what is "hot" in English today?

[smellybug]

he really did steal my upvotes. He posted a picture of my cat

I kind of love you.

[Deadinthewater]

he really did steal my upvotes. He posted a picture of my cat

 

Don't listen to Fishbucket, the infamous troll. She's my cat, and I can prove it:

 

[Fishbucket]

I cant believe you posted that picture. I'm not wearing any pants!

[Deadinthewater]

I cant believe you posted that picture. I'm not wearing any pants!

 

Troll

[Taco Superior]

Just have to stick up for history for a second here -- "transnational" is not the same as post-colonial. 

 

Ya, I was talking out of my ass. My bad.

[Taco Superior]

Don't listen to Fishbucket, the infamous troll. She's my cat, and I can prove it:

 

 

There'll be no more fun of any kind!

[Mattie Roh]

Bumping this awesome thread but changing the trajectory a bit:

 

When I was applying to programs the first time around a professor in the writing center suggested I try tie in a "hot" topic in my field into my SOP. I didn't end up doing this because I didn't feel comfortable shoehorning anything in. My questions: What are the "hot" topics in your subfield? If your work didn't naturally interact with this, did you find a way to incorporate it comfortably into your SOP? Also, do you feel the pressure to mold your research to hot topics?

[Dr. Old Bill]

Bumping this awesome thread but changing the trajectory a bit:

 

When I was applying to programs the first time around a professor in the writing center suggested I try tie in a "hot" topic in my field into my SOP. I didn't end up doing this because I didn't feel comfortable shoehorning anything in. My questions: What are the "hot" topics in your subfield? If your work didn't naturally interact with this, did you find a way to incorporate it comfortably into your SOP? Also, do you feel the pressure to mold your research to hot topics?

 

I'm glad you've bumped this thread, as it's something I've been thinking about lately. Personally I've avoided tying in "hot topics" to my research. It's just not my usual style. Having said that, though, one of my LORs for the last cycle mentioned that he was going to try to make me sound "hot" in his letter, because my own research interests were, in themselves, not hot. Few people care much about Renaissance prosody these days. So I'm trying to keep an open mind for developing my research interests in different directions...perhaps with some "hot" topics included. It will take a lot of effort to incorporate contemporary theory etc. however, since it really doesn't resonate much with me. I just don't like pre-fab theoretical constructs, retroactively applied. I'm more of a form-your-own-interpretation kind of guy.

 

Anyhow, all of this is to say that yes...I'm interested in hearing about more hot topics in the field of Renaissance studies (and poetry in particular).

[Wonton Soup]

I feel like I saw a lot of technical/professional writing jobs this last year. 

[iExcelAtMicrosoftPuns]

I feel like I saw a lot of technical/professional writing jobs this last year. 

Yeah. I can only (naively) speak about the Comp/Rhet side of things but I agree, I've seen a lot of tech/prof writing positions. 

 

[echo449]

I'm not entirely sure what the "hot topics" in my subfield are (I think of poetics more in terms of influential scholars than theoretical perspectives), but my writing was inadvertently trendy. Basically, while I was trying to crack an angle on my thesis, I realized that all of the theorists I was citing were writing 30 years ago. To get out of the trap, I emailed a professor and just asked for names (I had a research fellowship last summer, and that helped a lot). In working through the names, it happened that Ranciere elucidated an issue in the primary text I was working on, and things went pretty easily from there. I didn't think of it as "shoehorning" at the time, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't pursue that avenue with some alacrity once I realized that it worked. 

I guess if I have an opinion on how to use trends or "hot" thinkers, it is that a general familiarity with them as you work on a writing sample can be super helpful, but isn't necessary either way. Deciding first that you want to write on Laruelle before picking a text would be goofy, but if you can argue that Laruelle's concepts help you articulate something about Macbeth that was latent in the play, then you're in pretty good shape. Of course, this comes with risks--if your committee has decided that your "hot" inspiration is so much hot air, then you've stabbed yourself in the foot. 

Edit: maybe not "goofy," as I put it earlier, but if you want to write about contemporary theory, I think you're better off just writing a THEORY sample instead of an awkward mash-up of a lit paper and a theory paper.  

Edited June 8, 2015 by echo449

[SilasWegg]

Hey this thread is way more interesting than the grad school ponzi scheme thread ive been trolling for the past 20 weeks.

[Between Fields]

I'm glad you've bumped this thread, as it's something I've been thinking about lately. Personally I've avoided tying in "hot topics" to my research. It's just not my usual style. Having said that, though, one of my LORs for the last cycle mentioned that he was going to try to make me sound "hot" in his letter, because my own research interests were, in themselves, not hot. Few people care much about Renaissance prosody these days. So I'm trying to keep an open mind for developing my research interests in different directions...perhaps with some "hot" topics included. It will take a lot of effort to incorporate contemporary theory etc. however, since it really doesn't resonate much with me. I just don't like pre-fab theoretical constructs, retroactively applied. I'm more of a form-your-own-interpretation kind of guy.

 

Anyhow, all of this is to say that yes...I'm interested in hearing about more hot topics in the field of Renaissance studies (and poetry in particular).

 

I think it's admirable that you're keeping an open mind. What's inadvisable, though, is to incorporate things into your research that you're not actually passionate about. Imposter syndrome feels bad enough when you actually are interested in something, so I can't even imagine what the inner turmoil would be like if you're just doing something because it's popular.

 

With that being said, I'd urge some caution on your resistance/apprehension towards "contemporary theory." I say this both as someone interested in medieval and classical literature as well as reception theory, which is more or less interested in how and why people take up certain texts in certain ways. Looking at old things has the tendency to give scholars a sort of nostalgia for their subject--it's old enough or classic enough not to need a theoretical framework on one end or "My professors and their professors didn't need it" on the other end. Prosody is a beginning, not an ending, just like all kinds of philology.

 

The "form-your-own-interpretation," New Critical approach is not ideal for a number of reasons, but the most important reason is because it's borderline disingenuous to disconnect yourself from the scripts and frames that help you form your own interpretation of a text. Not acknowledging perspective or subjectivity is akin to an appeal from authority fallacy--the line between this is my reading and this is the reading is quickly obscured, and reinforces a lot of troubling hierarchies and privileges that English studies should be working to tear down. 

 

All theoretical frames are applied retroactively. In terms of looking at antique and ancient literature especially, there is no way to actually access the cultural and linguistic context necessary to understand a piece of writing in its exact intended manner. A pragmatist in linguistics might even argue that there's no way to get 100% reception of meaning even with the author right in front of you because language simply doesn't offer that kind of precision in thought transmission. Any reading or interpretation you argue for therefore has to be composited from your own preconceptions/skills/scripts/frames and the available information in a text itself. Not attending to theory obscures this fact.

 

To me, the best sorts of articles in English Studies do two things: they provide a robust theoretical framework that is in conversation with other scholars and an application to a specific problem in a text/pedagogical situation/etc. Being able to appropriate that framework and to apply it to another text is actually really difficult in most cases, but I find that it's a really good way of going about seminar papers. Taking someone's methodology with bits of other peoples' and applying it to a new problem and then explaining what that teaches both about the theory and the artifact you're examining is really sophisticated. Viewing things like marxist criticism or deconstruction as pre-fabs is simplistic, but not an uncommon view, and I think it stems from not seeing that individual scholars are rarely doing things purely from one perspective or another, and the very best are tailoring their methodology very specifically to their actual problem.

 

I had a few people in my MA program who said things to the effect of "Why can't we just read books and talk about them?" and one professor's response was "This isn't a book club." Theory isn't so much a hot topic as it is necessary for English Studies to work properly. That isn't something I realized, though, until the graduate level, and I was pretty resistant to theory in undergrad, so I understand your point of view. 

[__________________________]

 

With that being said, I'd urge some caution on your resistance/apprehension towards "contemporary theory." I say this both as someone interested in medieval and classical literature as well as reception theory, which is more or less interested in how and why people take up certain texts in certain ways. Looking at old things has the tendency to give scholars a sort of nostalgia for their subject--it's old enough or classic enough not to need a theoretical framework on one end or "My professors and their professors didn't need it" on the other end. Prosody is a beginning, not an ending, just like all kinds of philology.

 

The "form-your-own-interpretation," New Critical approach is not ideal for a number of reasons, but the most important reason is because it's borderline disingenuous to disconnect yourself from the scripts and frames that help you form your own interpretation of a text. Not acknowledging perspective or subjectivity is akin to an appeal from authority fallacy--the line between this is my reading and this is the reading is quickly obscured, and reinforces a lot of troubling hierarchies and privileges that English studies should be working to tear down. 

 

All theoretical frames are applied retroactively. In terms of looking at antique and ancient literature especially, there is no way to actually access the cultural and linguistic context necessary to understand a piece of writing in its exact intended manner. A pragmatist in linguistics might even argue that there's no way to get 100% reception of meaning even with the author right in front of you because language simply doesn't offer that kind of precision in thought transmission. Any reading or interpretation you argue for therefore has to be composited from your own preconceptions/skills/scripts/frames and the available information in a text itself. Not attending to theory obscures this fact.

 

To me, the best sorts of articles in English Studies do two things: they provide a robust theoretical framework that is in conversation with other scholars and an application to a specific problem in a text/pedagogical situation/etc. Being able to appropriate that framework and to apply it to another text is actually really difficult in most cases, but I find that it's a really good way of going about seminar papers. Taking someone's methodology with bits of other peoples' and applying it to a new problem and then explaining what that teaches both about the theory and the artifact you're examining is really sophisticated. Viewing things like marxist criticism or deconstruction as pre-fabs is simplistic, but not an uncommon view, and I think it stems from not seeing that individual scholars are rarely doing things purely from one perspective or another, and the very best are tailoring their methodology very specifically to their actual problem.

 

I had a few people in my MA program who said things to the effect of "Why can't we just read books and talk about them?" and one professor's response was "This isn't a book club." Theory isn't so much a hot topic as it is necessary for English Studies to work properly. That isn't something I realized, though, until the graduate level, and I was pretty resistant to theory in undergrad, so I understand your point of view. 

Yes!  Beautiful response!

 

I do premodern stuff too and I'm still amazed to see how this nostalgia persists today.  Writing is inherently anachronistic; using theory on the old stuff is worth it and just as legitimate as applying it to newer works, in my view (medieval and early modern writers were at least as theoretically and philosophically minded as the modernists, yo).  I know this has been mentioned in other threads before, but the Stanford Arcade is really worth checking out: http://arcade.stanford.edu/.  The colloquy "We, Reading, Now" (http://arcade.stanford.edu/colloquies/we-reading-now) is one I've particularly enjoyed.

 

Wyatt, I particularly recommend this essay, which discusses a subject/way of reading that I want to spend some of my summer trying to better understand: http://arcade.stanford.edu/content/post-critical-reading-and-new-hegelianism

[Mattie Roh]

Yes!  Beautiful response!

 

I do premodern stuff too and I'm still amazed to see how this nostalgia persists today.  Writing is inherently anachronistic; using theory on the old stuff is worth it and just as legitimate as applying it to newer works, in my view (medieval and early modern writers were at least as theoretically and philosophically minded as the modernists, yo).  I know this has been mentioned in other threads before, but the Stanford Arcade is really worth checking out: http://arcade.stanford.edu/.  The colloquy "We, Reading, Now" (http://arcade.stanford.edu/colloquies/we-reading-now) is one I've particularly enjoyed.

 

Wyatt, I particularly recommend this essay, which discusses a subject/way of reading that I want to spend some of my summer trying to better understand: http://arcade.stanford.edu/content/post-critical-reading-and-new-hegelianism

 

Thanks for this article! I've been working my way through some of the sources he cites and it's been fascinating. I admit I had some trouble chewing through the Bewes piece ("Reading with the grain"), but after the second time around I felt I had a better grasp of it. Right now I'm reading Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings, which I think was suggested elsewhere (another thread maybe?). I don't know if I can make these theories work on my current project, but it certainly opens up a lot of possibilities. And anyway, reading theory is fun.