27 posts tagged “academia”

No, look, I have to shout my little shout, and then I'll bury my little snout back in my 50 books.  I hate writing papers.  Why?  Because I have nothing paper-length to say about any appropriate topic.  I find the form impossible.  What I consider serious intellectual work is fragmentary, catenary, open-ended, allusive, recursive, not MLA-formatted, not 16-25 pages in length, not spelled out in plain terms for the idle reader.  You're picturing a monstrosity, and I understand this, I do.  Work must get done.  But nothing deserves these intellectual subdivisions, these pleasant little tracts of Times New Roman 12-point real estate with their 1.25" white picket margins, their aluminum siding hiding Gothic levels of philosophical decay.  Oh let us excavate a grotto or renovate a warehouse and there build a new way of living with arts and histories and literatures and sweet heady unfinished symphonies; let us leave these New Developments in Literary Studies to those who work close by.  Let the forms live and die!

There.  There may be more of that left in my system.  I'll keep you... all... posted...

No, I'm not going up to Napa to work on my novel.  If only.  Rather, this month must necessarily be devoted to writing papers, and I figure I might as well make a game of it.  I wonder if there's a way to keep a page count going on Vox?

There are three papers.  They should be between 16 and 20 pages long.  The topics are, um, mostly, um, largely, they are kind of targeted at this point.  I will say at the outset that I really don't know if I can make this interesting for the rest of you to read, and that if it seems like it ain't working after a few days, I'll give it up.  But papers are potentially more discussable than novels.  "Ergh, I am having trouble developing this one character!  I'm just not sure how to get them all on the pirate ship with the indie bands!  (Well, I mean, they're sort of Renaissance-era indie bands, but they're based on my favorite bands.)"

Also, more Peter Szondi.  Badass!  Do you think that's a real forest, or is it just a painted backdrop he carried with him everywhere?  Theory of modern drama, indeed!

Something about literature and irrationality.  Irrational authors, irrational subjects, irrational novels.  Are there rational novels?  There are "novels of ideas," although the ideas are not so often good.  Representations of philosophy, of ratiocination, of remotely successful quests for knowledge in fiction are somewhat rare.  Although intelligence is one of the preeminent virtues of our time, people rarely take it on as a subject, because it cannot be shown

Okay, new question: why am I such a fucking idiot?

The graduate student in literature as idiot

Blindness and stupidity among critics

The uselessness of anecdote

Thinking as terrible

Okay, to the point, narrowing the problem:

Problematizing the nonexistence of common ground between Spanish and German literature oh no, wait!:

Self-deception in Cervantes and Kafka or actually

Self-deception in every goddamn novel ever written

Self-deception in graduate programs

Self-deception in time management

Okay, that's good.  I guess I'll have to switch to psychology.

So during the first of my two campus visits, I went to a Q&A with current grad students in the program.  The questions eventually slowed to a trickle.  Suddenly I thought of a good one, and raised my hand.  Yes?  "Do you guys have enough time to read?" I asked.  It sowed general confusion.  Did I mean, time to do the class reading?  I shook my head.  Or, like, reading novels for pleasure?  Light reading?  I shook my head again, and gave up.

What I meant was this: suppose you are assigned a short essay by a late 20th-century theorist who refers extensively to, say, Brecht's Kleine Organon für das Theater, and you have no idea where he or she is coming from, so you go in search of the Brecht and discover that it is indeed klein and you can polish it off in an evening.  Now, having read the Brecht, you think you understand a little more and it may be time to tackle Benjamin's essay, "What is Epic Theater?", which seemed gnomic and mysterious the last time you read it.  Do you have time to do that reading?  That is, do you have time to learn more than you're required to by others— because no professor can ever give you the complete story, unless it's a semester course on Hermann Hesse or something you do not want— and to learn enough to answer your own questions?  Do you have time to read as much as you need?

My answer for this program, so far, is no.  There is no time whatsoever to do outside reading.  There is a little time to do the course reading.  There is a tiny bit of time beyond that to eat dark chocolate chipotle almonds, and about 13.5 minutes left over for the blog each week.  I think I'm over this week's limit here already.

I am not dead, but I am very, very busy and (more pertinently) very, very preoccupied.  It is hard for me to follow a thought from one end of a sentence to the other.  Consequently posting has been impossible for the last week, although there are a few drafted sentence fragments.  This might be a good time to make a virtue of necessity and turn this blog into a game of Finish the Sentence, or it might be a good time to give up and work on the looming papers, the prospect of which has already, by the end of the first week of classes, made me panic.  Nine weeks or so to go.

So I was thinking of writing a paper on...

But this raises irksome questions of...

And then there's the larger aspect of trends within the discipline: ...

And the narrower aspect of my command of...

Delicious salads can be procured at...

Delicious salads without a risk of passive construction will leap into your mouth at...

Thank goodness for that, anyway, and for...

And for...

And although I have been guilty of procrastinating on many occasions, reading Dante may be my best excuse yet.

So, to make the long story of the last few weeks short: I turned in all my work, including my thesis, and should be cleared to receive my degree whenever all the paperwork is processed.  My incredibly flexible, generous, and supportive thesis committee deserves a big collective gold star for their tolerance of my terrible work habits.  There should be more faculty like them everywhere, and more graduate programs like this one— not because they tolerate poor work habits, of course, but because of general flexibility, utility, and humaneness.  In certain ways I think the formal master's program, which has been widely abandoned in place of the straight Ph.D.-only track, deserves another look: I have no idea how to make the economics of it work, but it's certainly adequate preparation for teaching comp classes (with the certification courses I didn't take) and/or lower-level literature classes, and a lot of people currently slogging through doctorates are going to get jobs doing just that.  If you want to take five years, be poor, go to the MLA, and write a huge M.A. thesis, you certainly can, but you don't have to.  (Of course it's easy for me to say, from my lofty perch in the entering class for a reasonably competitive Ph.D. program, that it would be great if more people just got master's degrees, as long as I get the doctorate.  That's the way to sell it, by God.)  It deserves further thought, that's all.

Anyway: if you haven't hugged someone with a master's degree today, you should.  The degree has been shown to make its holders 22.8% calmer and 3% cuter than they were before they got it, correcting for the effects of the maturation process overall.

Application for Grant for Books Unnecessary for my Research
P.P. Nuttalli (http://simultan.vox.com)

I am applying for a monetary grant for the purchase of books unnecessary for my research in German- and Spanish-language literature and literary criticism.  As a graduate student at [a California] University, I receive limited support from my department for my living expenses and teaching duties, which leaves me with an even more limited budget for books necessary for my scholarly work, some of which are difficult to find in libraries to begin with; my budget can hardly be stretched to encompass the many books which are fairly undeniably not necessary for my scholarship, but which I want to read anyway.  Your organization has a history of supporting the unnecessary expenses of young scholars, which would not be covered under a more conventional funding arrangement.

Which books are necessary for my research?
I work primarily on literature of the 20th century from Spain and the Southern Cone, Austria, Germany, and other German-speaking areas, including many expatriate and/or stateless writers, but I am also interested in earlier works in these languages.  I also study philosophy and a fairly limited set of theoretical schools.  Anything falling under these rubrics, including titles about comparative literature in general, is potentially useful for my studies.

Which books are unnecessary for my research?
Everything else, basically: books on other literary traditions; books in French, Italian, minor European languages, dead European languages, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, or languages I can't identify but which look cool; books on the natural sciences, the history of the natural sciences, current trends in the natural sciences, advanced equations for quantum field theory; field guides to birds, trees, rocks and minerals, or any other ecological phenomena in areas to which I am too poor to travel, up to and including a large full-color guide to woodpeckers and flickers full of photographs of same; cultural studies, comparative religion, anthropology, sociology, urban studies, art history, musicology; economic history, cultural history, military history; Islam in global context; Tang dynasty China; 20th-century sub-Saharan Africa; Japanese imperial/colonial history and its aftermath in the Pacific Rim; New-Agey books on how to quit buying so many books; Franco Moretti's 5-volume study of the novel, Il romanzo, untranslated from the Italian; all those books by Leonora Carrington; all those books in French by Philippe Jaccottet; anything I believe would be interesting because I've never really thought about it before.

Is a partial bibliography included with this application?
Please see attached pages 4-24.

Are other sources of funding for unnecessary books available to me?
In the past, I have subsidized my ancillary, unnecessary reading by selling old books and CDs for store credit, reducing my grocery budget, going into debt, and making big puppy-dog eyes at family members who don't regularly see me.  I may be able to rely on these sources in the future, but none of them is particularly reliable or sustainable.

Please say a few words about the advantages of purchasing books over lower-cost alternatives like library borrowing.
While I certainly have access to some of the best libraries on the west coast, I have found through experience that library books are insufficiently shiny, new and appealing to provoke full-scale, obsessive, unnecessary-reading lockdown episodes of the kind that have been most unproductive for my research.  I have also been known to incur fines and to hurt myself at the end of the semester carrying all those books back to the library.  My attached bibliography should reflect the extent to which I intend to use my library card.  However, I also bear in mind that books unnecessary to my research may be necessary for the research of, potentially, 40 or 50 actual other people with legitimate scholarly interests and deadlines and so forth, who also use the library.

If applying for support for language learning aids: have I considered the FLAS grant program?
Oh Jesus no.  They'd expect results.

What results do I anticipate from the unnecessary reading?
The main result is that I'll stay sane in graduate school.  If all else fails, I can start an Interdisciplinary Institute for Less Commonly Combined Disciplines, such as Literature and Statistics, Macroeconomics and Avian Ethology, Creative Writing and Computational Neuroscience, or Materials Science and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics.  You may hear from me again.

Institutional Affiliation: _____________________
I plead the 5th.

You know, one of the great things about being part of an academic couple is that you can always count on interest and support in your work...

Me: [reading]

The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Post-Contempo

I guess we may note here that "Post-Contemporary Interventions" can, I think, become "Noise Prevents Content Riot, Mor' Pay."  But this is not technically WORK.

I'm starting to feel a little bit like the cat moving around the bedroom in pursuit of the sunlight: I keep moving from project to project in a similarly almost-regular way.  Alas, my advisor wrote to remind me that I do owe him a lot of work, so I had to revisit The Rings of Saturn, a book I've spent too much time disparaging.  Unfairly!  It really rewarded a second reading.  It's probably best suited to people who are entirely unfamiliar with his intertexts— I just read a book of Chinese history, so the bit about the Taiping rebellion served mainly to make me giggle helplessly at the line, "The bloody horror in China at that time went beyond all imagining"— since much of the book seems to be about bathos as a form of engagement.  Untold millions died... people perished in unreckonable numbers...  the heap of corpses must have reached the sky...  all the houses in the area were burnt to cinders...  bloody heaps of pheasants...  tons of dead fish... eternal night... death... destruction...  lousy hotel beds...

But no, no, I'm being unjust.  It has its moments.  I can't do justice to the best of them, but at one point Sebald gets lost in a heath:

Only in retrospect did I realize that the only discernible landmark on this treeless heath, a most peculiar villa with a glass-domed observation tower which reminded me somehow of Ostend, had presented itself time and again from a quite different angle, now close to, now further off, now to my left and now to my right, and indeed at one point the lookout tower, in a sort of castling move, had got itself, in no time at all, from one side of the building to the other, so that it seemed that instead of seeing the actual villa I was seeing its mirror image.  (171-72)

I like the "castling move" with the reflexive verb: imputing agency to the chess pieces— as though they'll just do that sometimes, through inertia or statistical factors.  (Something like the physics exam question about the probability of a saucer tunneling through the dinner table: it sits, and sits, and sits, and then foop— right through to the floor.  I found it endlessly amusing.  The world where normal physical behavior is only suspended to produce absurdity.)

But more to the point: it's amazing how much good a tiny bit of aesthetic pleasure does my work ethic.  It lasts until I pick up an essay meant to tell me about Sebald's acquaintance with poststructuralist theory, and it tells me his explication of a Rembrandt painting is totally taken from Foucault's Velázquez chapter in Les mots et les choses, and I read the Foucault and find only a similarity between two pieces of writing about paintings.  I guess if those are the only two you've read, they sound alike?  (I'm sure this too is unfair, but I was baffled.)

Also: I hear we signed a free trade pact with South Korea.  Any good sources on this?

Every academic probably has his or her own inner Pierre Bourdieu.  Mine also talks like Céline.  Often I think, "Getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature isn't such a bad deal," and then the ghost of Pierre-Louis-Ferdinand rears up and says, "It's all shit!... a crock, a real carrion-flambé!... mon dieu!"  This usually happens when someone talks about comparative literature in the age of World/Global/Planetary Consciousness, as in this recent book:

Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization

Not that I recommend reading it per se, but it's one of several on this theme.  I think it's fair to say that its authors support making comparative literature more inclusive (or less exclusive), more wide-ranging, more in step with an internationalized, globalized world.  So here is the story:

If you apply to a comparative literature program in the U.S., you need to demonstrate proficiency in at least one, and usually two, languages other than English.  The status of English is uncertain: this is the U.S. and any grad student here has to know English to study, but you don't technically have to study English literature along with your other literatures.  If you are going to study English literature, this is a perfectly good place to do it.  If you are going to study literature in another language, the U.S. can be a good place for it, but you'll probably also need to go abroad.  There is no formal arrangement or expectation for this; there is usually some money, but you'll likely also need to get money from another source to support yourself.  Essentially, then, the field in the U.S. (and, I think, in other countries) isn't formally international: the major professional credential is tied to a particular university in a particular country, and all arrangements to travel must be made by individual students with individually chosen institutions, funding sources, NGOs, whatever.  I have been told that, as a native English-only speaker, you can't get a job in a non-English literature without going abroad, ideally often.  So who should study comparative literature in the U.S.?

- People fluent in several languages
- People with ties to more than one country
- People looking for jobs in English
- People looking for jobs in languages for which there's a scarcity of teachers
- People willing and able to travel like maniacs

Now, what does space have to do with books?  Books, after all, are portable and translatable.  Literature courses take place in seminar rooms in universities; the texts can be purchased at the local bookstore.  Films can be ordered and screened in university buildings.  Art is mechanically reproducible.  How much of these travels make it into a course?  Probably very little.  How much into scholarly work?  The fruits of conversations with scholars abroad; archival research; acquaintance with the physical layout of cities and towns; better knowledge of language; acquisition of telling anecdotes; intellectual deracination....  class markers...  names for dropping... mon dieu!!

You love to travel.  You love to read books.  You subscribe to the New Yorker.  You live in New York.  You are a student of comparative literature.  You sleep on your notebook on the train.  You are beverage-conscious.  This is still the game; we just don't write nearly as well as Erich Auerbach anymore.

What I'm getting at is not an attack on real people (all I've provided here are caricatures) but an expression of my own inner conflict: on the one hand are my intellectual interests; and on the other a quiet, creative life of social and communal commitment which comes quite naturally to me, but isn't really compatible with all that moving around.  Everything I've learned, literally, I have learned in seven weeks outside the U.S. and nearly 28 years within a pretty small area inside it.  That's not The Official Best Life, but it is who I am.   I love travel, but I can't fake extensive experience with it, and I am starting to fear that I'll never translate very well out of my rarefied— if still perforce "global"— milieu.  And the habitual stasis has probably made me too exacting: I want to see the world, and read its books, but I want the real world, the true!  Good luck, right?