TripWillis
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Posts posted by TripWillis
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University of Phoenix.
- egwynn, ComeBackZinc and Datatape
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I think Children's lit is doing pretty well these days. I know someone who just nabbed a tenure-track job in it.
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SUNY Buffalo American Studies!
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Good news: in the last month, I found out I'm getting my second peer-reviewed article published.
I know post-phd job opportunities are slim... But wow. I love teaching and I've remained relatively positive about being an adjunct for the past two years, but feeling exploited with absolutely no recourse makes me really glad I'm starting my doctorate in the fall.
1) Congrats!
2) Sorry to say the exploitation doesn't end when you're a grad-fellow; you just feel slightly more valued by the university.
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CUNY Graduate Center I think has Matthew Gold. I also think their DH program goes between English and Urban Ed, for the most part.
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I just accepted Buffalo and turned down WVU.
Now I've got the blahs. I am very excited about Buffalo, though. Yay!
I think you made the right decision.
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YOU GUYS!!! I've just been accepted to UNC-Chapel Hill!
WOO! Congrats! Really glad you wound up at such an awesome program.
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I was recently admitted to UMass-Amherst with full funding.
The question now is: Umass vs. UW-Madison?
I was offered full funding from both. What do you guys think?
I think it's a difficult decision; they're both wonderful programs. All things being equal, choose the place with the faculty you most want to work with.
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Good times people, good times. But no one bothered to address my question about how long a streak of hotness lasts in the profession.
I started this thread, I'm smart, I can handle things, not like everyone says, like dumb--I'm smart! And I want respect! I'm your older brother, ZincWillis, and I was passed over! Answer my questions!
I don't know how long it lasts.
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By the way, the notion that queer studies is about looking for "what could be gay" in literature is somewhere between laughable and offensive.
Exactly. Can we start a petition to ban Harold Bloom and his multiple gradcafe accounts?
- oij, intextrovert, antihumanist and 5 others
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The hottest thing in English today is a new club called Sylvia's Daddy.
I think my favorite of all time was "New York's hottest new club is '...KEVIN?...' located in an abandoned warehouse on..."
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Which is another way of saying it is a specific permutation of general postmodernist theory. Which is interesting, because everyone working in X Studies is always quite fond of telling me that postmodernism is dead.
You are describing a paradigm in which "post" is the key concept, not "humanism"--and certainly not "post-humanism"--and yet delineating a field in which certain foundational concepts are immutable, taken as the structure of a field simply by the act of naming the field (see: Derrida on "the proper," etc.). Whether or not this is a "contradiction" is irrelevant, because the philosophical backbone here does not admit of the immutable logical invalidity of contradiction, or, in fact, of the episteme that would privilege any or all of those three words. That is the entire point of the philosophy. I need neither animal studies nor posthumanism-in-literature to tell me about culture and enthnocentrism, relativity and the phenomenological human condition, transcendental philosophy and the episteme, because those ideas predate, preconfigure, and outstrip the bubble of scholarship to which you are appealing. Naming a field neither closes it nor makes its rules or its existence something that must be acknowledged as intellectually valuable. We have this thing in English, where actual thinkers, artists, or scholars come to a certain topic as a matter of course, as something that they treat along the road of their philosophical or methodological development, as a means of funneling or actualizing specific patterns of their thought; and then others walk down this now paved road, they see the scenery along the roadside--and they stop. They construct spectacular edifices around this scenery, and then they no longer move. While poor old Diogenes wanders around the countryside, they live in castles. The path is lost in the haste to codify some field around a specific instance of its development, and then that field is cultivated by serfs who do not have knowledge of or interest in anything but the crops they are pulling out of the ground. So that instead of looking at "how literature enacts questioning" at all, or what is even meant by that question, by literature, language, questioning, etc., as concepts or as principles that organize our intellectual being; in short, instead of developing scholars capable of living up to literature, we invent some little nook wherein we get to talk about animals in Victorian literature or what could possibly be gay in Dante: a theology, and turn our discipline into category bingo, into the work of finding X in Y, where the instances of those variables are deified--where it is possible to talk of "what is hot in English"--but the structure of the act, of X and Y qua X and Y, are treated as grotesque monstrosities. All the while, there is no intellectual common ground through which to see a forest as anything more than a series of trees--let people do as they like! We invent problems in the name of politics. Which is, you'll note, preposterously backwards.
1) "Which is another way of saying it is a specific permutation of general postmodernist theory. Which is interesting, because everyone working in X Studies is always quite fond of telling me that postmodernism is dead." -- Well, I will apparently be the first person working in x studies to tell you that all those "dead" theories are actually residual, a la basically every sub-field of inquiry since 1920 and WAY before that, too.
2) "We have this thing in English..." -- who is "we?" Presumably you and fishbucket? "...where actual thinkers, artists, or scholars come to a certain topic as a matter of course, as something that they treat along the road of their philosophical or methodological development, as a means of funneling or actualizing specific patterns of their thought." Straw men, everywhere! Again, who are these hypothetical people who take theory and enclose it as dogma? I don't know them. You'll have to introduce me. I think you'll find that with people who take an interest in x studies or theory y that the process you describe is no different. I am interested in the genealogies of certain themes and ideas that I tend to privilege in my research; I find this approach works better for me than a strictly period-based approach. I assure you though that the cart does not come before the horse (no animal studies pun intended).
3) "I need neither animal studies nor posthumanism-in-literature to tell me about culture and enthnocentrism, relativity and the phenomenological human condition, transcendental philosophy and the episteme, because those ideas predate, preconfigure, and outstrip the bubble of scholarship to which you are appealing" -- What do you know about animal studies/posthumanism besides what you've read off of a wikipedia page? Further, it's not that anyone needs these categories, nor takes them to be metonymic for an entire field of inquiry -- they're just convenient discursive taxonomies and ways of theorizing how one might begin to talk about or operate on these issues. Apparently, this is the most offensive thing in the world to you, that people who are mutually interested in a topic might congregate around a field of inquiry and (gasp!) have events and teach classes and god forbid publish! THE HORROR. ENGLISH IS RUINED.
4) "serfs" -- Revealing.
5) "in short, instead of developing scholars capable of living up to literature, we invent some little nook wherein we get to talk about animals in Victorian literature or what could possibly be gay in Dante: a theology, and turn our discipline into category bingo, into the work of finding X in Y, where the instances of those variables are deified" -- I think you're misunderstanding how theory works, and again, I have no idea what graduate level scholars you're talking about because I've never met them. Do you also have a problem with studying themes in literature?
Edit: Little known and unrelated fact -- Foucault anticipated and welcomed posthumanist discourse in 1966's The Order of Things. It's an interesting path of influence; it's not at all without precedent or rigor.
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I propose we call this new field "Studies Studies", and have an anything-goes policy, and dump all the dreck out of English and into there.
But would you two be okay on your own like that?
Just going to say it again -- the people who are "critiquing" posthumanism and animal studies in this thread have never read any of it and have no idea what it really is.
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But it will always be a human's-eye-view of insects. So why pretend that we can have insect-oriented philosophy? It's just a person talking for an [insect/object/animal]
I don't think Philosophy is pointless. I think certain kinds of philosophical thinking is pointless. That's how you keep philosophy sharp, by thinking critically about how one does philosophy.
Sure, people can study different things from me. But if I think those things are fundamentally flawed in their methodology, gonna go right ahead and say so, thanks.
In this case I sense you just don't know very much about animal studies and posthumanism, especially considering that asleepawake has already acknowledged one of your primary critiques (of something you obviously know nothing about) and you read right through it. This is either cognitive dissonance or you are a troll.
Humanism is also people talking for other people (see like everything ever written by Spivak for instance -- the fucking double bind!). Does that invalidate humanism? Is humanism a flawed methodology? Are you a troll?
Edit: Everything is representation. Get over it.
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thestage, Fishbucket, you guys are aware that you can study some things, and other people can study different things, and that's okay, right?
OMG thank you.
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I made it official: I'm going to CUNY Graduate Center.
Welcome!
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I really don't think Toni Morrison is a good writer at all.
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3) What does this have to do with the conversation besides trololololololooooooooooooooooo?
Another Don't Hate Classic ©.
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For everyone who is making this point: those things didn't join the canon overnight. They joined it because of a certain critical consensus, over generations and generations. CONTEMPORARY Pop culture (which is what I was referring to in my post) cannot be canonical for this reason. There are things that are popular now that will eventually be taught and read in the same way that the canon is today. But that doesn't happen overnight, and it shouldn't.
Scratching my head here. I now understand that you meant contemporary pop culture, but now it seems you're saying that things can't be canonical until 100 years passes. There are things written within the last 5 years, pop culture texts, in fact, that are already canonical, some of which we like and some we don't.
Edit: I'm done here, btw. Another time... the thread is drifting away from my initial point of interest.
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It's not the popular culture has no value or shouldn't be studied, it's that it shouldn't be canonical. That's a big difference. Studying pop culture is already a thing.
I think a lot of pop culture already is canonical (Mark Twain's novels, Shakespeare's plays, Uncle Tom's Cabin). I'm not sure I feel comfortable being as absolute about this.
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Trip said just about everything that I was too lazy to type. I would add, however, that the opposite of "close" reading is "distant" reading, not careless reading as was mentioned earlier - this obviously has no place in academia. Distant reading, via the administrative darling DH (as it was dismissively termed) is doing the exact work being called for in order to reshape the canon. Through Bayesian modeling among other forms, DH are redefining the broad aesthetic movements that undergird the canon and which this thread, this far, has left fairly unchallenged.
I like DH's potential, don't get me wrong, but to what end is it doing what you described? And also, I'm wary about why certain people like it -- oo, numbers!
At the last DH lecture I went to, a professor had derived a statistical method to test Jameson's assertion that most major literature is now set in the future or past rather than the present. He found via statistics that Jameson was only sort of right. Afterward, I asked him, politely, what the point of his project was and he sort of sheepishly smiled and said, "I'm not sure. This is my first digital humanities-type project." I guess I'm puzzled about the exigency of some DH projects -- what's Henry Adams' term? Inert facts? If you can point out some DH work that has done more to challenge our methods, I'd love to hear about it. I guess I've had a bad experience with it so far. Then again, most new stuff stumbles out of the gate in praxis. Maybe I should be more patient. 
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Rupert Pupkin basically summed up what I mean by doing aesthetics "first." I'm just saying that we need to pay attention to aesthetics, even when we're doing socio-cultural work.
I do think that my being more philosophically/scientifically inclined does affect my views on these things to some extent. I think cognitive and evolutionary psychological criticism is really interesting, whereas you seem to dislike it (or it at least worries you, as you mention in another post).
Concerning less extreme expansions of the canon: keep Twilight out of it, for the love of god. Some academics already take stuff like that seriously.
I don't think we're talking past each other quite yet. I'm just still not sure I understand you. I looked for the Rupert Pupkin post that you said explains this process, but couldn't find it. If all you're saying is that we need to pay attention to aesthetics, I agree with you and we can be past this point. I just didn't get this idea of partitioning them off or using them as some kind of gatekeeping tool in determining the object of inquiry. I'm just not sure that's possible without divorcing oneself's inquiry from the analyses of material critique, which I don't think is possible in the first place. We're always already in hegemony.
Re: cognitive/evolutionary -- in a perfect world, I'd be all about these, but I've heard and a read a few papers in the past year written in this vein that left me feeling dirty (unchecked and unreflective eugenicism and gender essentialism were involved). Cognitive/evolutionary, because it is influenced by the epistemes of science qua science, does not promote a more valid truth, but I think are best as reflections on their own methods, as with any other form of analysis. They tell us some of the story, but not all of it. We have to get away from this "lens" model of criticism. We also have to put methods under the microscope as texts themselves. I'm hoping you can help with this (also, I think science and philosophy are socio-cultural; as such, beware motivation, dogma, and demagoguery. We can't be led so easily by textual authority, or our jobs are obsolete).
Re: Twilight -- you aren't going to like me saying this, but it's too late; Twilight is already in the canon, as are a great deal of dime novels and dramas through the history of literature. I don't like those books, and I'm not interested in them, but we're already responding to them via our suppression of them, and thus they are either on the margins of the canon or are fragmented and interspersed through the web-like shape of the canon (draw a dotted line between Stoker and Myers). The canon is a lot more organic and hegemonic than most of us are willing to admit because damnit we're supposed to be in charge! But, alas... teen vampire novels. The way I see it, 50 years from now, Twilight will probably only be talked about as being a mass culture fascination that influenced other writers, the way we talk about Melville and Hawthorne in light of 19th century dime temperance/vice novels. People still work on those novels because it helps them better understand Melville and Hawthorne. So, those books aren't at the center, certainly, but they're somewhere.
Let's back up and look at the canon the way Derrida looks at the archive. The archive involves impression and selection. It often involves depositories. But there are always radical remainders and present absences in the depositories. Anything we impress or select is a violence to the other. As such, those suppressions are involved in the act of archiving. When we make the decision to exclude Twilight, its being, style, form, etc. can be traced to everything we include.
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It's a slippery designation.Half of these figures are canonical. -
I think the canon has a purpose. It gives you a background for all the major literary reference points of a few thousand years. It doesn't mean I particularly like everything in it or that I think we should maintain the same narrow focus going forward, but it has a purpose.
This is a pretty good way of looking at it. It's important to know influence, even if you don't do "influence studies" per se.
Edit: Basically, it's the duty of everyone who does not particularly like the capital-C Canon to know it very well.
What on earth does this mean? Just curious
DH = Digital Humanities. I like interdisciplinary stuff like digital humanities in theory, but I worry that, as with cognitive criticism, darwinist criticism, etc., it's part of a not-so-new trend to make humanities a science that produces results quantitative and satisfying to administrative capitalists -- it's similar to what was being tried with formalism, but way way crasser and also less interesting. I think the pressure to make English a science comes from anxiety over its being underfunded by comparison to the sciences. As I said earlier, along with Bennett, I think humanities has to maintain some autonomy from the sciences and analyze scientific epistemes. It has to be the conscience of the sciences.
Fall 2012ers: How are y'all feeling?
in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition
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I'm feeling good! It's good to hear from you guys.
I'm teaching two classes this year with two different preps, which is a major time-suck, but I get to teach literature for the first time, which is exciting. I scored a peer-reviewed article pub in the offseason and I have another under review. Turning in a book review today. Trying to stay as busy as I can on the publishing front.
I'm tired, but in a really good way. My lingering doubts only come when my bank account is empty.