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Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Notes from the MLA, Part I
Like many academic bloggers, I found myself sitting in the audience today for the packed “Meet the Bloggers” panel at MLA. I won’t grumble too much about how [the “Meet the Bloggers"] panel filled the room while my 8:30 panel drew only five of my own friends and colleagues.
Horace can take comfort in the fact that only one other panel I’ve ever proposed has been accepted—and that conference was in Trieste. More to the point, I doubt so many people would’ve attended a panel on “Evolutionary Theory and Theories of Development in 19th Century Fiction.” “Meet the Bloggers” held up a mirror to a phenomenon, whereas my hypothetical panel would’ve only reflected my own narrow range of interests and attracted far less attention.
Put another way, “The Press“ may have shown up for Sean McCann, Stephen Schryer and Andrew Hoberek’s panel on C. Wright Mills the New Class in post-WWII literary culture, but as McLemee noted in his most recent column:
For some topics, 15 people is a lot. Just this morning, for example, I saw a blog post that started by asking, “What is the future of phenomenological geography, and why is this question even important?"
The size of the audience is less important than the quality of the feedback you receive from it. An auditorium guarantees little. Not that I can complain about the quality of the feedback I’ve received, mind you, only the quantity. I’ve been stumbling into conversations about the panel for a couple of days now, but have yet to address half of what’s been said.
(For the record, I’m perplexed by how few people are discussing John’s talk. He called for the radical transformation of the discipline and insulted everyone with an investment in the current system. Maybe that’s the problem. Calls for radical transformation and gratuitous insults seem so, what’s the word, perfunctory? Someone should spread the word: John’s weren’t.)
Comments
How odd. I just read his talk notes, and found myself getting excited despite being alone in my apartment at 12:30am, and in a different discipline besides. What’s wrong with people?
Everyone was there for Berube and Osell.
Everyone was there for Berube and Osell.
Not me. I saw Berube on Thursday--not that I was Berube’d out, but I wasn’t going to drag myself out of bed at MLA on my last day there only to see him again--didn’t connect Osell to her blog until I got there, and was curious about Holbo. Mainly, I felt a special interest in seeing SEK.
And I’m perplexed, too, not only by the Holbo-silence, but also by how little noise there seems to be about the many recent (and to be praised) attacks on the “traditional” monograph.
I’m curious, Karl: What sort of noise are you looking/hoping for? The MLA task force report on evaluating scholarship for T&P has gotten lots of ink in my publication (CHE) and elsewhere (IHE), and UP directors at least are well aware of it.
What sort of noise are you looking/hoping for?
More blog noise, i.e., so much talk that I couldn’t keep up, and perhaps even some counterstatements--if I could legitimately expect such a thing--by the presses that would either be helped or hurt if the task force’s suggestions were turned into policy. I imagine there’s a lot of noise in the Chronicle fora and the snakepits of the IHE comments, but I haven’t looked: so I might be full of it.
I also expected--perhaps perversely--that someone during the MLA interviews to mention the task force report (note to any committee members reading this: I do plan to turn my diss into a monograph! I’m just interested in the profession....). That of course didn’t happen.
For what it’s worth, Jacob Levy just praised John’s paper about as highly as I’ve ever seen him praise anything on his blog here. Give it time. John’s throwing-of-the-gauntlet is definitely going to make waves.
It’ll take time for the presses to 1) read the report fully and 2) get some real sense of whether the people producing/expecting monographs are going to change their M.O. I did hear, when I was at the MLA, that the department chairs discussed the report in their meeting, but I don’t know what resolutions, if any, came of that.
Another question: Are the people making tenure decisions reading discussions like this one? And if they are, would they be likely to air their views in this kind of public space? I’m guessing not--not yet, anyway. Lack of noise may not indicate lack of attention. But I really don’t know.
Hi, this Dave Mazella of the Long Eighteenth. Liked Holbo’s piece, though I was not at the meeting, and put up my own thoughts on the Long Eighteenth.
I made quite a bit of small (and big) talk with people about the MLA’s proposed changes to tenure and the de-centering of the monograph. Consensus was that while it’s nice the MLA shined a light on the problem and issued a report of substance, no one is holding their breath. The idea seems to be that unless the big old boys start actually tenuring people who haven’t published a monograph, this movement is dead in the water. I heard it compared to the suspension of early-admissions at Harvard this fall. Harvard took the lead, Yale and Princeton followed. If, say, Grinnell College had done so it wouldn’t have garnered as much press, started so many discussions, or built a movement of like-institutions to do the same. It would have probably cost Grinnell a slew of qualified candidates who chose to early admit elsewhere, eventually causing a prestige gap, leading to the death of the experiment and a setback in institutional growth. So what happens when, for example, a department not at H, Y, or P begins tenuring without monographs (which at those places is already a laughable idea given the lack of tenure “track")? A prestige gap leading to the loss of quality faculty and graduate students? Internal pressure from Deans and A&S Colleges who see the move as suicide because the change occurred apart from H, Y, and P creating press and discussion as forerunners?
I am thinking about this in relation to your questions about Holbo’s paper, which I was present for, and which made me think. The lack of discussion over his proposal, however, might be growing precisely out of our skepticism about the profession’s ability to end the cycle of what he called “vanity publishing.” Until someone actually gets tenure at a “top 25” school -whatever that means- because of their serious contributions as public intellectuals in an online arena, or through publishing via new channels and new media, proposals like Holbo’s come across as interesting ideas for which we shall “wait and see.”
The question I would have asked - had I enough courage to pipe up in a full room - is how (or if) Holbo sees his publishing process and press leading to the single authored monographs we’ve come to know and love. He talked about texts emerging from review events that draw together chapters with various approaches from various authors. We’re familiar with this form already, but these publicatins alone already don’t secure tenure for all positions. It seems to me that Berube has done more important work to shift the landscape with Rhetorical Occasions by editing and republishing material originally composed for his blog in a dead-tree university press edition.
Until someone actually gets tenure at a “top 25” school -whatever that means- because of their serious contributions as public intellectuals in an online arena, or through publishing via new channels and new media, proposals like Holbo’s come across as interesting ideas for which we shall “wait and see.”
What’s going to happen is that the current system will remain dominant for another quarter or half century, getting weaker and more baroque as time goes on. And then it will collapse—remember the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—and who knows what will emerge in its wake. That’s too long to do me much good, nor many of you, but . . . . unless the forces of Evil somehow put the breaks on, it’s all but inevitable. Of course, there’s always the possibility that new institutions will arise before the collapse, but there’s no guarantee of that.
Well sometimes it’s after you think more that you can come up with better comments.
I regret there was no discussion of why people use pseudonyms and the effect of these on blogging and the people’s lives outside blogs. If you want what you write on a blog to count outside the blog, how explain your pseudonym. It often gives away uncomfortable perceptions of the self.
Also we should have discussed an important aspect of blogs (which I discussed myself last night on my blog thinking about this): they make intimacy public. They break taboos of speaking of private life. Not that books can’t do this: but _The Bookseller of Kabul_ was harshly criticized for this.
Yet it is the most content-rich persuasive account of life in Afghanistan and critique of the traditional family I’ve come across. Two girls do blogs in Iraq and an essay in _The New York Review_ is right to say the blog nature of the content is what makes it so important.
Ellen Moody