The Academic 'Labor System'M

(Can you think of a more boring title for a blog post)
It's taken me over a week to work up even this lame response to this post by Conscientious Objector that responds to the things I was discussing below about grad school, etc. I've got a pile of papers to grade, the final draft of the JRRT Encyclopedia Table of Contents to complete (almost 1000 entry topics thus far), and a paper to give in Vermont in a week that still needs a lot of work. But it's rude to be silent so long, and I apologize to Objector and anyone else reading the exchange.
But although I see where Objector is coming from, I'm afraid I can't agree with the analysis given in the post. There are two problems being mixed: the "oversupply" of graduate students in comparison to the jobs they want, and the existence of the adjunct system. I think the first is not really a problem because I stand by my comparison to the arts, sports and entertainment: there is an oversupply because being a professor is a very desireable job. In that situation, more people will want to take a gamble on that job, despite the comparitively low pay (versus other jobs that require similar training) and difficult odds of success. I don't think academia is a Ponzi scheme any more than the entertainment business, and if you think adjuncting sucks and is dead-end, compare it to trooping from audition to audition with no guarantee of any positive result, even if you've ponied up your money to get your Equity card.
Objector says that graduate students overvalue their investment because they don't understand the market, but I'm not sure I can agree: I knew exactly how bad the market was when I decided to go to graduate school for my Ph.D. (I'd already gotten one M.A. and was working on my second), and in fact the year I got my job there were 127 applicants for my particular job, and only 25 medieval jobs in the job list. But getting a Ph.D. seemed worth the gamble because, like all the young, ambitious people hoping to get a foot in the door in entertainment, I was sure I could win, and because the actual process of going to grad school seemed better than other alternatives at that moment. I think most people make similar choices, and when you choose to take the gamble, you have to have back-up plans and be prepared to live with the results (if I wasn't a professor now, I'd be running a pet store somewhere, either just finally setting out on my own or getting ready to. Seriously. That was the plan and I moved forward on it while in grad school. But I digress.)

The other question is whether the adjunct system is exploitive or not. Since we don't have many adjuncts at Wheaton, and we don't have graduate students teaching classes, etc., I don't know this system first hand as much as most. But it seems to me there are different categories of 'exploitation,' and some are worse than others. The worst, in my opinion, is the hiring of multiple adjuncts so as to avoid having to pay full-time benefits. This seems morally wrong to me, and stupidly inefficient: if you need five classes taught, hire one person for five classes, not five different people. We have tried very hard (and at least this year, succeeded) at Wheaton to avoid this.

But we simply don't have the resources to create the five new tenure lines that we'd need, just in English, to cover all of the classes that get covered right now (our department is 11; there's no money for such a huge increase). We can only hire people full time if we have the guaranteed resources for a tenure line (i.e., the college accounting people can project a suitable revenue stream 30 years into the future. Rumor has it that the college had to raise $250,000 for each new tenure line it added during the recent period of growth, and that number is only so low because Wheaton relies much more heavily on annual funds versus endowment compared to other schools).

So we could do a few things: eliminate most lit. classes and all teach 4 (out of five classes) English 101's. That seems like an intellectual impoverishment for the students. We could cut the number of English 101's in half, using some kind of test to pick out 50% of the students, saying they don't need English 101. We could elminate English 101 and say that students need to learn that material in high school and tough luck if they don't. Or we can see if there are people around who want to teach English 101 for a wage that the college can afford.

At Wheaton the rule is that there is no such thing as a non-tenure-track, full-time teaching job. If you teach the full course load, you are making progress towards tenure. So theoretically we have no second-class citizens (i.e., no full-time, non-tenure track jobs), but instead a fair number of third-class citizens (adjuncts who couldn't even get full-time work and thus no health insurance, etc., even if they could piece together work from multiple institutions).

Our solution, imperfect as it was, was to lump together adjunct positions into 4 classes plus some tutoring or administrative responsibility. The adjuncts thus got full-time benefits (and now, multi-year contracts), but didn't go 'tenure track' because they were doing other things than teaching. They're not expected to do committee work, teach indep. studies, attend events (though they're of course welcome). We negotiated pay packages that were much better than the 3000 per class that adjuncts got (i.e., they don't get $12,000 for four classes).

Is this exploitation? I don't know. And I don't know if I'd feel exploited if I took such a job. But again, I don't think it's as bad as the situation in many other occupations. Adjuncts at Wheaton do have a foot in the door for tenure lines that open up, and at least four of our eleven in the department have started this way and have had tenure lines eventually open up (though they had to go through the whole search procedure, etc.)

Do big schools, and places where teaching is less important, exploit people more? Probably. But I don't know first-hand. Our Writing Associates are excellent, and they do a great job, but they don't put in nearly as many hours as I do (nor should they). Then again, I put in a lot more hours on campus than people at big universities (somehow I manage to publish just as much, or more, though, but that's another blog post). Their contracts are infinitely renewable (though not guaranteed beyond however many years are on there); if I'd not made my tenure, I'd have gotten the boot.

Does the 'adjunct system' enable the entire academic system? Definitely not. Most departments at Wheaton don't have any adjuncts and, as I pointed out above, if we had to elminate adjunct positions, the department could cope. Maybe things are different at places with graduate students and no emphasis on teaching, but I wonder if those places couldn't adjust if they had to.

This comes back to the supply/demand problem. More people want the things that come with a college job and environment than there are jobs for them. The 'adjunct system' allows them to have some of those things. Would I have made that trade-off? (of financial security, etc. for the college environment?) probably not, since I was interested in the pet trade. But I know people who've taken significant pay cuts (in IT, for example, and a friend who does landscaping) to work in the college environment, so there are other compensations even for underpaid, overworked adjuncts. I think the Wheaton model suggests ways to be more humane, to stop people from having to juggle three or four jobs, and to get a better working environment (and we got those things because we argued that it was better for the students). It would be great if there were more money in the system, but I've seen the budget: there isn't, and our students pay 30K per year. But again, I think the parallel is entertainment, or sports, or publishing: people want to get paid for doing what they love and so often accept very low pay. I just can't see it as a boot in the face.

Leaving (or being driven out of) Grad School
[N.B.: Post started last week; delayed due to sick toddler who is now well]
This post at Winston's Diary and a series of similar posts and discussions here and in the comments and a follow-up at Invisible Adjunct, and more discussion here at Critical Mass (and also follow Erin's links) has gotten me to thinking about why smart people I know dropped out of academia and why I was able to stick with it even though not, perhaps, as intellectually gifted as they were. This is also a relevant topic because my very best former student has just started getting excellent offers from Ph.D. programs and so is going to be following along the academic trail.

I think there are a number of problems with graduate school system that are getting conflated here, in particular the political problems (people with certain viewpoints or approaches driven out [n.b.: working on a post on the Duke flap], the labor problems (institutions accept a lot of graduate students to staff the freshman writing program, thus freeing up professors for other things; those graduate students then either receive Ph.D. as door prize and don't get jobs or are just strung along at low wages), and the market problems (there aren't as many tenure track jobs, in desireable locations, as there are people who want them).

But in my link-following (to In the Shadow of Mt Hollywood and then to Conscientious Objector, who has a slightly different p.o.v.) I've run across a fair number of people, in blogs and in comments, who seem to be very angry and bitter about graduate school, and I think that if more folks went in with the right knowledge and attitude, fewer people who have these terrible experiences.

I can't really add much to the discussion of the market itself. There's a supply and demand problem that won't be solved until the two come into balance. I doubt unionization would help, though I'm not opposed to it, but I think this is probably the triumph of hope over experience. The "Ponzi scheme" charge won't stick, I'm afraid, because there is a complete lack of coordination between institutions (and I've seen this first-hand). The 'wage' (which includes job security, benefits, pay) probably won't change much until there is either more demand or lower supply, and I have no solution to either of these problems that doesn't commit gross injustice upon one person or another. The theory that production of Ph.D.'s can somehow be limited by some kind of cartel is appalling, not because there aren't too many Ph.D.'s for the number of jobs, but because of the gross injustice that would be created by trying to implement such a system. Admissions to anything is already an unjust and inefficient process (how can you tell from an undergraduate transcript what someone is going to be in seven years?) and to put more weight on it, by limiting entrance to programs (which is what you'd have to do) is, to me, insane and pretty horrible (you want the only Ph.D.'s out there to come from the Ivies? Shudder. Your think the professoriate is screwed up now...).

But I can address graduate school burn out / drop out / misery out, which has claimed no small number of my friends. The biggest problem I've seen is that people go in with incorrect expectations. Not too high, not too idealistic, just incorrect. If I could tell all prospective graduate students three things, they would be:

A Ph.D., on its own, does not qualify you for anything and does not earn you a job. It is merely the lowest common denominator for the job you want. Analogy: the ability to sing on key will not get you a job at the Metropolitan Opera. You have to, while you are still a graduate student and immediately when you are done, do a whole suite of other things to get a job. These include publishing, networking, and showing that you have additional skills -- administration, computer skills, documented teaching ability, etc. Way too many expect that all the work that goes into a Ph.D. guarantees some result or entitles them to something. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Second, if you want a Ph.D. and a job afterwards, you must focus single-mindedly on doing what it takes. You are not allowed to say "but I don't have a life." (The correct reply to that complaint is: "oh, you want a life. I thought you wanted a Ph.D.") Most of the people I know who dropped grad school at or before the M.A. level thought that their life would be an extension of undergrad, but with more money, freedom and respect. Ha! Be prepared going in. There are many good things about grad school, and (in retrospect) I enjoyed my years, but they are nothing like even the most rigorous years of an undergraduate program. Not if you want a Ph.D. and a job.

Who is directing your dissertation is ten times more important than where you are getting your degree. I cannot emphasize this enough. I went to Loyola-Chicago for my Ph.D. A fairly lame school with a below-average English program (in my opinion, of course). But I had Allen Frantzen direct my dissertation and there simply is no one better, on earth, at preparing his students. There were six of us doing dissertations with Allen while I was there (yes, that's a huge load of graduate students in English). Five of us six have tenure-track jobs (or, in my case, tenure) or the equivalent, and the sixth has a full-time position at the institution she wants. That's 100% placement within 1 or two years of graduation. Unheard of. And it is all because Allen put in huge amounts of time preparing us for the job market: he helped us frame our topics so that they were what we wanted to study but also sounded good to hiring committees (the former is essential or you'll go crazy; the latter is essential or you won't get hired); he made gigantic personal efforts to network for us; he guided us through conferences, publishing, etc. If you don't know who you want to study with (common at the beginning level of grad school), you need to research and move after your M.A. And you need to talk with the person first, see if you are compatible and get a committment. You should expect to do something in return (assist on projects, help run conferences and, most importantly, take an interest in your director's work so that he can discuss it with you), but if the director is ethical, he won't use you for monkey work and you'll get a vital education that's outside of both classes and official reviews.

There are caveats and exceptions to all of the three dicta I've given above, and remember that I'm talking about how the system actually works, not how it should work if it were efficient, fair, honest, just, etc.

But if you want success in a Ph.D. program, you need to follow those three dicta, I think, and you must not treat it as an extension of undergraduate (though that's exactly why I went to graduate school at first). You don't do the minimum to get the A; you do a lot of extra work. You read around in the critical literature. You don't write the same paper for each class ("The Lacanian Mirror Stage in Beowulf" "The Lacanian Mirror Stage in Wuthering Heights" "The Lacanian Mirror Stage in Sometimes a Great Notion")

A number of the posts I've been reading recently mention graduate students who are frustrated because their profs want to teach, say, feminist theory while they want to do, say, cognitivist approaches to literature. If that's the case, you are in the wrong program, with the wrong professor and you need to move on rather than trying to do your dissertation there (yes, I know, that's not truly helpful advice, since one of the reasons you are at a certain school is that it is where your spouse lives, or where you got in, or where you want to live).
But a doctoral program isn't like an undergraduate program where you show up, sign up for classes, and can expect to get the degree you want if you do the work. You are signing up to work one-on-one with someone who really gets paid the same whether you graduate and get a job or not. If the person doesn't have professional ethics and if he or she isn't a good human being, then it's not worth studying there even if the program does have a "name."

There may be certain exceptions, programs, like Toronto in Medieval Lit, where the system works so well that nearly all the graduates get jobs. But those are hard to find, and harder to get into, and they tend to produce students who do one kind of thing superbly (source study, say, or medieval Latin), but, perhaps, lack some of the creativity needed to end up at a cool but quirky place or to do the kind of work that gets noticed outside of the immediate field.

You need to investigate whose students are all employed. I can say this because he's retiring and thus won't get a flood of applicants off of my stupid blog, but Tom Hill at Cornell is a great example. There are Tom Hill students everywhere (he's also my academic grandfather, my dissertation director's dissertation director's dissertation director -- Tom Hill => Jim Earl => Allen Frantzen => Me) in great jobs because he is not only a great teacher, but someone who makes a real effort--phone calls, talking to people at conferences, really strong letters--to take care of his students. Find an Allen Frantzen or a Tom Hill, and you are set.

And if you end up underemployed or in temporary jobs, you need to publish your way out of them if you want to leave. That of course destroys your life even more, and begs the question of where you get the time. But a very good friend from my Ph.D. program didn't get a tenure track job offer after his Ph.D. He went off for a one-year, non-renewable position at a big state school that had him teaching either 8 or 9 classes and helping to run a computer lab. But he worked like a fiend, published in JEGP (Journal of English and Germanic Philology) and the next year got the most coveted job in Anglo-Saxon that was open that year. One big article in JEGP or Speculum or their equivalents is probably worth more than a book contract (to get a job; book contract is probably necessary for tenure). A PMLA article will put you at the front of every queue.

So my conclusion: the struggle for a tenured job in academia is like the struggle to be a successful actor or actress or writer or athlete or any other career where the job is very appealing and there are a lot of people that want it. The odds are against you (there were 127 applicants for my job at Wheaton and only 25 jobs listed in Medieval Lit that year. You can do the math). Act accordingly, and decide if the effort you must put in is worth the possible result. You can make a lot more money in a lot of other careers. But you don't get to teach amazing and wonderful undergraduates. A tough trade-off.

Leaving (or being driven out of) Grad School
[N.B.: Post started last week; delayed due to sick toddler who is now well]
This post at Winston's Diary and a series of similar posts and discussions here and in the comments and a follow-up at Invisible Adjunct, and more discussion here at Critical Mass (and also follow Erin's links) has gotten me to thinking about why smart people I know dropped out of academia and why I was able to stick with it even though not, perhaps, as intellectually gifted as they were. This is also a relevant topic because my very best former student has just started getting excellent offers from Ph.D. programs and so is going to be following along the academic trail.

I think there are a number of problems with graduate school system that are getting conflated here, in particular the political problems (people with certain viewpoints or approaches driven out [n.b.: working on a post on the Duke flap], the labor problems (institutions accept a lot of graduate students to staff the freshman writing program, thus freeing up professors for other things; those graduate students then either receive Ph.D. as door prize and don't get jobs or are just strung along at low wages), and the market problems (there aren't as many tenure track jobs, in desireable locations, as there are people who want them).

But in my link-following (to In the Shadow of Mt Hollywood and then to Conscientious Objector, who has a slightly different p.o.v.) I've run across a fair number of people, in blogs and in comments, who seem to be very angry and bitter about graduate school, and I think that if more folks went in with the right knowledge and attitude, fewer people who have these terrible experiences.

I can't really add much to the discussion of the market itself. There's a supply and demand problem that won't be solved until the two come into balance. I doubt unionization would help, though I'm not opposed to it, but I think this is probably the triumph of hope over experience. The "Ponzi scheme" charge won't stick, I'm afraid, because there is a complete lack of coordination between institutions (and I've seen this first-hand). The 'wage' (which includes job security, benefits, pay) probably won't change much until there is either more demand or lower supply, and I have no solution to either of these problems that doesn't commit gross injustice upon one person or another. The theory that production of Ph.D.'s can somehow be limited by some kind of cartel is appalling, not because there aren't too many Ph.D.'s for the number of jobs, but because of the gross injustice that would be created by trying to implement such a system. Admissions to anything is already an unjust and inefficient process (how can you tell from an undergraduate transcript what someone is going to be in seven years?) and to put more weight on it, by limiting entrance to programs (which is what you'd have to do) is, to me, insane and pretty horrible (you want the only Ph.D.'s out there to come from the Ivies? Shudder. Your think the professoriate is screwed up now...).

But I can address graduate school burn out / drop out / misery out, which has claimed no small number of my friends. The biggest problem I've seen is that people go in with incorrect expectations. Not too high, not too idealistic, just incorrect. If I could tell all prospective graduate students three things, they would be:

A Ph.D., on its own, does not qualify you for anything and does not earn you a job. It is merely the lowest common denominator for the job you want. Analogy: the ability to sing on key will not get you a job at the Metropolitan Opera. You have to, while you are still a graduate student and immediately when you are done, do a whole suite of other things to get a job. These include publishing, networking, and showing that you have additional skills -- administration, computer skills, documented teaching ability, etc. Way too many expect that all the work that goes into a Ph.D. guarantees some result or entitles them to something. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Second, if you want a Ph.D. and a job afterwards, you must focus single-mindedly on doing what it takes. You are not allowed to say "but I don't have a life." (The correct reply to that complaint is: "oh, you want a life. I thought you wanted a Ph.D.") Most of the people I know who dropped grad school at or before the M.A. level thought that their life would be an extension of undergrad, but with more money, freedom and respect. Ha! Be prepared going in. There are many good things about grad school, and (in retrospect) I enjoyed my years, but they are nothing like even the most rigorous years of an undergraduate program. Not if you want a Ph.D. and a job.

Who is directing your dissertation is ten times more important than where you are getting your degree. I cannot emphasize this enough. I went to Loyola-Chicago for my Ph.D. A fairly lame school with a below-average English program (in my opinion, of course). But I had Allen Frantzen direct my dissertation and there simply is no one better, on earth, at preparing his students. There were six of us doing dissertations with Allen while I was there (yes, that's a huge load of graduate students in English). Five of us six have tenure-track jobs (or, in my case, tenure) or the equivalent, and the sixth has a full-time position at the institution she wants. That's 100% placement within 1 or two years of graduation. Unheard of. And it is all because Allen put in huge amounts of time preparing us for the job market: he helped us frame our topics so that they were what we wanted to study but also sounded good to hiring committees (the former is essential or you'll go crazy; the latter is essential or you won't get hired); he made gigantic personal efforts to network for us; he guided us through conferences, publishing, etc. If you don't know who you want to study with (common at the beginning level of grad school), you need to research and move after your M.A. And you need to talk with the person first, see if you are compatible and get a committment. You should expect to do something in return (assist on projects, help run conferences and, most importantly, take an interest in your director's work so that he can discuss it with you), but if the director is ethical, he won't use you for monkey work and you'll get a vital education that's outside of both classes and official reviews.

There are caveats and exceptions to all of the three dicta I've given above, and remember that I'm talking about how the system actually works, not how it should work if it were efficient, fair, honest, just, etc.

But if you want success in a Ph.D. program, you need to follow those three dicta, I think, and you must not treat it as an extension of undergraduate (though that's exactly why I went to graduate school at first). You don't do the minimum to get the A; you do a lot of extra work. You read around in the critical literature. You don't write the same paper for each class ("The Lacanian Mirror Stage in Beowulf" "The Lacanian Mirror Stage in Wuthering Heights" "The Lacanian Mirror Stage in Sometimes a Great Notion")

A number of the posts I've been reading recently mention graduate students who are frustrated because their profs want to teach, say, feminist theory while they want to do, say, cognitivist approaches to literature. If that's the case, you are in the wrong program, with the wrong professor and you need to move on rather than trying to do your dissertation there (yes, I know, that's not truly helpful advice, since one of the reasons you are at a certain school is that it is where your spouse lives, or where you got in, or where you want to live).
But a doctoral program isn't like an undergraduate program where you show up, sign up for classes, and can expect to get the degree you want if you do the work. You are signing up to work one-on-one with someone who really gets paid the same whether you graduate and get a job or not. If the person doesn't have professional ethics and if he or she isn't a good human being, then it's not worth studying there even if the program does have a "name."

There may be certain exceptions, programs, like Toronto in Medieval Lit, where the system works so well that nearly all the graduates get jobs. But those are hard to find, and harder to get into, and they tend to produce students who do one kind of thing superbly (source study, say, or medieval Latin), but, perhaps, lack some of the creativity needed to end up at a cool but quirky place or to do the kind of work that gets noticed outside of the immediate field.

You need to investigate whose students are all employed. I can say this because he's retiring and thus won't get a flood of applicants off of my stupid blog, but Tom Hill at Cornell is a great example. There are Tom Hill students everywhere (he's also my academic grandfather, my dissertation director's dissertation director's dissertation director -- Tom Hill => Jim Earl => Allen Frantzen => Me) in great jobs because he is not only a great teacher, but someone who makes a real effort--phone calls, talking to people at conferences, really strong letters--to take care of his students. Find an Allen Frantzen or a Tom Hill, and you are set.

And if you end up underemployed or in temporary jobs, you need to publish your way out of them if you want to leave. That of course destroys your life even more, and begs the question of where you get the time. But a very good friend from my Ph.D. program didn't get a tenure track job offer after his Ph.D. He went off for a one-year, non-renewable position at a big state school that had him teaching either 8 or 9 classes and helping to run a computer lab. But he worked like a fiend, published in JEGP (Journal of English and Germanic Philology) and the next year got the most coveted job in Anglo-Saxon that was open that year. One big article in JEGP or Speculum or their equivalents is probably worth more than a book contract (to get a job; book contract is probably necessary for tenure). A PMLA article will put you at the front of every queue.

So my conclusion: the struggle for a tenured job in academia is like the struggle to be a successful actor or actress or writer or athlete or any other career where the job is very appealing and there are a lot of people that want it. The odds are against you (there were 127 applicants for my job at Wheaton and only 25 jobs listed in Medieval Lit that year. You can do the math). Act accordingly, and decide if the effort you must put in is worth the possible result. You can make a lot more money in a lot of other careers. But you don't get to teach amazing and wonderful undergraduates. A tough trade-off.

Violating the Integrity of the A-Fragment

I'm on my two-course semester (here at Wheaton we alternately teach 3 and 2 courses), so life is supposed to be easier and, surprise, it actually is. Even though I have almost exactly the same number of students as I did last semester, the extra 3 hours free of class is a huge help thus far.

I'm teaching Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer (in Middle English), so it's language, language, language for a while. The Anglo-Saxon students still seem intimidated, which I'm hoping will be fixed soon, and the Chaucer students are already very into the text, arguing about the narrator, the characters, the interpretation of key passages... it's amazing and wonderful. I can't understand why anyone would pass up the opportunity to teach Chaucer. You have to spend a little time on the Middle English, but the rest of the course teaches itself. Explain a few things, set a bit of an agenda, and then step back and let the students dig into the text. There's so much great stuff in Chaucer, and he presents it in such a fun, stylish, clever way, that for me it never gets old.

By the way, I reject the idea (that was popular when I was in grad school) that the Canterbury Tales are boring and played out. That's all I teach for my Chaucer class, the whole CT (even Melibee, but not all the Parson) in Middle English. They do a little outside reading, and some do papers that compare CT material with some of the other poems, but they and I love the CT so much that it all just comes together. So much fun.

I do have one trick, which I'll share, though I'm supposed to hide my head in shame here: I break up the integrity of the A-Fragment (the horror!). Because the first tale after the General Prologue is the Knight's Tale, which is very long, difficult and confusing, I have them skip KnT. Why? Because when students are just learning Middle English, KnT is a horror: it takes so long at the speed they can read that either you spend three weeks on it, or you drive them crazy with so many hours of Middle English. So I skip right to the Miller's Tale and do the Knight at the end of the semester.

Does this work? Well, in my undergraduate class, taught by the great Peggy Knapp at Carnegie Mellon, we all hated the Knight's Tale despite the great battles, love interest, etc. I'm sure it wasn't due to the Tale itself, but to the steep learning curve of Middle English for novices. But when I teach KnT at the end of the semester, when they're all expert at ME, the students love it and consider it Chaucer's finest work and most beautiful tale (which it might be, though I love the Pardoner's Tale, in its setting, the most).

I've had a number of really good Chaucerians tell me that they are horrified that I break up the A-Fragment (More properly, Fragment I, Group A; the Canterbury Tales are organized in fragments; each fragment is made up of Tales that we know Chaucer intended to be in a certain order. So we know Chaucer intended General Prologue, Knight, Miller, Reeve, and Cook because there are internal links between the Tales. We can't be sure that Man of Law comes next, though most people agree. We know that Wife of Bath, Friar and Summoner go together, but we only infer that Clerk is supposed to come next). And I see where they're coming from: the Miller's Tale is a response to the Knight's Tale, where the Miller takes all the beautiful, chivalric romance that the Knight describes and says 'it's really all just about dirty, barnyard sex' (at least in many interpretations). If you don't read KnT, you don't have the references to Miller.

But my take is that students just don't understand KnT at that early stage of their Middle English reading. I'd rather they understood, even though they have to then retrospectively construct the Miller's 'quiting' of the Knight. But as far as I know, I'm the only person who does this, so maybe I'm playing too free and loose with Chaucer (after all, I'm not a real Chaucerian but an Anglo-Saxonist).

Advocacy in the Classroom and Tenure


K C Johnson's comments on a potential tenure scandal discussed in this Erin O'Connor's post made me want to discuss "academic freedom" a little bit. I've read the materials posted by Francisco Gil-White, an assistant prof. of psychology who does additional advocacy work on purported U. S. war crimes in Yugoslavia as well as being an advocate against anti-semitism. Gil-White seems likely to have his tenure denied and, as best one can tell from the materials posted, this denial is due to his using class time for discussion of his political work.

I can't have a real position on the merits of the specific case, since I don't have all the info, but it's worth discussing what should and shouldn't be in the classroom.

First, this would never be an issue if the professor were in History, or Political Science, or probably even English (though if he were a medievalist and were using class time on the 20th century, people might wonder). But since I don't have an insider's knowledge of "BioCultural Psychology," I can't opine on what belongs in the discipline or in the specific courses.

But the discussion of politics during undergraduate class time isn't as simple as either of the major camps seem to think. One camp, the "it doesn't belong there if it's not the subject of the course" seems on the surface quite reasonable. 'Teach Psychology (or Bio, or 18th century novels) and shut up about Iraq already' would be the understandable reflex of many in the blogosphere. But that approach, if taken to its logical conclusion, means that one manipulates or dissembles in front of one's students. I have a good friend who does this: he's proud that at the end of a course, the students have no idea what his actual political leanings are. He plays Devil's Advocate for either side, he attempts to keep a poker face, etc.

I'm sympathetic to this approach (and it's basically what I do), but I wonder if letting students believe something that's not true (i.e., that I don't have an opinion on issue X) is an honest thing to do. Is that, at its heart, good, honest pedagogy?

On the other hand, while I respect the political passion that some teachers carry into the classroom, I wonder if it is the best use of the students' time and, more importantly, if it isn't an abuse of the teacher's authority. No matter how you try to disguise it, you as the professor have the power in the classroom situation, and passionate politics can come close to forced indoctrination or, just as bad, coerced play-acting by the students, which is the reflex of the problem of play-acting by the professor.

It also should be the case that there is certain content-material that needs to be covered in any course. If the politics gets in the way of students understanding this material, no matter how important or passionately held the politics may be, then the students are not getting everything they need from the class. Of course there's a balance to be struck between simply learning material and learning how to think about it, but that balance needs to be discussed and interrogated: by students, mentors, departments and administrators as well as professors.

But in the end, and I'm afraid that this won't be a popular sentiment in the blogosphere, I think that we need to give professors near-dictatorial power in the classroom and trust them to do the right thing, even though some will fail that test. Not because professors are necessarily any more virtuous than anyone else (far from it), but because no one has devised a good and fair system of checks and balances, and the alternative--controlling professors via administrators who don't know the subject matter, or within-institution ad hoc peer review--is possibly a cure worse than the disease. That's the problem with trying to deal with these kinds of problems via tenure review. Better to have a good mentoring program that nips them in the bud (although it seems like such an approach was tried). The good news, if there is such, is that most professors I know are immensely influenced by student evaluations and peer comments not so much because they're scared of not getting tenure, but because they genuinely want to improve.

But this begs the question of what happens when you get someone who abuses his or her power in the classroom, and for that I don't have an answer, except to say that if I honestly believed someone was doing that, I would vote against his or her tenure regardless of scholarship or evaluations.

Tolkien Studies news

Things are proceeding apace with the publication of the first issue of Tolkien Studies by West Virginia University Press. It should appear in early April (around the same time my son is due to be born) and the brochure and subscription information are all being finalized. I'll post a link here and on my main page as soon as everything is out and official (and that should be in days, not weeks).

There's still a little room in Tolkien Studies volume II (yes, volume I isn't out yet and we're trying to finish up volume II. Such is publishing, I guess). So please send articles.

A Helpful Tip
When you're noting a totally obscure reference, say, a work you consulted once in the Newberry Library during the course of dissertation research back in, say, 1995, make sure to copy down all of the page numbers for the relevant quotations . I have now finished proofing / revising How Tradition Works down to the last few misplaced commas, split infinitives and transposed Latin endings. But I am going to have to drive up to the Harvard Library in the snow to get one stupid page number that I should have written down almost a decade ago. Arghh! (though I've got a request in to a friend...)

That said, if any of my erudite readers has access to the Hanslik edition of the Rule of St Benedict (R. Hanslik, ed. Benedicti Regula. 2nd ed. Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1977), you could be a big help to me. Some student has my library's copy out (almost certainly one of my students) and I just need to know which pages to cite for chapter 58.

Real posts on matters of greater interest soon, I promise.

Why the slow blogging?

A variety of reasons, most importantly that I'm in the process of going over the copy-editor's mark-up of the manuscript for How Tradition Works. She is a genius and has been improving the book immensely, but it's still my book, so when she suggests an article or a few pages of a book, I have to rush out, find the source, read it, and see if I agree that it belongs in the footnote. Tiring. And I just can't believe that after several revisions there were still this many mistakes for her to catch in the manuscript. Embarrassing.

But I did want to follow up on a few reactions to my post of the other day that was picked up by SDB and BAW and others. The level of invective that it has generated in a number of places (no, I won't feed the trolls, though you can use my site-meter referrer logs if you desire) goes a long way to proving my point. If you can't argue with people, but simply assert your superiority at having mastered some arcana, well, it's no wonder the wider public isn't influenced by your work.

But on the fun side of referrer logs, I came across some highschool or college students who were using one of my old articles, on Susan Cooper, and for whom I'd become some kind of drooling idiot who couldn't not possibly get anything right. That made my day, because I used to use that approach to articles I disagreed with in order to get me motivated to write a paper. And, as is almost always the case when there's name-calling involved, it's telling that the challenges are always focused on points of interpretation that are masquerading as points of fact (hint: since Cooper doesn't say whether or not Alfred was some kind of partially human Lord of the Light, analogous, perhaps, to Arthur, we have to infer. But whether or not the inference is correct is another story. Also, a sharp word does not equal a 'punishment'. But I digress...)
Good to see that some things never change and that people are reading my old Susan Cooper article, even if they hate it.

This post by Stephen den Beste (of whom I am a regular and grateful reader), and this one by 'Big Arm Woman,' (ditto what I said for SDB), and this one at Invisible Adjunct seem to be somewhat different variants of a meme that is spreading throughout the blogosphere. In general it is focused on criticism of humanities academia (and in particular the Modern Language Association). [N.B.: After I began composing this post, I found this discussion at Roger Simon's linked via this post at Glenn Reynolds.' I find the comments at Roger's blog the most troubling, but haven't really changed what's below to respond directly, yet.]

Let me start by admitting that while I am a member of the MLA, I think you would find it hard to find anyone who is more embarrassed about the organization than I am. Set aside the horror that is the MLA conference (you'll never find more miserable people who aren't actually incarcerated in any one place), the unbelievably useless resolutions passed by the delegate assembly, and the elevation of charlatans, like Edward Said (who didn't know squat about Dante, but that didn't stop him from opining...). Also forget that PMLA (the journal, supposedly the most prestigious in my field) has become boring and unreadable over the past ten years. But you can't forget or ignore the fact that seemingly a lot of intelligent, well-read, sophisticated people are just disgusted by humanities academia.

This is a problem.

For a lot of reasons, I think it's a bad thing to have so many people alienated from the professional world of letters (yes, yes, you can be educated and intelligent without any contact whatsoever with the academic world. Maybe it even helps. But the whole purpose of academia is to expand and disseminate human knowledge). Obviously if we are alienating so many smart people, we're doing something wrong.

Maybe we need to ask ourselves: "Why do they hate us?"

There are any number of 'standard' answers to this question, any maybe all together they do explain it, but I'm not so sure.
The first is the political one: academics are extreme leftists who practice Leninist tactics in order to preserve the ideological cocoon they have created.

There's no doubt that there are plenty of such people, and they're the most vocal on campus, but they are also mostly ignored by everyone except politically involved people on the other side. For example, my campus passed an anti-war resolution (stupid waste of time, regardless of what you think of the war, as I doubt there are ten people on earth who care what some percentage of the Wheaton College faculty thinks of the war) this year. There was any amount of sound and fury, but a large chunk of the faculty didn't bother to attend the faculty meeting at which the resolution was passed (including yours truly: perhaps the greatest benefit of tenure is that you can skip useless meetings and no one can do anything to you). And the students didn't appear to even notice.

Now I am disgusted and appalled that there are faculty who apparently have ideological criteria for grades. And the browbeating of students discussed in many of the posts I've referenced above is totally out of bounds. But I had some of the most doctrinaire leftists one could imagine when I was a student, and I never saw that kind of behavior, and I don't know anyone in my department who would even think of acting that way (and my dept. is comprised of very politically typical left-liberals for the most part). I don't doubt that there are such people, and they should be shunned and fired, but I tend to doubt that they are wide-spread enough to engender the kind of grass-roots hostility towards academics reflected in the posts above.

Another possibility for the hostility of engineers and scientists is the one suggested by SDB and by many posters on Roger's blog: humanities students, and professors, are simply stupider than those in the sciences and so they create jargon, confusion, rigid ideological tests, etc. to keep themselves from being challenged and shown to be stupid.

The problem with this analysis is that the most jargony, ridiculous, doctrinaire academics are, truth be told, really very smart. In fact they may be smarter than me and smarter than a lot of the technical people whose company I prefer: you have to be ridiculously clever, widely read, mentally agile, etc. to deal with the kind of theory, jargon, ideology that these folks deal with. Engineering and science (and I'm not just popping off; I have my first degree from Carnegie Mellon; I'm married to an engineer with a Ph.D. and helped with her dissertation in places; I can read technical papers; I passed DiffEQs, etc.) are in one very important way easy: they describe the real world and so they have to make sense. Things might be counterintuitive (though I don't include work by EE's and ECEs who deal with quantum stuff here), but even Fluids fundamentally makes sense; it's hard, but it makes sense. The postmodern stuff doesn't (which is why I think most of it is wrong), but you do need some pretty major mental skills to play the game. [n.b.: at this point in the argument I'm not taking a position on the tripartite division of philosophy that SDB brings up; it's probably mostly correct. I'm just trying to figure out where humanities academia has gone wrong].

So what is the problem? I think, as much as anything, it is a matter of style, and that humanities professors are, on the whole, in the wrong. You only have to read the comments on Invisible Adjunct, where the academics rather pathetically try to defend the MLA, to realize that way too many humanities academics don't know how to debate. They only know how to sneer.

I've seen this first hand too many times to count, and there is a fabulous dramatization of the process in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, where dinner at a restaurant turns into a train wreck when an engineer dares to tell a famous academic that he's full of shit when he's talking about the "information superhighway" strictly in terms of metaphor. The academic can't directly challenge the engineer's claims (since the engineer knows much more than the academic), so instead he shifts the debate to "meta" discussion about the influence of metaphors, etc.

If academics would recognize that there are a lot of very, very smart people out there who put their considerable brainpower into trying to understand things like packet-switched networks or football formations or concert hall sound dynamics, and if they would force themselves to recognize that such things are just as important as understanding literature (though they're not quite as important as knowing the date of the composition of Beowulf. Nothing is that important), they'd be able to carry on conversations with other folks in which they didn't come off as pompous, sneering jerks.

But jerks they do appear to be. Which is sad, because I know a lot of humanities academics and as individuals they are generally not jerks. But there is a deep, deep insecurity in humanities academics that makes them over-reach with their theories and their literary analyses. Tom Wolfe (I think) makes the point that, think what you want about Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionist artists, they never doubted for an instant that what they were doing was important and justified in and of itself. But the newer generation of 'political' artists give away, by the very lack of subtlety in their work, that they have no confidence that doing art is really justified. They have to make their art accomplish some other work such as solving the homeless problem or fighting racism.

When the art -- or the humanities scholarship -- fails to solves those problems, the artist is forced to deal with the cognitive dissonance of the claim of importance and the actual results. This kind of dissonance leads, I think, to the attitude the everyone who disagrees must be stupid. Thus, the sneer elevated to the most commonly used tool of rhetoric.

So, 'why do they hate us?' Because we tend to act superior, and people loathe people who act superior.

What's my solution? No much, sadly, though we fail to adapt at our peril. If academia continues to lose the interest and respect of people like those I've linked to above, it is a great loss for our culture, and for academia.

And that's unfortunate not only for opportunities lost, but also because what we do in the humanities actually really does matter. We are supposed to be engaged in the study of humanity and its works. A healthy self-confidence would mean that we could recognize that, well, a new theory on the dating of Beowulf ain't the polio vaccine, but not much out there is, really. That doesn't mean that my theory, or my teaching, or my research can't change people's lives in some small way. I'm proud of the bricks I've added to the tower of human understanding, small as they may be, and my goal is to do everything I can to keep adding bricks and, more importantly, to keep ushering people up the stairs of that tower. Then one day, perhaps, I'll be able to climb high enough to glimpse the far-off sea.

The Return of the Blogging

Sorry to have been absent for so long, but for the first time since before graduate school started, I decided to avoid doing new work between Christmas and New Years. I did grade a stack of papers and exams that was over 20 inches high, but other than that I was slack, spending most of my time playing with my daughter. No one gets into Christmas like a 3-year-old.

So I may have missed out on some good discussions of Return of the King. But Andrea Harris' review of Return of the King is pretty much what I would have written: she points to the same problems I thought marred the film (particularly the lowest-common-denominator character of Denethor; he should be a Lear, not a typical drooling villain from central casting). I think that the overall flaws in Jackson's execution are that in many places the screenwriter and the director didn't respect their audience enough: they could have left things challenging and complex, but they over-simplified. Thus the Frodo / Sam fight about the missing lembas (really a stupid 'Sam is fat' joke drawn out way too much) instigated by Gollum was far more shallow than necessary; the audience would have just understood a real fight simple about trusting/not-trusting Gollum (though, as I've said before, no one is offering me 300 million dollars to make movies). But RoK was a fine movie and I think I would have really loved it if I didn't know LotR so well.

Now, just in case you were thinking that a professor lives a life of luxury, I have to: finish entering changes in the proof copy of Tolkien Studies volume I and send to the printer; edit and re-layout my grammar book; enter the editor's suggested changes for the manuscript of How Tradition Works (and the editor is a genius so she's almost certainly given me a lot of good stuff to enter and revise); update all of my websites; revise my syllabi for Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer for next semester; write an article on Tolkien's Beowulf translations (without quoting them) that's due in three days for a collections coming out from Western Michigan University Press; give a talk at the University of South Carolina on January 15. All of these things must be done before classes start on January 27.

Quick news: NPR Today

I'll be on NPR's Talk of the Nation today in a segment that runs from 3:00-4:00 p.m. So you can hear me talk about JRRT. More importantly, Ursula Le Guin will also be on the show!!!!!!
I'm feeling a little star-struck...

Beowulf and Christianity (and by extension, JRRT and same)
Andrea Harris in this entry points out a number of flaws in some superficial 'Christian' readings of Tolkien. She also mentions that she wrote a paper on Christian themes in Beowulf, and one of her commenters mentions a hostile reception by Anglo-Saxonists of a Christian-focused Beowulf translation.

I thought it might be useful to mention what exactly we do know about the Christianity of Beowulf and what Tolkien thought about it, since I've read more than a few things on the web that are, well, confused.

Beowulf the poem, as we have it (i.e., in its manuscript form, not some postulated earlier version), is definitely written by a Christian. However, there is not a single reference to Christ, the Trinity, the resurrection, or the New Testament, which is very strange for an Anglo-Saxon Christian poem. The only real proof of a Christian (as opposed to a general monotheistic) poet is the inclusion of Cain and Abel (and, strangely enough, "Cain" is spelled wrong both times the word appears in the manuscript. More on that in some other post).

As Tolkien points out, the references to God aren't to Christ or specifically the Christian God, but to The Ruler, The Lord, The Measurer, etc. Why would a Christian poet, who knew about Cain and Abel, do this?

Tolkien's explanation has never been bettered: the poet was a Christian, but he was setting his story back in the pre-Christian past. He knew that the people in his story weren't Christian, but he also believed that Christian truths explained the way the universe worked. So he can say that The Ruler determined the outcome of a battle even if he knows that Beowulf wasn't Christian himself.

Now part of the brilliance of this interpretation is that it can't really be disproved by any one example. Tolkien even notes a few places he thinks that the poet has failed in tone (when pagan Hrethel is said to have "chosen God's light", i.e., died, Tolkien says that the phrase has "escaped from Christian poetry). And Tolkien thought that lines 175-188, which sound, to the ear familiar with Anglo-Saxon poetry, much more like a Christian homiletic piece than do any other lines in Beowulf, had been added to the poem at a later date. So the idea of a poet who is deliberately writing a kind of 'historical fantasy' is still preserved.

Now I think it's not a great stretch to suggest that Tolkien was doing much of the same thing in his work. If you look at the Athrabeth na Finrod Andreth, which is in Morgoth's Ring in the History of Middle-earth, you see Tolkien suggesting that men, back in the First Age, had a kind of prophesy that one day the creator would enter his own creation for the purpose of healing it. That day hadn't happened yet, so Tolkien was setting his Middle-earth stories before the incarnation. Thus he doesn't mention Christ, etc. Just like the Beowulf poet.

Andrea mentions Christian themes in Beowulf, which is a slightly different kettle of fish. I think Tolkien, and many scholars, would argue that the poet put those Christian themes there, but you actually don't need that hypothesis if you're a Christian who truly believes: since in the Christian worldview, the world works in a certain way, you'd expect to see those workings be universal. Similarly, physics is universal, so someone who knows no physics could describe, say, the behavior of a spring and we'd recognize the phenonemon. Thus if someone described, say, mercy, 'sapientia and fortitudo,' forgiveness, etc., a believing Christian could say that these fit into the way the world works.

As for the Beowulf poet, I think that he was a Christian looking back on the pagan past. Actually, I think he was a tenth-century monk revising an old and received poem, but that's the kind of assertion that starts bar-fights (or at least beer-throwing) among Anglo-Saxonists. And as for Tolkien, I think that his Christianity could not help but influence the world he created, but that looking for a didactic Christian message that was somehow hidden in the Lord of the Rings is perhaps not the most critically useful approach.

Also: Tolkien discovered Finnish in college and he never became fluent in the language, though he used its phonology as a basis for Quenya.

Also: I'm going to be talking about Tolkien and WWI on National Public Radio's "The Talk of the Nation;" we're taping tomorrow, so I'm guessing it'll be broadcast on Friday. I was on WBUR today; link when I find one.

GOTF in Toronto

Just got back from the Gathering of the Fellowship in Toronto. Over 2000 people, about 75% of them in full costume, attended. Over 100 showed up one afternoon to hear me talk about Beowulf. It was a great experience, more professionally run than all but the ISAS-level conferences, in a beautiful location and with wonderful people. I wish I'd been able to stay longer. Anthony and Jessica -- thank you for inviting me. I got to meet some great people, including my favorite Tolkien illustrator of all time, Ted Nasmith, and I was able to bring the importance and beauty of Beowulf to a whole new audience. Great, exciting stuff.

After the reaction to the OE reading, I definitely need to do the recording of the Beowulf MP3 sometime soon (my idea is to record the entire poem and then allow it to be dowloaded in sections; I'll be talking to the college radio station.

Did some interviews with Christian Science Monitor, WBUR, and a few others today and have an NPR interview on Talk of the Nation tomorrow between 2 and 3. Will post more later when I dig out from under the avalanche of email and pre-Christmas (and pre- seminar students over for dinner) work I have to do. And I have to figure out how a baby grand piano makes its way up to the second floor tomorrow....

Tedious Topic: Tolkien and Race
I normally try not to feed the trolls, and there's more trolling going on over here, but I'll take one more swing at this annoying, shallow topic.

I've previously shown, in this post, that the charge that Tolkien was personally a racist is completely contradicted by biography and published writing.

But there are actually three different charges mixed in with the tiresome 'Tolkien is a racist' attack. The first is the intentional, discussed in the links above. The second is only a little harder to counter: it's that the work itself is racist because readers can make links between, say, orcs and African Americans (my African-American wife and daughter have, well, strong feelings that this comparison is not polite or accurate). I think it's pretty simple to show the origins of the orcs as tortured elves, their lack of humanity, and, most importantly, this distinction from the Southrons, who could be matched up with people of African descent, shows that the case for orcs=black people is pretty weak.

Likewise the foolishness about the blond, blue-eyed overlords doesn't quite work if you actually read the books. Almost all the elves are supposed to be dark-haired and gray eyed (Galadriel is a major exception due to her ancestry; more on her later). Likewise the "high men" of Gondor. It's the "middle men" of Rohan who are Nordic blonds. [n.b.: there are some complexities here that I'll deal with in a moment].

But there is a third thread in the racism charge that is harder to deal with only because it is cast an an irrefutable charge: Tolkien is racist because he posits entire races of creatures that can only be dealt with by genocide (orcs; trolls). Q.E.D., Tolkien is promoting the genocide of 'inferior' or 'evil' races.

I think Tolkien obviates this problem by making the evil 'races' exist without true free will. That is, they came about either via the torture of elves or, and this is the latter, more developed explanation in the Athrabeth na Finrod Andreth, they proceeded from Morgoth like icebergs calving from a glacier. The amount of evil in the world remained the same, but Morgoth reduced himself by breaking off dragons, orcs, trolls, etc.

The real source of new evil in Middle-earth, then, is from Men who can be converted to evil through the mis-use of their free will. Since they are Men, the same 'race' as the other men, racial genocide isn't an option.

There are still problems here, because Tolkien ended up, through the power of literature, giving the orcs more "personality" than their metaphysical natures warranted (see Shippey, "Orcs, Wraiths and Wights" for the best discussion). All of a sudden it's not so clear cut that exterminating them is morally unproblematic. But that's a good thing about literature: as Iris Murdoch said, it forces you to admit that other people really exist. Frodo says that he pities even Sauron's slaves, and he is right to. But that doesn't mean that they don't have to be killed when they are a threat.

Thus I would say that if you want to read the Lord of the Rings as advocating genocide, I can't stop you. But I think your reading is shallow and uninformed, and I wonder at the kind of experiences of life and literature had by people who seem so intent on applying theories (political or otherwise) that they miss the great and beautiful individuality of the works that they are not really reading.

[*the complexities of the blond overlord class in elves comes because while 90% of the Noldor and Sindar in Middle-earth are dark-haired, the golden-haired strain of the House of Finwe comes from the Vanyar, the "higher" kindred of the elves. Feanor is jealous of Fingolfin, his younger half-brother, in part because half of Fingolfin's blood is from the "higher" caste among the elves. Thus, while there aren't any real "blond overlords" in the Lord of the Rings, you can find them in the Silmarillion (though the Vanyar pretty much just sit at the feet of the gods and sing; not much overlording for them...).]

The Wisdom of Students

In the final meeting of my senior seminar on Tolkien and Le Guin, I asked students to make some kind of judgment about the value of fantasy literature, particularly these two authors. Now these students are senior English majors; they don't just read fantasy by any means; they've had a full complement of courses in the traditional canon and beyond.

Yet to a one, they thought that Tolkien belonged right in with all of the other great writers they had studied. "He's trying to do different sorts of things than they are," one said. "So he set himself some major aesthetic goals, and met them. Isn't that the definition of a great writer?"

Another student talked about Tolkien's heroes: "We've got all of these books, hundreds of books, with anti-heroes or failed heroes: Gatsby, Absalom, Absalom! Beloved, Sun Also Rises, Catcher in the Rye... but can the anti-hero even work when you haven't had a regular hero? And is there even a regular hero in Tolkien? Aragorn, maybe, but Frodo and Gandalf really save the world (one directly, one through inspiration), and neither of them fits the hero template. If Normal Mailer is a genius for coming up with an anti-hero, isn't Tolkien more of a genius for coming up with a hero without supernatual powers who also isn't an anti-social, violent, destructive, self-involved jerk?

I love my students.

English Professors, Tolkien and Genres

(or, why do so many people think English professors are full of crap, part II)

Here is Part I

At the end of the previous post I put the suggestion that simply rejecting PoMo theory folks as being full of it was possibly not the most productive intellectual stance one can take. As Gary Farber notes, it's really easy to take a quick step from thinking that the disparagement of Tolkien by "high culture" literary people is stupid to arguing that the only good writing is genre fiction or that all literary judgments are just bogus snobbery. I don't think that's right.

First, I categorically reject the idea that genre fiction can't be good literature. Such a stance is akin to saying that sestinas can't be good poetry because that form is inferior/dated/impossible. Almost any chosen form, I think, could produce great literature and it would be great in part because of the ways that it interacted with the conventions of the genre (and there are just as many conventions -- and those just as unreal -- in 'standard' literature as there are in fantasy).

So the real question is, how does one go about recognizing good literature in fantasy? You can go with the gut instinct approach, or you can develop detailed sets of rules and definitions and see if a work fits them, or you can say "who are you to judge?" But whatever approach you take, you will be judging the literature, if only in the sense that you'll choose to ration some of your 2 billion seconds of life to reading the work.

The approach taken by mainstream critics could be summed up as: 'the best fantasy literature is that which is closest to mainstream literature in as many particulars as possible,' and this would explain the favorable treatment given to 'magical realism' of Borges, Garcia-Marquez, Llosa, Calvino, Rushdie, etc.

Another approach might be to try to determine which works within the genre create the most powerful aesthetic effects. One can do this simply by solipsistic reporting (it gave me goosebumps) or by sociological survey (x number of people felt this way -- often oversimplifed as x number of people bought this book). Or you can take some kind of aesthetic theory and figure out how the book fits with it.

Finally, you could determine how closely the book fits in with other books in the genre and how influential it has been on other authors.

Tolkien enthusiasts who've stuck with me this far will see that each of the approaches has been applied to Tolkien. He's like a bunch of mid-century authors (Golding, T.H. White) who used fantasy to argue big issues of good and evil; he makes medievalists get goosebumps when he tackles cruces from Beowulf; many nerdy people like me and other super smart folks love/buy Tolkien, therefore he's great; a work of fantasy should say X, and Tolkien says X....

I think in fact just about everyone who is a good critic ends up going with the gut feeling and then constructing an ex post facto explanation for it along the other lines. Only really tedious, programmatic people approach the texts with the theory in hand, waiting to see how it fits (the theory might be unconscious in everyone, but when it's right out there, you're setting up for a boring article).

If English professors better explained that many of us are trying desperately to give some kind of logical, rational, and perhaps even scientific explanation for our gut instincts and prejudices, I think we'd get more sympathy from normal readers who haven't had their brains damaged by grad school. But, sadly, the approaches that I've been reading toward Tolkien by non-Tolkienists (who have every right and responsibility to comment) have tended to sound like pronouncements on high from the Gods of Good Literature. Those Gods are dead. In the age of the internet, I think you have to convince people rather than trying to bully them into doing what you think is right (that's the purpose of syllabi, captive audience classes, and students who desperately need your class to graduate... heh heh heh).

Follow up post will try to get to some specifics of Tolkien's work that, IMHO, substantiate the idea that LotR is great literature.

Return of the King: More Thoughts

It's hard to comment in detail without spoiling the movie for others. But there's an interesting literary question raised by the fact that so many Tolkien enthusiasts among my students immediately wanted spoilers. If you know the books well, wouldn't spoilers be the last things you'd want? You already know how the story will turn out, after all, so the only real suspense would be how the director has adapted the story.

Unfortunately for me, I think that's how I watched the film: constantly thinking about what and why Jackson cut or added what he did. I don't think this is a particularly good way to watch a film, and I'm glad that, for whatever reason, I did it less with RoK than with FoR or TT and thus enjoyed RoK much more (and I think many Tolkienophiles will feel the same way).

But I wonder how important 'suspense' is in LotR, anyway. I first had the books read to me when I was about five years old, so I can't really remember whether I was terrified, say, at the Tower of Cirith Ungol (though I'd guess I was), but the 40 or so times I've read LotR since then seem to prove that, for me, the great value of the book isn't in surprises in the plot (or, Tolkien's illusion is so perfect that one re-lives the story again and thus gets all the old feelings even though the twists are known).

Since so many people do re-read Tolkien frequently (an amazing fact, given the length of the book), it's clear that there is something about Tolkien's work quite significantly different from most literature. It would be useful to figure out why this is so, and I have a guess at a partial explanation for the phenomenon.

Tolkien very skillfully withholds information in LotR so that the reader experiences the story (in terms of information) much in the same way as the mediating characters--the hobbits (except for the brief shift to the point of view, in 3rd person associated pov, of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli). For example, Strider appears out of nowhere and slowly develops as a character; even after Weathertop Sam isn't 100% sure of him. The hobbits are surprised by the landscapes they enter and the characters they meet. They don't have all the background until the Council of Elrond, and even then the whole history of the Ring is really only sketched in. The hobbits almost never know more than the reader, and thus the reader's consciousness must be, in some way, similar to the imagined consciousnesses of the hobbits: both are confused at the same times, startled at the same times, etc.

The delivery of information is one aspect of the films that I disliked a lot: everybody knows everybody else before they've met. Aragorn is famous; everyone is clear on the map, and when things aren't perfectly clear, Gandalf spells them out in somewhat tedious detail. Obviously in the films Jackson couldn't spent lots of time on introductions, getting to know characters, etc., but that one aspect of the presentation makes the films a lot more like your classic, cliched Conan-type fantasy ('the treasure is in the cave of Gror guarded by the beast of Snirga behind the mountain of Ploth, etc.' speech that cliched fantasy characters always give).

Critics have written a lot about the 'illusion of depth' in LotR (and now that we have Silm, UT and History of Middle-earth, it's clear that the depth wasn't really that much of an illusion!), but lots of subsequent fantasy has elaborate backgrounds. The difference is, Tolkien had the ability to hoard his information, to release just enough that the reader could follow things without being overwhelmed by characters who know everything (and those characters, like Gandalf, Elrond, and to some degree Aragorn, who do know everything are rather taciturn about it). This deft touch with information is one of the many things that make Tolkien so much better than his immitators, and make the job of a film-maker so much more difficult. [update: fixed stupid typos].

Return of the King

I saw Return of the King today thanks to some very generous support from a Wheaton alum. I won't give a full review, because I don't want to spoil things for people who have to wait until the middle of the month, but let me say that as a movie this one manage easily to top the other two. I could come up with all kind of picky criticisms (and I have some larger ones, as well), but on the whole this just blew me away--and I actually quite disliked Two Towers. The sheer spectacle, the visuals, the landscape, the special effects (seamlessly integrated)...

The audience was made up of jaded film critics and theater owners, and had only about 50 people in attendance. But spontaneous applause and cheering broke out three times and I myself got misty in more than one place. That might be the film just reminding me of the great scene in the novel, but I still give Jackson some props for getting the emotions right.

Ok, you probably want me to wear my Tolkien-critic hat: the treatment of Denethor is even worse than that of Faramir and shows that the critique of Tolkien for having 'black and white' characters is incredibly off the mark. Tolkien treats Denethor with great subtlety; Jackson does not -- it's over the top, in fact. The editing of the movie is odd: some things are very rushed, while we get image after image of catapults firing, many slow motion scenes, etc. On the other hand, no one is paying me 300 million dollars to have a deft hand in building tension, so perhaps there are reasons.

My critique about Middle-earth seeming too small is even more accurately applied to this movie, but it is already 3 hours and 15 minutes long, so I don't think more travelling scenes would have worked. At times I felt that the pace was breakneck and yet Jackson was leaving so much out, and I realized that it's probably impossible to do justice to LotR in less than, say, 24 hours of film.

Tomorrow I'll try to talk about why I think that the movies--whether you like or hate them -- really won't do much to Tolkien's legacy of work. But today, fresh out of the movie, I'll end with a few comments about it that hopefully won't spoil anything:

I said that I didn't think the scale of the battle of the Pelennor Fields being ten times larger than Helm's Deep would really make that much of a difference. I was really wrong.

Gimli's comic relief wasn't heavy-handed and worked in this film.

You've never seen such an amazing volcanic eruption.

And, finally, and most importantly to my students, I think:

EOWYN RULES!

Why do so many people think English professors are full of crap?
Got interested in this piece in Andrea Harris' blog and then, via another train of clicks that I can't replicate, found this discussion via Volokh.

I think there are some very important points in both posts, and even though they are on different topics, there are some unifying themes. I also thought I'd risk being one of those annoying pseudo- (but only pseudo, mind you) defenders of academia by saying that some of the commenters in Andrea's thread, and also other writers on the web whom I respect, like Stephen den Beste, are perhaps making a couple significant intellectual mistakes in their criticism of the humanities.

First, Andrea, Stephen, and commenters are exactly right in saying (in so many words), 'you should read any damn thing that gives you pleasure, and who cares what some academic dude with initials after his name says.' Absolutely true. Academics who try to 'cure' people of their reading tastes are doing an enormous disservice; it seems to me an ethical violation of sorts.

But (you knew there was a 'but' coming), literary studies, when done well, can and should enhance the pleasure you get from your reading, and they should lead you to other things that you'd also get pleasure out of, and they might even teach you how to get pleasure (and a lot of pleasure) out of texts you might otherwise think you wouldn't like.

And the criticisms in the Crooked Timber piece about post-modernism are more than reasonable. The claim of the supporters of Butler, Bhaba, et. al. is that to escape from Foucault's "prisonhouse of language" you have to be free to stretch logical and grammatical relations as far as they will go, thus opening up room for logical freedom otherwise trapped by language. I think that the 'hard' claim of the Foucaultians, that language actually and effectively stops people from arguing about certain relationships, etc., is straightforwardly contradicted by the data: Foucaultians talking about the prisonhouse of language, etc. So most people make a 'soft' claim about language: that it shapes unconscious thoughts, etc., through pre-programmed logics that are favorable to dominant power structures. But this 'soft' claim, it seems to me, doesn't justify the contradictory and incoherent writing by B, B, et. al., since the remedy for the kind of 'favored' inbuilt constructions of language would seem to be clear demonstrations of these things (i.e., 'the linguistic/logical embedded idea that black is the opposite of white is getting you to believe impossible things about people once you have classified them using this black/white system').

Ok. That was a long way to go. Anyone still with me?

The 'bad writing' among post-modernists, is, it seems to me (and here I'm in agreement with the Crooked Timber post) a way to disguise rather banal, cliched or rejected assertions. Butler's 'performative' is an example. Gender, according to her, isn't just something that 'is', it's something that has to be enacted or performed (there, I just saved you from having to read Gender Trouble). But a person isn't free to just indulge in any performance he/she wants to, since society constrains not only what those performances can be, but how they will be 'read' (there, you can now skip Bodies that Matter). There's nothing terribly objectionable about this, I think, but it reduces pretty quickly to 'so what?'


There's also another element to the argument. Philosophy, as practiced by real philosophers, is difficult. Every argument must abide by the rules of logic and, at the foundation, the principle of non-contradiction (you can't say A = ~A). But for some of the things that the postmodernists want to do, the principle of non-contradiction is a serious impediment. So you write your argument in an elaborate, circuitous way so that you end up harnessing the "slippage" between signifier and signified (Derrida modifying Saussure) so that you're asserting, logically, that A= ~A while you can deny that at any single step you said that A = ~A. Stanley Fish is particulalry good at this trick; he also uses the related trick of taking a description of something (people decide on the acceptability of a given interpretation of a text via the interaction of rhetoric and politics in 'interpretive communities') and making it into a normative statement: people should make literary judgments strictly due to the politics of interpretive communities.


Now, it may be necessary to assert that A = ~A in order to bring on the revolution, but you'll have to excuse me and a lot of other people if we find this to be a very weak foundation on which to build a theory of literature (and while we're on this, I find Fish's 'interpretive community' theory to be banal sophistry).

The problem for those of us who are literature professors and young(ish), is that the alternative to the PoMo ideology has been (or at least has been perceived to be) the kind of criticism that simply rejects any role of theory (any theory) at all. This is problematic, to say the least, not because we need theory for its own sake, but because the sorts of aesthetic judgments that people want to defend (this book is 'good' because...) come crashing down when you try to talk about aesthetics as self-evident. Self-evident to whom? The real role of a literary theory is to try to decide what the criteria are for good work. Or, if you want to just avoid the whole good/bad debate, you still want to figure out how the work of literature works, why it produces the effects it produces.

So, the old-fashioned critics invented the idea of "authorial intent." But, as Barthes and Foucault pointed out, while there almost certainly was an intent in the minds of the authors creating the works, recovering that intent, from the works themselves is, at the very least, highly problematic. I'd go so far as to say that the reasoning is circular: we know that the Beowulf poet wanted to create effect X in Beowulf because, by reading Beowulf, we find effect X, which therefore the poet wanted to put there, because he's a great poet. Why is he great? He wrote a great poem like Beowulf. I am only stereotyping a little bit here.

Now the philosophical problems with the approach I've given above should be obvious. Scholars who want to reject the PoMo approach (perhaps because it is fundamentally contaminated by Marxist assumptions not shared by many young scholars, perhaps for other reasons), have been seen to be stuck going back to the hoary "authorial intent" approaches, which, I believe, have been philosophically discredited (not merely fallen out of fashion).

Now here is where I can make this blather self-promotional, and say that my How Tradition Works book is an attempt to bypass the whole PoMo approach (well, maybe stealing some of its useful bits) and to try to find a way to approach literature and culture that is not author-intent focused and not PoMo. But that's for a different post.

Rather, I'd like to end this half of the post (the follow up will be on Tolkien, so everyone can read that; I'll post it after I see Return of the King tomorrow) by just reminding the people who are up in arms against English professors that there are serious philosophical problems that are raised by the PoMo's. I don't think that the PoMo solutions are correct, but I think to deny the problems, or to imply that academics are fools or are out to ruin literature for others, is, well, not a very productive intellectual position to take.

National Geographic Beyond the Movie: The Return of the King
I got my copy of the National Geographic video today and, after rescuing it from the vcr that was trying to eat the tape, watched it.

Verdict on the whole thing: Much better than I'd thought. When I was first asked to be in the video, I questioned the premise of linking Lord of the Rings with people and events in history who weren't necessarily (or were even definitely not) inspirations for Tolkien. It seemed potentially silly.

But give the producer and National Geographic some credit. They managed to play up the universalism of Tolkien's ideas by showing the similarities to historical situations. They didn't try to make connections in the wrong direction (i.e., Tenzing and Hilary inspiring the Frodo/Sam relationship), but instead showed how the literature sheds light on the history.

So LotR is put to the service of some nice little history lessons, and it all comes together quite well. My wife, who had been very skeptical, ended up enjoying it.

Verdict on Me: They actually used a fair bit of the interview and they spread it through the whole piece, which is a nice compliment. I'm not embarrassed, which is a relief.