In certain respects, the Spanish academy is much more rigid than the American one, especially in terms of traditional disciplinary boundaries; but at the same time, it's much more tolerant of academics doing all different kinds of writing.
Showing posts with label popular writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label popular writing. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
#AcademicsWithCats
What We Learn from Cats. A book I spotted en route to lunch today. Written by one of the preeminent scholars of the Sefardi ballad tradition. Now in its third reprinting.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Girly Rhetoric
The shootings in Connecticut are not relevant to the subject matter at hand. This is not a post about the shootings in Connecticut. The ways in which academics are talking about that event, however, is very relevant. And that's what this post is really about, as much as it might seem otherwise.
The New York Times' Philosopher's Stone series is very hit-or-miss. Some of the columns are great and about interesting topics, and other times they're — well, not.
This week they are running a series of pieces about ethics, philosophy and morality in the wake of the shootings in Newtown. And one of them was just appalling, made worse by the fact that it's written by an assistant professor at Princeton, one who studies essayistic writing for a living, to boot. It's the sort of piece of writing that gives me pause every time I've just about screwed up enough courage to return to writing for a general audience. It is well crafted in its awfulness, though, in very specific ways that mean it will be useful in class as an example of how to handle content and rhetoric together.
In the column, the author argues that public rampage shootings are on the rise because young white men are releasing the pent-up frustration they feel at not being universally adored for being young white men and for not being quite as many heads and shoulders ahead of women and minorities when it comes to subtle and not so subtle advantages in all of the arenas in which humans interact with each other. And apparently we women are meant to sit around swooning and making the men in our lives feel heroic and virile and desperately needed. And then they won't feel the need to shoot twenty first graders.
We should act more helpless and googley-eyed. It's okay because we can vote and make many of our own medical decisions. And it'll stop mass homicides.
As far as public policies go, I think this one is a loser.
I feel like each and every one of us simply choosing not to shoot first graders is probably a better one.
Even knowing that I was going to write about rhetoric and qualifiers, I've just caught myself automatically starting the sentence above with the qualifier I feel. It's something that women tend to do in writing and in speech more than men. And it's not unrelated to the kind of horrible rationalization that says that if only women could take it upon themselves to be unobtrusive in their success, and to nurture men more and be responsible for their self esteem, that if only that, then nearly thirty people wouldn't have died, hundreds of gunshot wounds between them. Qualifiers come into play in prose when the author lacks confidence or wants to couch a point or lessen the risk that a reader will take offense or push back hard. The waffling text of the column — "This is merely anecdotal evidence, not social science, but I believe that it is indicative of a sort of infection spreading in our collective brain, one that whispers to the American subconscious..." — is the rhetoric of someone who thinks that the unidirectional interaction of women making men feel better about themselves is an effective gun policy.
The message in this op-ed piece, like the seriously qualified medium, argues for the passivity of women. It is such a startlingly effective pairing of rhetoric and content that I'm probably going to use it for writing workshops when I return to teaching undergraduates next year. (I happen teach in a department that overwhelmingly enrolls female students in its classes, which makes it that much more salient for my teaching.) The column demonstrates why using qualifiers is bad rhetoric in a way that is related to a perceived role in society. At the same time it shows that a piece of writing is that more more compelling, for better or for worse, when the style and the content of the writing support each other. That the subject matter — guns and the role of women in society — will catch students' attention might make it an especially effective exercise.
The New York Times' Philosopher's Stone series is very hit-or-miss. Some of the columns are great and about interesting topics, and other times they're — well, not.
This week they are running a series of pieces about ethics, philosophy and morality in the wake of the shootings in Newtown. And one of them was just appalling, made worse by the fact that it's written by an assistant professor at Princeton, one who studies essayistic writing for a living, to boot. It's the sort of piece of writing that gives me pause every time I've just about screwed up enough courage to return to writing for a general audience. It is well crafted in its awfulness, though, in very specific ways that mean it will be useful in class as an example of how to handle content and rhetoric together.
In the column, the author argues that public rampage shootings are on the rise because young white men are releasing the pent-up frustration they feel at not being universally adored for being young white men and for not being quite as many heads and shoulders ahead of women and minorities when it comes to subtle and not so subtle advantages in all of the arenas in which humans interact with each other. And apparently we women are meant to sit around swooning and making the men in our lives feel heroic and virile and desperately needed. And then they won't feel the need to shoot twenty first graders.
We should act more helpless and googley-eyed. It's okay because we can vote and make many of our own medical decisions. And it'll stop mass homicides.
As far as public policies go, I think this one is a loser.
I feel like each and every one of us simply choosing not to shoot first graders is probably a better one.
Even knowing that I was going to write about rhetoric and qualifiers, I've just caught myself automatically starting the sentence above with the qualifier I feel. It's something that women tend to do in writing and in speech more than men. And it's not unrelated to the kind of horrible rationalization that says that if only women could take it upon themselves to be unobtrusive in their success, and to nurture men more and be responsible for their self esteem, that if only that, then nearly thirty people wouldn't have died, hundreds of gunshot wounds between them. Qualifiers come into play in prose when the author lacks confidence or wants to couch a point or lessen the risk that a reader will take offense or push back hard. The waffling text of the column — "This is merely anecdotal evidence, not social science, but I believe that it is indicative of a sort of infection spreading in our collective brain, one that whispers to the American subconscious..." — is the rhetoric of someone who thinks that the unidirectional interaction of women making men feel better about themselves is an effective gun policy.
The message in this op-ed piece, like the seriously qualified medium, argues for the passivity of women. It is such a startlingly effective pairing of rhetoric and content that I'm probably going to use it for writing workshops when I return to teaching undergraduates next year. (I happen teach in a department that overwhelmingly enrolls female students in its classes, which makes it that much more salient for my teaching.) The column demonstrates why using qualifiers is bad rhetoric in a way that is related to a perceived role in society. At the same time it shows that a piece of writing is that more more compelling, for better or for worse, when the style and the content of the writing support each other. That the subject matter — guns and the role of women in society — will catch students' attention might make it an especially effective exercise.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
The Long Thirteenth Century
A really interesting conversation began a week or so ago in the blogosphere about periodization and the value of "early modern" as a label:
A Periodization Collation
However, it turned into a debate on the merits of Stephen Greenblatt's newish book, The Swerve, after he was given an award by the MLA. Many medievalists took issue with his construction of a world in which first there were the dark ages and then *boom!* there was modernity:
Why Stephen Greenblatt is Wrong and Why it Matters
The Swerve and the Prize
Modernity is Not History
I'm not sure I fully agree with the characterization of the book (about which, incidentally, I've had a post in the works for a while now, hopefully to be completed over the winter). Besides that, though, I get the impression that the swerve towards The Swerve is as much about popularization as it is about periodization. Greenblatt is an easy target not necessarily as much for what he writes as much as for the audience for whom he's writing. Loads of academics look down upon popularizers, that is, people who write for a general audience in addition to writing for an academic one. And I think that when popular writing comes into play, people tend to be less than honest about what's really at stake in any given debate. There tends to be a lot of huffing and puffing about inaccuracies and distortions and flattening out and omission as though it were a scholarly work and seemingly without any recognition or awareness that writing for different audiences requires different sets of priorities. In my immediate field, books like these two, just to choose the two that come immediately to mind, have been subject to that treatment.
Please don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating bad history, even though I am, I suppose, fundamentally a literature scholar. (I reject the polarity of the distinction between literary and historical writing — although that's an issue that deserves a separate post — and am defending myself against the anticipation of a charge, that people who read literature don't care about historical narrative, that I hear made all the time.) It just strikes me that there's a lot under the surface to the effect of how dare he write for the uninitiated?! that it might be worth unpacking before continuing a debate.
It might also be worth considering that discussions like this one tend not to happen until there are awards in play.
Returning to the issue that is explicitly at hand, though, periodization has been a topic near the front of my mind this whole year. The fellowship that I'm holding is thirteenth century-themed. At the start of the year, there was a round-table discussion amongst the most senior of the fellows about the extent to which . The bottom line, at least from that brief discussion was that from an institutional and intellectual history perspective, the thirteenth century does cohere as a unit, but from a social-cultural history perspective, it doesn't.
Even as an intellectual historian, though, the thirteenth century doesn't totally work for me. When I first wrote my proposal for the fellowship, I was pretty sure I'd be discounted out of hand with a project that begins in 1150 and is basically, in its continuity, wrapped up by the middle of the 1230s. But when I arrived in the fall, I started to realize that my "long" thirteenth century was just about the shortest one in the group. We have thirteenth centuries that begin in the eleventh and some that end in the sixteenth. Say "the log thirteenth century" amongst this lot and you tap into what has become a running group gag. The more the year has worn on, the less it seems (unsurprisingly) that "the thirteenth century" isn't really a sensible period of time to talk about.
I don't have something really good to fill in the narrative void, though.
I wish I had more to say about this or a real and concrete conclusion to arrive at beyond saying that an arbitrary numerical system isn't going to map very well only any trends in history or literary production, but I don't. Perhaps at some point in the future I'll have a dramatic flash of insight about the value or lack thereof of the thirteenth century. But until then, I at least wanted to jump into the discussion while it's still current-ish
A Periodization Collation
However, it turned into a debate on the merits of Stephen Greenblatt's newish book, The Swerve, after he was given an award by the MLA. Many medievalists took issue with his construction of a world in which first there were the dark ages and then *boom!* there was modernity:
Why Stephen Greenblatt is Wrong and Why it Matters
The Swerve and the Prize
Modernity is Not History
I'm not sure I fully agree with the characterization of the book (about which, incidentally, I've had a post in the works for a while now, hopefully to be completed over the winter). Besides that, though, I get the impression that the swerve towards The Swerve is as much about popularization as it is about periodization. Greenblatt is an easy target not necessarily as much for what he writes as much as for the audience for whom he's writing. Loads of academics look down upon popularizers, that is, people who write for a general audience in addition to writing for an academic one. And I think that when popular writing comes into play, people tend to be less than honest about what's really at stake in any given debate. There tends to be a lot of huffing and puffing about inaccuracies and distortions and flattening out and omission as though it were a scholarly work and seemingly without any recognition or awareness that writing for different audiences requires different sets of priorities. In my immediate field, books like these two, just to choose the two that come immediately to mind, have been subject to that treatment.
Please don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating bad history, even though I am, I suppose, fundamentally a literature scholar. (I reject the polarity of the distinction between literary and historical writing — although that's an issue that deserves a separate post — and am defending myself against the anticipation of a charge, that people who read literature don't care about historical narrative, that I hear made all the time.) It just strikes me that there's a lot under the surface to the effect of how dare he write for the uninitiated?! that it might be worth unpacking before continuing a debate.
It might also be worth considering that discussions like this one tend not to happen until there are awards in play.
***
Returning to the issue that is explicitly at hand, though, periodization has been a topic near the front of my mind this whole year. The fellowship that I'm holding is thirteenth century-themed. At the start of the year, there was a round-table discussion amongst the most senior of the fellows about the extent to which . The bottom line, at least from that brief discussion was that from an institutional and intellectual history perspective, the thirteenth century does cohere as a unit, but from a social-cultural history perspective, it doesn't.
Even as an intellectual historian, though, the thirteenth century doesn't totally work for me. When I first wrote my proposal for the fellowship, I was pretty sure I'd be discounted out of hand with a project that begins in 1150 and is basically, in its continuity, wrapped up by the middle of the 1230s. But when I arrived in the fall, I started to realize that my "long" thirteenth century was just about the shortest one in the group. We have thirteenth centuries that begin in the eleventh and some that end in the sixteenth. Say "the log thirteenth century" amongst this lot and you tap into what has become a running group gag. The more the year has worn on, the less it seems (unsurprisingly) that "the thirteenth century" isn't really a sensible period of time to talk about.
I don't have something really good to fill in the narrative void, though.
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