game narrative using the logic and idiom of the object-oriented programming languages that are used to create the video games in the first place? (Classes, objects, methods, etc.) But again, I should concede that this is not really my thing, theory-wise or thematically.
Wardrip-Fruin is certainly not the first person to blog a book in progress (see Siva Vaidhyanathan, for instance), but he may be the first humanities/social sciences academic to do so. Do people know of other examples?
And of course: one wonders whether and how something like this might work with a book on a specifically literary (or literary theory-ish) topic. Wardrip-Fruin’s experiment seems to be sustainable partly because he is writing about a digital media theme, and is likely to find readers who are already densely involved in the internet; that is not so much the case for scholarly communities in literary studies.
Incidentally, I brought up an idea for a different kind of experiment in blogging/peer review last year, and got a somewhat mixed response from Valve readers.
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Thursday, October 25, 2007
China Miéville, not a fan of Libertarianism
Via 3QD, China Miéville has a biting critique of libertarianism in In These Times. It’s an excerpt from a forthcoming book:
Libertarianism is by no means a unified movement. As many of its advocates proudly stress, it comprises a taxonomy of bickering branches—minarchists, objectivists, paleo- and neolibertarians, agorists, et various al.—just like a real social theory. Claiming a lineage with post-Enlightenment classical liberalism, as well as in some cases with the resoundingly portentous blatherings of Ayn Rand, all of its variants are characterized, to differing degrees, by fervent, even cultish, faith in what is quaintly termed the “free” market, and extreme antipathy to that vaguely conceived bogeyman, “the state,” with its regulatory and fiscal powers.
Above all, they recast their most banal avarice—the disinclination to pay tax—as a principled blow for political freedom. Not content with existing offshore tax shelters, multimillionaires and property developers have aspired to build their own. For each such rare project that sees (usually brief) life, there are many unfettered by actual existence, such as Laissez-Faire City, a proposed offshore tax haven inspired by a particularly crass and gung-ho libertarianism, that generated press interest in the mid-’90s only to collapse in infighting and bad blood; or New Utopia, an intended sea-based libertarian micro-nation in the Caribbean that degenerated with breathtaking predictability into nonexistence and scandal. . . .
A parable from seasteading’s past goes some way in explaining. In 1971, millionaire property developer Michael Oliver attempted to establish the Republic of Minerva on a small South Pacific sand atoll. It was soon off-handedly annexed by Tonga, and, in a traumatic actualized metaphor, allowed to dissolve back into the sea. To defeat the predatory outreach of nations and tides, it is clearly not enough to be offshore: True freedom floats. (link)
Though he is indeed merciless in slicing up libertarianism for dinner, Miéville is nevertheless interested in one of the recurring leitmotifs in much libertarian thought—the idea that true liberty must inevitably be landless, stateless, and therefore possibly afloat (in outer space, or at sea—same thing). The idea of the “floating utopia” is one he explored in his novel The Scar, which I briefly attempted to interpret here. In Miéville’s rendering, of course, a lived utopia is always going to be perilously close to its opposite.
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Wednesday, August 15, 2007
“The Good Soldier”—A Bad Novel
Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) is considered a classic of sorts from the early modernist period. W.H. Auden thought Ford was a great novelist (he had particularly strong praise for Parade’s End, which deals with World War I), and so did Graham Greene. From what I can tell, The Good Soldier, which is not a war novel, but a novel about adultery in the British aristocracy, is still widely taught in college classes on British modernism (see here, here, and here); it’s also widely cited in the scholarly literature. But it shouldn’t be—this thing is a mess. (Or more politely, “perhaps it’s time for a reassessment”?)
One of the oft-repeated chestnuts about The Good Soldier stems from Ford’s early relationship as an editor and collaborator of Joseph Conrad. Ford, it is said, aims to use a version of Joseph Conrad’s nested narrators with their various, idiosyncratic approaches to the “truth.” But if Ford is aiming for a Conradian effect, it’s poorly done, to the point of unrecognizability. The Good Soldier has only one narrator, and the multiple points of view that emerge in the text are never fully explained (in Conrad, by contrast, the different narrators are usually in dialogue with one, primary narrator). The narrator in Ford’s novel at once knows implausibly much about what his friends and family were thinking at various moments, and far too little—it seems unthinkable that he could be such a poor judge of character (more on that below). Moreover, instead of creating a sense of suspense for the reader, the unraveling of the story merely creates confusion, as the story slides back and forth chronologically without leading to new insights on why the characters do what they do in the end.
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Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Idea for Discussion: An Academic Blog Review
This is a variant of an idea John Holbo has mentioned a few times over the years. But while (as I recall), Holbo has posited blogging as a radical alternative to the old peer-reviewed journal system, I’ve been thinking there might be a need to have a system that is more formal than “whatever, it’s all good, do your thing” academic blogging, but which nevertheless preserves some of the fun and liberatory aspects of writing and publishing on the internet.
The idea came to me as I’ve begun preparing a tenure file at my current university, acutely aware that my blog writing cannot be considered “peer-reviewed” publication by any current standard. Even the rewards of occasional Boing-Boing-ish popularity (my post on “Early Bengali Science Fiction” from awhile ago, for instance) do not help, since that is really popularity rather than review. But why not institute a review of some sort? This was also, incidentally, a question raised at the MLA by Gwynn DuJardin: how can blogs be made to “count” as part of the academic process? It came out awkwardly at the time, and at the panel where it was first asked, Michael Berube swatted it down pretty summarily: they don’t count. Yes, but couldn’t they, if there were some kind of evaluation process?
My idea is to have a system of academic blog reviewing, where people self-select individual blog posts they’ve written for review by others, perhaps using a combination of Technorati tags and emailed links. The reviewers could consist of fellow bloggers (credentials no bar) as well as non-blogging academics in a given discipline, who would pubish their reviews on a central site. The reviewers could choose to be “onymous” or pseudonymous (as long as it is a consistent pseudonym, and contact information is available to site admins), and be asked to write a significant evaluation to the post in question (say, 250 words). Other reviewers and readers of the reviews could also evaluate the reviewers’ comments, as a way of maintaining standards for reviewers. Troll-like, unfair reviews would be deleted, and their authors denied reviewing privileges.
Reviewers aren’t that different from commenters in the current blog architecture, but their purpose in writing in my system is primarily evaluative—the goal isn’t necessarily to have a conversation. Just as in formal journals, reviewers can recommend revisions or corrections. However, in contrast to formal academic journals, the reviewer doesn’t recommend publication or rejection—since what they’re evaluating has already been published on a blog. Instead, they might recommend readers to check out the post in question—as in a “Digg.”
Though for many people the idea of a formal-ish evaluative process for blog writing will sound really depressing (or just boring), for those of us who are interested in blogging as an extension of our academic projects and research it could actually be pretty helpful. I want to stress that the idea here isn’t so much that people will stop writing bloggily, or only be able to submit 5000+ word posts for review; indeed, one profitable way to think of an academic blog review is as a space to “publish” shorter work, or things that cross disciplinary boundaries, or that might just be a promising riff on something. Another hope is that blog writing, even under a review process, would remain jargon-free; people would continue to presume that their readers are essentially educated lay-readers—not narrow period specialists. (That last stipulation might well be debatable.)
Even with review, it’s unlikely that one would ever put blog posts down under “peer-reviewed publications” on one’s CV. But perhaps academics could soon introduce a new category: “Peer-reviewed Writing Published on the Internet.”
I’m initially interested in a blog post review system for literary scholarship, but there’s no reason why other disciplines couldn’t also work with it. Indeed, the larger the range of disciplines included, the more likely it is to be accepted by the system as a whole.
This is admittedly just a preliminary sketch. What do you think? Is it workable? What are some of the problems you see with this idea? Are there ways to make it better?
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Tuesday, March 13, 2007
The Sea, The Sea: “Ulysses” vs. “To the Lighthouse”
Recently, in my Modernism class, I gave students two brief passages relating to the sea to discuss, one from Joyce’s Ulysses, and the other from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The similarities in the theme of the two passages helps provide an anchor for comparison; I’m curious to know what readers of The Valve think.
Here’s a passage from the end of Section I of Joyce’s Ulysses ("Telemachus"):
Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.
A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’ song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love’s bitter mystery.
Where now?
And here’s Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:
Continue reading "The Sea, The Sea: “Ulysses” vs. “To the Lighthouse”"So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. A steamer far out at sea had drawn in the air a great scroll of smoke which stayed there curving and circling decoratively, as if the air were a fine gauze which held things and kept them softly in its mesh, only gently swaying them this way and that. And as happens sometimes when the weather is very fine, the cliffs looked as if they were conscious of the cliffs, as if they signaled to each other some message of their own. For sometimes quite close to the shore, the Lighthouse looked this morning in the haze an enormous distance away.
‘Where are they now?’ Lily thought, looking out to sea. Where was he, that very old man who had gone past her silently, holding a brown paper parcel under his arm? The boat was in the middle of the bay.
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Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Peter Nicholson on Auden, and against the “Poetic”
The Auden centenary is coming up, and Peter Nicholson has posted his poem, “Asking Auden,” from 1984 at 3 Quarks Daily (seems we’re in a linking-to-3QD mood over here). He’s also posted a short essay with some reflections on the function of criticism, specifically poetry criticism. The highlight for me is the following:
There is a problem specific to poetry: mistaken thinking about poetry by the general public. Misuse of the word ‘poetic’ is so common as to be beyond repair. Proper poetry dives into the world, takes in its multifariousness, its roughnesses and tragedies, its joy at beauty, even as the poet grabs on to the broken glass shards of the Muse’s patchy visitations. ‘Poetic’ is not another word for nice, kind, sedate, palatable. Between top-heavy pronouncements from various spots around the publishing globe and the general public’s indifference to the real poetic, falls the shadow, Cynara, of the individual writer’s efforts to get him or herself understood on a proper footing.
It’s true, as Robert Hughes said in Australia recently—a critic has to have a harsh side, otherwise all you get is blandout.That apart, critics will come in many guises. One will behave like Stalin, casting the unchosen to outer darkness. Another will gather in a sheaf of sensibilities with an almost creative zeal. A few imply they have read everything and therefore their commentaries come with an air of supernal wisdom. Nothing of the kind, of course. . . . Personally, I can’t think of any critics with whom I am in general agreement about literature or art. When reading all these people you can get an interesting perspective, learn new things about art and artists, enjoy the erudition, if worn lightly. However, in art, it is essential not to let others do the thinking for you. Perhaps that’s even more important with artists you admire and who write on art too. I often disagree with some of my favourite artists. Wagner seems misguided on all manner of subjects. ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’ and ‘All art is quite useless’ are two statements from Auden and Wilde that irritate me.(link)
(I had to look up “falls the shadow, Cynara". Did you?)
I like Nicholson’s general point here. While good criticism can be helpful and insightful, it’s almost never really “authoritative,” partly because even benchmark critics have their own spots of extreme idiosyncrasy, and partly because every reader brings an essentially unique combination of taste, experience, and intelligence to the text at hand.
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Friday, January 26, 2007
Virginia Woolf, in Winter
When a person is inside her room, surrounded by everyday objects, the sense of home anchors the self, and to some extent limits the free flow of imagination. But as one steps outside, in London, on a cold winter’s day, everything changes. Anything might make a good excuse; for Woolf, it’s a simple errand to go out and buy a pencil:
But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell–like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks. (Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting")
What follows is a good long wander, in which the very flaneur-ish superficiality of urban looking is celebrated. There are also some strange little bits, including a slightly unpleasant and offensive (but perhaps still insightful?) bit about a dwarf in a shoe store. Then follows a brief interlude in a used bookstore, and finally, the pencil is purchased in a little shop with bickering shopkeepers. Along the way, Woolf deconstructs the idea of the unified Self:
Yet it is nature’s folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience sake a man must be a whole. (Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting")
“For convenience sake a man must be a whole” is, of course, a way of saying there is no wholeness to speak of.
It really isn’t the same when you get into your car and turn on NPR. Revelations related to ontology and the pleasures of the dissolution of the self into urban anonymity tend not to occur with the same frequency. And cold days in January are, all too often, defined by the discourse of a number (i.e., 21 degrees) and the containing patter of the weather forecast; you have to jog yourself to try and remember to experience the thing itself, somehow.
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Monday, January 22, 2007
A Psychoanalyst in Turmoil
Amy Bloom has a review of a new book about an Indian psychoanalyst named Masud Khan in this weekend’s New York Times. Khan was born in Lahore in 1922, and moved to England to study at Oxford around 1944. He ended up having a successful career as a psychoanalyst, publishing several well-regarded books, and training extensively with the famous British psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott. But Khan also seems to have been seriously mentally unbalanced—among other things, he was an alcoholic, slept with several of his patients, and seems also to have become rather anti-Semitic in his old age (which is especially strange, considering his choice of profession). Bloom wants Linda Hopkins’s new biography of Khan to directly criticize him for these failings:
Hopkins, in her non-judgmental way, writes of this analysand only that it is “easy to assume she must be in denial about the harm done to her by Khan, but it is perhaps more honest to grope with the possibility that there may be some validity to her subjective experience.” It seems to me that it is not only his patients but his admirers, including his biographer, who may be struggling with some denial about the harm done by an alcoholic married analyst who initiated sex with female patients, encouraged affairs between patients, threatened patients who terminated treatment and abandoned those who did not meet his own emotional needs. (link)
Bloom certainly has a point when she insists that a person who was so abusive ought to be held to account—but I gather that Hopkins’s approach is to consider Khan himself as a patient, and as such, she wants to consider all the different aspects of his life symptomatically (and not morally). Since it’s impossible to decide where to stand simply from reading the review (and I haven’t had a chance to read the book itself yet), I poked around and found some interesting articles relating to Masud Khan online. Masud Khan may well be the worst psychoanalyst ever, but perhaps that is itself interesting. For those who are critical of psychoanalysis as a technique (i.e., as “pseudo-science"), there’s ample material here; even Winnicott comes off badly. But ironically, Khan is equally intriguing for those who like psychoanalysis—as he constitutes a particularly rich case study.
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Friday, January 19, 2007
“Sacred Games”: Two Reviewers Who Haven’t Finished the Book
There seems to be something about Vikram Chandra’s heavily-hyped, 900 page Bombay gangster novel, Sacred Games, that has led reviewers to publish evaluations before they’ve finished reading the book.
I can forgive Sven Birkerts for his essay in the Boston Globe. He writes about the publishing industry’s hype machine, and how a million dollar advance and a $300,000 publicity campaign are actually pretty discouraging for a serious reader. The essay is well-written, and the paragraph Birkerts devotes to the novel itself redeems the thing:
I’ve been reading every day, not quite finished, so the one-man jury on ultimate greatness is still out, but I can say that “Sacred Games” is moving right along. It’s working. Page after page it plucks me from the here and now, from the world governed by marketing mentalities, ruled by tasks and anxieties. I really am for long stretches in some phantasmagoric, confusing, reeking, corrupt, overheated, overpopulated elsewhere, a Mumbai of the mind, with characters who surprise me with their look and sound, their twists of behavior. How strange. It’s as if I’ve needed to go through this peculiar re-immersion to get to my turnaround, to remember—again—why I got into this game in the first place. It was out of love. (link)
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Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Richard Posner on Plagiarism; the Case of Yambo Ouloguem
Via the Literary Saloon, I learn that Richard Posner has a new book on plagiarism out, called The Little Book of Plagiarism. There are already some reviews, including the Louisville Courier-Journal (which includes an interesting tidbit: the University of Oregon has been accused of plagiarizing its plagiarism policy from Stanford University). The Times review, by Charles McGrath, is more thorough, partly because McGrath is also reviewing a scholarly book by Tilar Mazzeo, called Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period.
When McGrath gets into Mazzeo’s understanding of plagiarism at the end of the 18th century, things start to get interesting:
In style and methodology, Ms. Mazzeo’s new book is an academic wheezer, a retooled dissertation perhaps, but it’s also smart and insightful, and points out that 18th-century writers took a certain amount of borrowing for granted. What mattered was whether you were sneaky about it and, even more important, whether you improved upon what you took, by weaving it seamlessly into your own text and adding some new context or insight.
Interestingly, the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally recently defended Mr. McEwan in just this way, writing, “Fiction depends on a certain value-added quality created on top of the raw material, and that McEwan has added value beyond the original will, I believe, be richly demonstrated.” In the case of “Atonement,” the principle seems inarguable, but it’s also a slippery slope. You could argue that Kaavya Viswanathan improved upon the raw material of the Megan McCafferty novel she relied on so liberally, and yet no one is rushing to her defense. (link)
In short, in the early 19th century a certain amount of borrowing was taken for granted and even allowed, as long as it was well-concealed and accompanied by fresh insights and work—“value-added.” And today, while both the law concerning plagiarism and the ethos of originality are quite different (today plagiarism is generally seen as shameful), some of the same thinking is still used, especially when there are gray areas (as in the McEwan case).
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Speaking of gray areas, there are a number of them in the case of a famous plagiarist from the 1960s that I only recently learned about, the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem.
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Sunday, January 07, 2007
Putting the “Literary” in “Secularism” (and a little on James Wood)
So – my book is for sale in cloth in the UK. I’ve created an informational mini-blog about it here, and also posted the text of Chapter One, on which I would be happy to answer questions if any readers have the time or inclination.
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Getting my dissertation to book form was a tortuously difficult process. I had been given some suggestions from my committee at the time of my defense, but in various ways it seemed impossible to follow their advice for one reason or another. It didn’t help that my topic was secularism in modern fiction, an unconventional subject where there aren’t really many preexisting critical templates.
There has been a great deal of interesting social theory on the topic of secularism in particular published in recent years – Talal Asad, Jose Casanova, William Connelly, Charles Taylor, Bruce Robbins, Edward Said, and Gauri Viswanathan have all had interesting things to say about secularism and secularization in their work. But even people who teach literature (Said, Viswanathan, Robbins), when they address secularism, are addressing a broader concept of secularity – one that is oriented more to the idea of the intellectual in society than it is to literary form. Said’s famous idea of “secular criticism,” for instance, is an ethic of critical detachment, not in itself a critique of religious orthodoxies or institutions per se (that critique is left as presumed—too obvious to bother with, perhaps).
My dissertation consisted series of thematic readings and historical contexts I had worked hard on, but the conceptual rubric that tied those readings together had always seemed weak. I had never been able to satisfactorily answer a basic, and therefore glaring, question: why secularism in literature? What is it about the idea of literature (and the novel in particular) that makes it a unique space in which to chart the transition from an experience of the world shaped by religious belief to one in which human-derived concepts are central? The question of the role of literary form was the most urgent one I had to address as I reworked the dissertation, and for several years I was effectively stalled.
Then, sometime in the summer of 2004, I came across James Wood’s book The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, and while the various essays in the book weren’t historically grounded enough to offer a comprehensive answer (most of the essays were initially published as book reviews), Wood gave me the conceptual jump-start I needed to reframe the project and identify a course that would lead to a more finished text.
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Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Side Effects of the MLA’s Move to January
According to Inside Higher Ed, the Delegate Assembly has voted to change the date of the MLA, from the last week of December to the first week of January. The change in schedule will not take effect until around 2010.
Obviously this will mean some general logistical changes. Plane fare might be a little cheaper, for instance. And affiliate groups, many of which hold parallel conferences alongside MLA, will have to think creatively to work out scheduling. Inside Higher Ed doesn’t give specifics, but as I understand it the dates are not going to be as fixed as they currently are; instead, the conference will be tethered to the first Thursday after January 1.
But we can expect some more ‘attitudinal’ changes too. Allow me to speculate:
1. Take California. First of all, schools on the quarter system often start on January 2 or 3, and people from those schools are quite possibly not going to be able to come to MLA for the full four days—or at all. Many quarter system schools are located on the west coast, though there are alsp schools elsewhere in the country that also use it (the University of Chicago, for instance). Since folks especially on the west coast (though not those from the semesterly Berkeley) may skip the MLA as a result of the change, the cultural tone of the conference might become even more east coast/upper midwest than it already is. Then again, since so many people who teach at those places are from the east coast originally, it may not really make much of a difference in terms of ‘culture’ if MLA were to lose them. In fact, I suspect the real change might be that the regional MLA for the Pacific schools (PAMLA) might become more important, especially for job interviews.
Alternatively, we might see a pattern of California, Oregon, and Washington people coming in just for a day—to give a talk, or do some interviews—and then heading back.
2. Mood change. Second, the general mood of the conference is likely to change. The end of December means the fall term is still very much in one’s mind: grading, various performance questions ("did I get enough writing done this year?")—not to mention the often emotionally-disorienting holiday season. Though by December those of us teaching 14 week semesters are somewhat exhausted, the currently looming MLA forces you to turn it around and be brilliant (or at least, “brilliant") and energetically professional for a couple of days, even if you would strongly prefer to be on a beach somewhere warm, or at the very least locked up at home with Season 2 of some mindless TV show. Instead of the end-of-the-year, apocalyptic, resentful, but still somehow festive feel of the current MLA, a January MLA is likely to be more calmly proleptic—stoic lit crit “resolutions” for a new year, rather than excessive theoretical manifestoes of frustration directed at what has already passed.
3. Quality. Since people interviewing and giving talks at MLA currently tend to prepare for them in a rush in the last two weeks of December, it’s marginally possible that the quality of both job interviews and the papers presented at the conference will improve with an extra week.
4. Happy comparatists. Since the scholars who work on literature from other parts of the world—from Italy to India—are going to find it easier to travel to those places now (most people will have two full weeks off in December), participants in panels related to those literatures are likely to have a recent physical memory of visiting those places when they come to the conference. Comparatists will have that happy, “I was just speaking French with people in Paris, yesterday!” look on their faces. On the other hand, people traveling just before MLA might end up spending their entire time abroad worrying about job interviews and paper(s) needing to be written. All in all, however, I think the change will be a beneficial one.
5. No More “Kooky MLA” pieces in the Times. I think the change to January is also probably going to be the death-knell of the much-lamented “Wacky, Sex-Obsessed English Professors Are In Town This Week, and Their Papers Have Scandalous Titles That Will Amuse You" article that local newspapers often carry. While the end of December is a dead news week, the first week of January tends to be more lively. Most people—except for academics—are already back at the office, and editors will have bigger stories to assign. The MLA might come to seem more like other academic conventions. Which is to say, not particularly newsworthy.
Then again, the tradition of such articles might already be ending. This year, the only Philadelphia Inquirer coverage I could find was a rather non-sensationalist piece called “Poetry, Creative Writing are Hot," which focused on the modest uptick in the number of jobs listed this year. Susan Snyder did, however, sneak a little jab about paper titles into the piece: “Organizers have identified poetry as a major theme this year, but the convention, as usual, also offers talks on offbeat topics such as ‘Evil’ and ‘Sexual Norms in Trastamaran Spain.’” Hardly a pinprick.
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