Former Student Melissa S (now P)
I read your comment in the post below and wrote you an email, and then realized I don't have an address. Please email me at mdrout at wheaton college dot e d u .
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Thursday, April 20, 2006
The Evolution of my Syllabi
Sorry so little posting of late. I was in Italy giving a paper at the Leornungcraeft conference in Udine (and maybe someday I will write an epic about my journey and how incredibly much Swiss Air sucks -- sixteen hours late to the conference, none of it my fault). Then I came back to my daughter having two weeks of school vacation, my son's birthday party, Easter, and hundreds and hundreds of emails. Have now finished my Kalamazoo paper: "Albert S. Cook, The Invention of Cynewulf, and the Evolution of Anglo-Saxon Studies in America" and am moving on to proofreading A-D of the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. I spent nearly three hours today and didn't finish A. Do you realize that there are 26 letters that will have to be done? Argh. Why can't people follow simple formatting conventions? Why?
But that's not what I want to write about.
Instead, I want to talk about how my syllabi have evolved over time (could anything be more exciting?). A while back (could be weeks, could be months; I don't have time to check) Scott Nokes was part of a conversation about which writers and writings belong on a medieval lit syllabus.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I learned that I'll be mentoring a graduate student teaching medieval literature here at Wheaton. I helped said student (very minimally) with the syllabus, and it took me back to my own early, graduate school and immediate post-graduate syllabi: so complex, so ambitious, so throughouly planned out. I used to be that way.
But as time as gone on, my syllabi have evolved back into something that would be quite recognizeable to all the old farts I dissed when I was coming out of grad school: "Oh, a 'greatest hits' syllabus," I would sneer at the work of some geezerish faculty member if I noticed students using a traditional syllabus.
For myself, I tried it all: Reverse chronological order? Check. No chronology at all but rather thematic contrasts? Check. Mixture of medieval and modern? Check. Appropriations of the Medieval and their Sources? Check. Theme Course with much Medieval Material? Check.
And then there was the content of the syllabi. Non-literary texts? Check. Non-canonical literature? Check. Mix of works by women, heretics, outsiders? Check.
But that's all changed. I don't recall making a conscious decision, but very steadily my syllabi have evolved into "Greatest Hits" syllabi. And as I have done this, my courses have gotten better by just about every metric: my average grades are down, my enrollments are up, my evaluations are up, the number of students going to grad school is up, the number of students who take follow-up classes is up. I enjoy teaching my classes more.
Of course the most likely possibility is that I made an immediate switch from Young Turk to Old Fart the moment I got tenure. This may be the simplest explanation, since I don't feel like an Old Fart, which is the first sign.
But I think the evolution of my syllabi can be explained by a few simple principles:
1. It's a zero-sum game. Everything I put in the syllabus bumps something else.
2. This may be the only chance the students get to experience this material.
1 and 2 combine to make me really leery of bumping, say, Pearl, for mysticism (which I find tedious and can't abide, anyway). I think a student who studies mysticism will get a very interesting look into the culture of the Middle Ages. I think a student who studies Pearl will get a pretty good glimpse of medieval culture and will also have encountered (and possibly fallen in love with ) a textual artifact that he or she might remember some time in the future. And there are likely to be a lot more of the second type of student.
3. It's a lot easier to get students enthusiastic over battles, romances, dragons and intrigue than it is to get them excited about the Peasants' Revolt or the penitentials. I can channel that student excitement and use it to push them into additional hard work. If they don't have that excitement, I am the only out out in the rain pushing the bus, and we don't go nearly as far.
This is not to say that I don't do things that I think are innovative (I'll post my Chaucer syllabus and let you see for yourself how you can make assignments that build on one another in such a way as to give students mastery not only of the language, but of the research tools and the academic culture in which they encounter Chaucer). But my innovation comes, I think, mainly in the realm of class-to-class improvisations, moment-to-moment readings of the student engagement and the ability to talk when necessary and, at other times, shut up and let them roll with their ideas.
So far, so good. In my favorite class this year, Beowulf, my syllabus consisted of line numbers to be translated and discussed by a given day. That was it (though students did presentations on sub-topics of Beowulf studies. We are now on target to finish the poem on time, and my students completely kick ass at Old English right. In this case, less syllabus was more class.
Sorry so little posting of late. I was in Italy giving a paper at the Leornungcraeft conference in Udine (and maybe someday I will write an epic about my journey and how incredibly much Swiss Air sucks -- sixteen hours late to the conference, none of it my fault). Then I came back to my daughter having two weeks of school vacation, my son's birthday party, Easter, and hundreds and hundreds of emails. Have now finished my Kalamazoo paper: "Albert S. Cook, The Invention of Cynewulf, and the Evolution of Anglo-Saxon Studies in America" and am moving on to proofreading A-D of the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. I spent nearly three hours today and didn't finish A. Do you realize that there are 26 letters that will have to be done? Argh. Why can't people follow simple formatting conventions? Why?
But that's not what I want to write about.
Instead, I want to talk about how my syllabi have evolved over time (could anything be more exciting?). A while back (could be weeks, could be months; I don't have time to check) Scott Nokes was part of a conversation about which writers and writings belong on a medieval lit syllabus.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I learned that I'll be mentoring a graduate student teaching medieval literature here at Wheaton. I helped said student (very minimally) with the syllabus, and it took me back to my own early, graduate school and immediate post-graduate syllabi: so complex, so ambitious, so throughouly planned out. I used to be that way.
But as time as gone on, my syllabi have evolved back into something that would be quite recognizeable to all the old farts I dissed when I was coming out of grad school: "Oh, a 'greatest hits' syllabus," I would sneer at the work of some geezerish faculty member if I noticed students using a traditional syllabus.
For myself, I tried it all: Reverse chronological order? Check. No chronology at all but rather thematic contrasts? Check. Mixture of medieval and modern? Check. Appropriations of the Medieval and their Sources? Check. Theme Course with much Medieval Material? Check.
And then there was the content of the syllabi. Non-literary texts? Check. Non-canonical literature? Check. Mix of works by women, heretics, outsiders? Check.
But that's all changed. I don't recall making a conscious decision, but very steadily my syllabi have evolved into "Greatest Hits" syllabi. And as I have done this, my courses have gotten better by just about every metric: my average grades are down, my enrollments are up, my evaluations are up, the number of students going to grad school is up, the number of students who take follow-up classes is up. I enjoy teaching my classes more.
Of course the most likely possibility is that I made an immediate switch from Young Turk to Old Fart the moment I got tenure. This may be the simplest explanation, since I don't feel like an Old Fart, which is the first sign.
But I think the evolution of my syllabi can be explained by a few simple principles:
1. It's a zero-sum game. Everything I put in the syllabus bumps something else.
2. This may be the only chance the students get to experience this material.
1 and 2 combine to make me really leery of bumping, say, Pearl, for mysticism (which I find tedious and can't abide, anyway). I think a student who studies mysticism will get a very interesting look into the culture of the Middle Ages. I think a student who studies Pearl will get a pretty good glimpse of medieval culture and will also have encountered (and possibly fallen in love with ) a textual artifact that he or she might remember some time in the future. And there are likely to be a lot more of the second type of student.
3. It's a lot easier to get students enthusiastic over battles, romances, dragons and intrigue than it is to get them excited about the Peasants' Revolt or the penitentials. I can channel that student excitement and use it to push them into additional hard work. If they don't have that excitement, I am the only out out in the rain pushing the bus, and we don't go nearly as far.
This is not to say that I don't do things that I think are innovative (I'll post my Chaucer syllabus and let you see for yourself how you can make assignments that build on one another in such a way as to give students mastery not only of the language, but of the research tools and the academic culture in which they encounter Chaucer). But my innovation comes, I think, mainly in the realm of class-to-class improvisations, moment-to-moment readings of the student engagement and the ability to talk when necessary and, at other times, shut up and let them roll with their ideas.
So far, so good. In my favorite class this year, Beowulf, my syllabus consisted of line numbers to be translated and discussed by a given day. That was it (though students did presentations on sub-topics of Beowulf studies. We are now on target to finish the poem on time, and my students completely kick ass at Old English right. In this case, less syllabus was more class.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
"Critical Thinking": What a Piece of Cant
Every once in a while I read or hear something that makes me realize that I've been unconsciously spewing cant about something for a long, long time. I get kind of a sick feeling when I realize this, because one thing I try to do, in keeping with my research in memetics, is to harden myself against the sorts of things that everyone is saying. My misanthropic gut instinct usually tells me that if everyone is saying it, it's probably wrong.
(I think this is why I tend to be very comfortable hanging out with scientists. One of my best friends at Wheaton is a scientist and the kind of person who immediately attempts to find alternate explanations for phenomena that are presented to her as facts. This can be difficult, I think, for the kind of people who like to say "studies show X" and have people believe them. Betsey won't let that nonsense go on for two minutes).
On Friday a friend from graduate school asked me to look over the introduction he's written for an essay collection. Among other very interesting things that he had to say, he took on the shibboleth (and called it that) of "critical thinking."
If you are currently in academia, or have been anywhere near it for the past twenty years, you've probably heard a lot about "critical thinking." Everyone agrees that it is the most important thing that we teach. Why, if students learn "critical thinking," then they don't actually have to learn any specific material: as long as they can think critically about it, well, our job is done. Administrators love "critical thinking," as do other professors, potential donors, parents and even students.
So of course we are probably long overdue for someone to throw some cold water on the whole idea.
"Critical thinking" appears to have all the qualities of a piece of cant. I'm not sure we do teach our students to think critically, and furthermore, I'm not so sure that we think criticallly, and I'm not even sure that if we did, it would make the slightest bit of difference.
Furthermore, saying that you are more concerned about teaching "critical thinking" than about teaching your subject matter is an example of pre-emptive rhetorical surrender and is the kind of thing that the humanities have been doing, to their great detriment, throughout my lifetime. If you are only concerned that your subject teaches "critical thinking," then there's really no reason for your subject to exist--if another subject came along that taught "critical thinking" just as well or better than yours, then why keep, say, a medievalist around when you can replace that person?
I think this is exactly why so many important, traditional disciplines have hemmorhaged students, tenure-lines and respect for the past thirty years. Because if you can get "critical thinking" from just about any subject (and believe me, every subject claims to teach "critical thinking"), then what's the payoff for studying a difficult subject like medieval literature? Trying to make the argument that difficult subjects teach more critical thinking is fighting on unfavorable ground: how can you be sure? You, in medieval lit, have to spend hours of class time on history, languages, paleography, theology, metrics, etc. In this other class, which doesn't have all that stuff, we can "think critically" just about the entire time.
Thinking about it more, and realizing that the phrase "critical thinking" is a piece of cant, I'm not sure that I ever learned how to think critically in a single class. And I'm not sure I've ever taught a student to think critically, either. I think at one stage in my teaching life I tried to teach them to be more skeptical (or, as one of my friends in the English department always says, "to be suspicious"), but even here I'm not particularly sure, and I'm not sure such teaching would really be worth their time or mine.
What I do think I got from my classes, and what I think I give to my students, is a more complete picture of the world, a more sophisticated model inside their heads, a more detailed map (though that map can never be as detailed as the territory). To speak of memes: the memetic ecosystem inside their minds is more complex and richer than it would be if they hadn't take the class, had the discussions, learned the material. And therefore that memetic ecosystem has a better chance of generating interesting, valuable, previously unknown combinations and permutations of memes.
So if you, like me, say or have said that you are more concerned about teaching "critical thinking" than the actual subject material, you, like me, are guilty of transmitting cant. And the transmission of cant shows that you're not practicing "critical thinking."
Every once in a while I read or hear something that makes me realize that I've been unconsciously spewing cant about something for a long, long time. I get kind of a sick feeling when I realize this, because one thing I try to do, in keeping with my research in memetics, is to harden myself against the sorts of things that everyone is saying. My misanthropic gut instinct usually tells me that if everyone is saying it, it's probably wrong.
(I think this is why I tend to be very comfortable hanging out with scientists. One of my best friends at Wheaton is a scientist and the kind of person who immediately attempts to find alternate explanations for phenomena that are presented to her as facts. This can be difficult, I think, for the kind of people who like to say "studies show X" and have people believe them. Betsey won't let that nonsense go on for two minutes).
On Friday a friend from graduate school asked me to look over the introduction he's written for an essay collection. Among other very interesting things that he had to say, he took on the shibboleth (and called it that) of "critical thinking."
If you are currently in academia, or have been anywhere near it for the past twenty years, you've probably heard a lot about "critical thinking." Everyone agrees that it is the most important thing that we teach. Why, if students learn "critical thinking," then they don't actually have to learn any specific material: as long as they can think critically about it, well, our job is done. Administrators love "critical thinking," as do other professors, potential donors, parents and even students.
So of course we are probably long overdue for someone to throw some cold water on the whole idea.
"Critical thinking" appears to have all the qualities of a piece of cant. I'm not sure we do teach our students to think critically, and furthermore, I'm not so sure that we think criticallly, and I'm not even sure that if we did, it would make the slightest bit of difference.
Furthermore, saying that you are more concerned about teaching "critical thinking" than about teaching your subject matter is an example of pre-emptive rhetorical surrender and is the kind of thing that the humanities have been doing, to their great detriment, throughout my lifetime. If you are only concerned that your subject teaches "critical thinking," then there's really no reason for your subject to exist--if another subject came along that taught "critical thinking" just as well or better than yours, then why keep, say, a medievalist around when you can replace that person?
I think this is exactly why so many important, traditional disciplines have hemmorhaged students, tenure-lines and respect for the past thirty years. Because if you can get "critical thinking" from just about any subject (and believe me, every subject claims to teach "critical thinking"), then what's the payoff for studying a difficult subject like medieval literature? Trying to make the argument that difficult subjects teach more critical thinking is fighting on unfavorable ground: how can you be sure? You, in medieval lit, have to spend hours of class time on history, languages, paleography, theology, metrics, etc. In this other class, which doesn't have all that stuff, we can "think critically" just about the entire time.
Thinking about it more, and realizing that the phrase "critical thinking" is a piece of cant, I'm not sure that I ever learned how to think critically in a single class. And I'm not sure I've ever taught a student to think critically, either. I think at one stage in my teaching life I tried to teach them to be more skeptical (or, as one of my friends in the English department always says, "to be suspicious"), but even here I'm not particularly sure, and I'm not sure such teaching would really be worth their time or mine.
What I do think I got from my classes, and what I think I give to my students, is a more complete picture of the world, a more sophisticated model inside their heads, a more detailed map (though that map can never be as detailed as the territory). To speak of memes: the memetic ecosystem inside their minds is more complex and richer than it would be if they hadn't take the class, had the discussions, learned the material. And therefore that memetic ecosystem has a better chance of generating interesting, valuable, previously unknown combinations and permutations of memes.
So if you, like me, say or have said that you are more concerned about teaching "critical thinking" than the actual subject material, you, like me, are guilty of transmitting cant. And the transmission of cant shows that you're not practicing "critical thinking."
Friday, March 24, 2006
Why an Education at a Place Like Wheaton is Worth the Exhorbitant Price
I noticed this posting by Margaret Soletan at University Diaries about the Colleges that Change Lives book by Loren Pope. Wheaton is one of those forty colleges, and that's one of the reasons (that we change lives, not that we're in the book) I've been very happy to stay here even when other opportunities at other 'prestige levels' have presented themselves.
An example: Friday a colleague copied me on an email she wrote to a student who is graduating this year. Now of course I don't have favorites, but if I did, this student would be one of them. Intense about everything he/she does; really devoted to intellectual life without being arrogant about it; well read from a genuine sense of interest; just great fun to have in class because he/she knows how to argue and have a good time doing it.
But this student is not very worldly at all and is about to graduate into a world that puts a high premium on being worldly. I know that this student is going to be hugely successful one day, but I'm guessing that the first year or so is going to be a challenge, and the student knows this and is, as is every about-to-graduate senior, very worried.
Well, my colleague wrote a three-page email to the student discussing strategies for getting through the next year, and not one word was boiler-plate or cliche. Everthing was exactly tailored to the student, based on much discussion and much thought. My colleague discussed the specific worries the student has, the specific strengths and talents the student has, and my colleague came up with really solid, practical advice for the student. This email must have taken a good solid hour to write, not to mention the many conversations that must have led up to it. The thought behind it has obviously been developing for the years that we have both been advising this student.
I think if the student takes this advice, he/she will have much less of a struggle in the next couple of years and will much more easily move towards the great success he or she is destined for. For this student in particular, but for most students, really, a bunch of platitudes wasn't going to cut it.
But although my colleague's work is (like everything this colleague does) exceptionally good, it is the norm rather than the exception. Although I'm obviously not as thoughtful or talented as my colleague, I've had the great opportunity to see students' lives change on my watch, and occasionally I've been able to give them a little bit of help. It is one of the best things about teaching at Wheaton.
That's why you pay 40K a year to send your kid to college.
I noticed this posting by Margaret Soletan at University Diaries about the Colleges that Change Lives book by Loren Pope. Wheaton is one of those forty colleges, and that's one of the reasons (that we change lives, not that we're in the book) I've been very happy to stay here even when other opportunities at other 'prestige levels' have presented themselves.
An example: Friday a colleague copied me on an email she wrote to a student who is graduating this year. Now of course I don't have favorites, but if I did, this student would be one of them. Intense about everything he/she does; really devoted to intellectual life without being arrogant about it; well read from a genuine sense of interest; just great fun to have in class because he/she knows how to argue and have a good time doing it.
But this student is not very worldly at all and is about to graduate into a world that puts a high premium on being worldly. I know that this student is going to be hugely successful one day, but I'm guessing that the first year or so is going to be a challenge, and the student knows this and is, as is every about-to-graduate senior, very worried.
Well, my colleague wrote a three-page email to the student discussing strategies for getting through the next year, and not one word was boiler-plate or cliche. Everthing was exactly tailored to the student, based on much discussion and much thought. My colleague discussed the specific worries the student has, the specific strengths and talents the student has, and my colleague came up with really solid, practical advice for the student. This email must have taken a good solid hour to write, not to mention the many conversations that must have led up to it. The thought behind it has obviously been developing for the years that we have both been advising this student.
I think if the student takes this advice, he/she will have much less of a struggle in the next couple of years and will much more easily move towards the great success he or she is destined for. For this student in particular, but for most students, really, a bunch of platitudes wasn't going to cut it.
But although my colleague's work is (like everything this colleague does) exceptionally good, it is the norm rather than the exception. Although I'm obviously not as thoughtful or talented as my colleague, I've had the great opportunity to see students' lives change on my watch, and occasionally I've been able to give them a little bit of help. It is one of the best things about teaching at Wheaton.
That's why you pay 40K a year to send your kid to college.
Friday, March 17, 2006
Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf:
The Power of Performance
[Sorry to have taken so long to post anything. I was in NY, recording a complete course of Science Fiction lectures for Recorded Books. The recording went really, really well, but it is physically exhausting to do fourteen 35-minute lectures in two days. In related news, I just learned that Barnes and Noble is going to be carrying the course I recorded in December, Rings, Swords and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which is exciting. If you're interested, look for their "Portable Professor" section in stores. Hopefully they'll pick up the Chaucer and Science Fiction courses (and more things are in the works: with any luck, two more courses next year for Recorded Books and a Beowulf podcast on my own)]
And now to my main topic (which is avoiding grading more papers and writing my paper that I'm giving in Italy):
I had seen Benjamin Bagby's performance of Beowulf several times previously, which was why I arranged to have him come to Wheaton and perform last week. Ben will be premiering a new, extended version at Lincoln Center this summer, so you have a chance to see him there and, I assume, other places afterwards. It is a remarkable performance and it gets better each time I hear it. (Even though this time I was running the supertitles and thus couldn't just relax into the performance, close my eyes, and listen to the language).
I was also immensely proud of the Wheaton community: we filled the 300+ seat Weber Theatre on the Thursday night before Spring Break (and the performance was only mandatory for my ten Beowulf students). Bagby got a standing ovation at the end of the performance, and afterwards people were lurking around the corridors of Watson Fine Arts talking about the performance. Ben really makes Beowulf (from the beginning through Grendel's death) into a riveting performance, and he shows, I think, that all of the various "digressions" in the first 852 lines of the poem contribute to the suspense and excitement of the piece. Honestly, after you hear Ben's performance you absolutely believe that Beowulf was performed for an audience, not just written in a silent scriptorium.
Finally, I had the great fun of being allowed to play Ben's harp (lyre, if you want to be technical, but the same instrument was called a harp in Anglo-Saxon England). Even with no harp training, I was able to play a few little runs and accompany myself singing the first eleven lines of the poem (for the purpose of sound check only, and Ben was too polite to tell me if I sounded awful when I was singing the OE). I think I may get myself a lyre this summer as a "teaching tool," (and thus eligible for my Prentise Professorship stipend), and I may include some lyre-playing on the Beowulf cd/podcasts I am developing.
Ben's longer performance will soon be released on DVD, and I encourage you to buy it (and will post a link when it's up). But even more I encourage you to see him perform live. You won't forget the experience.
Thær wæs hearpan sweg, swutol sang scopes.
The Power of Performance
[Sorry to have taken so long to post anything. I was in NY, recording a complete course of Science Fiction lectures for Recorded Books. The recording went really, really well, but it is physically exhausting to do fourteen 35-minute lectures in two days. In related news, I just learned that Barnes and Noble is going to be carrying the course I recorded in December, Rings, Swords and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which is exciting. If you're interested, look for their "Portable Professor" section in stores. Hopefully they'll pick up the Chaucer and Science Fiction courses (and more things are in the works: with any luck, two more courses next year for Recorded Books and a Beowulf podcast on my own)]
And now to my main topic (which is avoiding grading more papers and writing my paper that I'm giving in Italy):
I had seen Benjamin Bagby's performance of Beowulf several times previously, which was why I arranged to have him come to Wheaton and perform last week. Ben will be premiering a new, extended version at Lincoln Center this summer, so you have a chance to see him there and, I assume, other places afterwards. It is a remarkable performance and it gets better each time I hear it. (Even though this time I was running the supertitles and thus couldn't just relax into the performance, close my eyes, and listen to the language).
I was also immensely proud of the Wheaton community: we filled the 300+ seat Weber Theatre on the Thursday night before Spring Break (and the performance was only mandatory for my ten Beowulf students). Bagby got a standing ovation at the end of the performance, and afterwards people were lurking around the corridors of Watson Fine Arts talking about the performance. Ben really makes Beowulf (from the beginning through Grendel's death) into a riveting performance, and he shows, I think, that all of the various "digressions" in the first 852 lines of the poem contribute to the suspense and excitement of the piece. Honestly, after you hear Ben's performance you absolutely believe that Beowulf was performed for an audience, not just written in a silent scriptorium.
Finally, I had the great fun of being allowed to play Ben's harp (lyre, if you want to be technical, but the same instrument was called a harp in Anglo-Saxon England). Even with no harp training, I was able to play a few little runs and accompany myself singing the first eleven lines of the poem (for the purpose of sound check only, and Ben was too polite to tell me if I sounded awful when I was singing the OE). I think I may get myself a lyre this summer as a "teaching tool," (and thus eligible for my Prentise Professorship stipend), and I may include some lyre-playing on the Beowulf cd/podcasts I am developing.
Ben's longer performance will soon be released on DVD, and I encourage you to buy it (and will post a link when it's up). But even more I encourage you to see him perform live. You won't forget the experience.
Thær wæs hearpan sweg, swutol sang scopes.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
A Better Man Than I Am
My co-professor in the Connection we're teaching ("The Edge of Reason") held the midterm for his half of the class today. Because we take turns teaching the class, which only meets twice per week, we are each limited to about 13 meetings over the course of the semester. So my co-professor decided that he would not use classroom time for the review session but would, on his own, uncompenstated time (which also costs babysitter money, I might add) offer a supplementary review.
One student went berserk, and I mean that in just about the technical sense of the term. All that was missing was an axe and a beheaded cow and you'd have Egil Skallagrimmson. The student accused my partner of being "irresponsible," "arrogant" and, in a later email, "a pompous ass." We wrote that if my co-professor was laying bleeding on the sidewalk, he'd walk by. His most damning criticism: "you are just too smart to be teaching."
Now my first reaction was "We need to slap the nonsense out out of this little wretch, and right fast." But my co-professor kept corresponding, drawing out more abuse. At first I thought this might be a case for the Honor Board, which handles civility issues, but then my co-professor provoked a core-dump that showed that this student has really serious problems of some sort going on. He was then able to get the counselling center involved, and maybe this student can get the help he needs now (and some training in minor social skills such as not giving authority figures gratuitous insults).
In all of this my co-professor showed why he is a better teacher than I am. I would have terminated the interaction after the first really obnoxious email. That would have been the end. But by going back and forth, we discovered that there was a problem and it might be important to address it.
And to be fair, some of the whining was actually funny (undercutting the student's whole argument): It boiled down to:' you are the meanest, meanest, meanest big meany ever.' Fortunately, both of us have children. We're immune. We've heard whining that college sudents can only begin to imagine.
Students inclined to whine: I scoff at your tiny, pathetic attempts at whining. Until I see you lying face-down in the hallway, banging your heads against the floor due to Bob the Builder not being on television, you just won't impress me. I advise getting out of the whining business. You're not even in the league, you amateurs.
My co-professor in the Connection we're teaching ("The Edge of Reason") held the midterm for his half of the class today. Because we take turns teaching the class, which only meets twice per week, we are each limited to about 13 meetings over the course of the semester. So my co-professor decided that he would not use classroom time for the review session but would, on his own, uncompenstated time (which also costs babysitter money, I might add) offer a supplementary review.
One student went berserk, and I mean that in just about the technical sense of the term. All that was missing was an axe and a beheaded cow and you'd have Egil Skallagrimmson. The student accused my partner of being "irresponsible," "arrogant" and, in a later email, "a pompous ass." We wrote that if my co-professor was laying bleeding on the sidewalk, he'd walk by. His most damning criticism: "you are just too smart to be teaching."
Now my first reaction was "We need to slap the nonsense out out of this little wretch, and right fast." But my co-professor kept corresponding, drawing out more abuse. At first I thought this might be a case for the Honor Board, which handles civility issues, but then my co-professor provoked a core-dump that showed that this student has really serious problems of some sort going on. He was then able to get the counselling center involved, and maybe this student can get the help he needs now (and some training in minor social skills such as not giving authority figures gratuitous insults).
In all of this my co-professor showed why he is a better teacher than I am. I would have terminated the interaction after the first really obnoxious email. That would have been the end. But by going back and forth, we discovered that there was a problem and it might be important to address it.
And to be fair, some of the whining was actually funny (undercutting the student's whole argument): It boiled down to:' you are the meanest, meanest, meanest big meany ever.' Fortunately, both of us have children. We're immune. We've heard whining that college sudents can only begin to imagine.
Students inclined to whine: I scoff at your tiny, pathetic attempts at whining. Until I see you lying face-down in the hallway, banging your heads against the floor due to Bob the Builder not being on television, you just won't impress me. I advise getting out of the whining business. You're not even in the league, you amateurs.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Arghh! I'm Affected
It's just been pointed out to me that I spell "plowing" as "ploughing," and that this is an affectation, adopting the British spelling for a word that is fully within American English.
It does look pompous, doesn't it?
In my defense, I had no idea that I was doing this. I just typed "...so I am ploughing through the Science Fiction lectures as quickly as I can." It just came naturally.
Damn you, William Langland. Damn you to hell!
[Update: It gets worse. In my own Vita I have an article on Piers Plowman. Yes, spelled that way. I'm not just affected, I'm newly affected!]
It's just been pointed out to me that I spell "plowing" as "ploughing," and that this is an affectation, adopting the British spelling for a word that is fully within American English.
It does look pompous, doesn't it?
In my defense, I had no idea that I was doing this. I just typed "...so I am ploughing through the Science Fiction lectures as quickly as I can." It just came naturally.
Damn you, William Langland. Damn you to hell!
[Update: It gets worse. In my own Vita I have an article on Piers Plowman. Yes, spelled that way. I'm not just affected, I'm newly affected!]
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Terrible Writing
No, not the student papers I've been grading (some of which have been excellent). My own writing in the (sadly, not so distant) past.
Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy in this post writes about finding an old article and being embarrassed at how wordy and convoluted his writing was. I have had exactly the same experience in the final editing of How Tradition Works (final proofs are in transit as I write this).
It's hard to do a lot of editing at the galley stage, and I probably drove my editor crazy, but, well, what was I thinking???? There were so many sentences where I actually had to stop and re-parse the entire thing to make sure that the subject and the verb agreed. They were that really so complicated that it wasn't obvious. And everything was hedged six ways from Sunday, with multiple subjects and multiple objects in some kind of hideous mis-mosh. Ugh.
Partly this is a problem with academic writing and dissertation writing in particular (although HTW isn't my dissertation, a lot of the basic research grew out of the diss, which clearly contaminated it). It's not that I was trying to seem smart (I don't think), or that I thought obfuscation was a good idea (my original goal, even way back at the dissertation stage, was to write a book that would fit both the popular and the academic audiences, a la Stephen Jay Gould). It was more that even five years ago I wasn't as confident about my ideas and my research as I am now. And when you're not confident, you go to extreme lengths to make sure that you dot every i and cross every t, not only in terms of content but in terms of form -- you try to show, in every sentence, that you've considered the complexities of every question.
I think I've slashed out the most horrendous of the tangled sentences, but, well, just ugh!
On a related note, I have now, through consideration of my own writing, formulated several rules that may be of help to those just entering academia:
Anything that follows "of course" is almost certainly questionable and in fact likely points in the opposite direction of the way the author is using it.
Likewise, if a sentence begins "clearly" or "obviously," you can be pretty darn sure that what follows will not be clear or obvious.
If you reach the phrase "that is to say," stop and skip to the next paragraph, because everything that follows was just covered in the prevous sentences.
Rhetorical questions are a sign that the author doesn't want you to consider what he or she has just written very closely. Rhetorical questions are now my pet peeve. If I can convince my co-editors, I am going to ban them from Tolkien Studies and I am now forbidding my students from using them. In the past eight weeks (since I have been thinking about this), I have yet to find a single situation in which a rhetorical questions is more logically effective than the answer to that rhetorical question. Why do people use them? Because they are on weak logical ground and they want to shove the reader along before he or she notices that there is something wrong.
Ok, back to other work.
And for those three family members who are interested:
The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia is done as of Monday (until page proofs come in, of course).
Tolkien Studies volume 3 is done except for editing one article and page proofs (If you owe a person a beer for a small favor, I owe Marcel Bülles something like four kegs for the bibliography, and I'll probably have to get a pony for my research assistant, Rebecca Epstein).
The fantasy course, Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature for Recorded Books is done and at the printer.
The final proofs of How Tradition Works are FedExing their way to me and will be back to the printer in ten days for late April delivery.
Still to do:
Faculty lunch talk: "Beowulf: Is it really the greatest English poem?" March 2.
Hosting (and now, running the supertitles) of Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf, March 9 at Wheaton.
Fourteen Science Fiction lectures to write for Recorded Books by March 13.
Paper/Book Chapter “Possible Instructional Uses of the Exeter Book 'Wisdom Poems: The Benedictine Reform Context,” Universitá Udine, Italy, April 6-8 at the Leornungcræft conference.
Kalamazoo Paper: “Albert S. Cook and the Invention of Cynewulf: The Origins of English Studies in America.”
No, not the student papers I've been grading (some of which have been excellent). My own writing in the (sadly, not so distant) past.
Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy in this post writes about finding an old article and being embarrassed at how wordy and convoluted his writing was. I have had exactly the same experience in the final editing of How Tradition Works (final proofs are in transit as I write this).
It's hard to do a lot of editing at the galley stage, and I probably drove my editor crazy, but, well, what was I thinking???? There were so many sentences where I actually had to stop and re-parse the entire thing to make sure that the subject and the verb agreed. They were that really so complicated that it wasn't obvious. And everything was hedged six ways from Sunday, with multiple subjects and multiple objects in some kind of hideous mis-mosh. Ugh.
Partly this is a problem with academic writing and dissertation writing in particular (although HTW isn't my dissertation, a lot of the basic research grew out of the diss, which clearly contaminated it). It's not that I was trying to seem smart (I don't think), or that I thought obfuscation was a good idea (my original goal, even way back at the dissertation stage, was to write a book that would fit both the popular and the academic audiences, a la Stephen Jay Gould). It was more that even five years ago I wasn't as confident about my ideas and my research as I am now. And when you're not confident, you go to extreme lengths to make sure that you dot every i and cross every t, not only in terms of content but in terms of form -- you try to show, in every sentence, that you've considered the complexities of every question.
I think I've slashed out the most horrendous of the tangled sentences, but, well, just ugh!
On a related note, I have now, through consideration of my own writing, formulated several rules that may be of help to those just entering academia:
Anything that follows "of course" is almost certainly questionable and in fact likely points in the opposite direction of the way the author is using it.
Likewise, if a sentence begins "clearly" or "obviously," you can be pretty darn sure that what follows will not be clear or obvious.
If you reach the phrase "that is to say," stop and skip to the next paragraph, because everything that follows was just covered in the prevous sentences.
Rhetorical questions are a sign that the author doesn't want you to consider what he or she has just written very closely. Rhetorical questions are now my pet peeve. If I can convince my co-editors, I am going to ban them from Tolkien Studies and I am now forbidding my students from using them. In the past eight weeks (since I have been thinking about this), I have yet to find a single situation in which a rhetorical questions is more logically effective than the answer to that rhetorical question. Why do people use them? Because they are on weak logical ground and they want to shove the reader along before he or she notices that there is something wrong.
Ok, back to other work.
And for those three family members who are interested:
The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia is done as of Monday (until page proofs come in, of course).
Tolkien Studies volume 3 is done except for editing one article and page proofs (If you owe a person a beer for a small favor, I owe Marcel Bülles something like four kegs for the bibliography, and I'll probably have to get a pony for my research assistant, Rebecca Epstein).
The fantasy course, Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature for Recorded Books is done and at the printer.
The final proofs of How Tradition Works are FedExing their way to me and will be back to the printer in ten days for late April delivery.
Still to do:
Faculty lunch talk: "Beowulf: Is it really the greatest English poem?" March 2.
Hosting (and now, running the supertitles) of Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf, March 9 at Wheaton.
Fourteen Science Fiction lectures to write for Recorded Books by March 13.
Paper/Book Chapter “Possible Instructional Uses of the Exeter Book 'Wisdom Poems: The Benedictine Reform Context,” Universitá Udine, Italy, April 6-8 at the Leornungcræft conference.
Kalamazoo Paper: “Albert S. Cook and the Invention of Cynewulf: The Origins of English Studies in America.”
Thursday, February 09, 2006
I H8 Publishers
I really, really do right now.
What other industry can sit on something for -- I am not making this up -- three years and then give you surprise a 10-day deadline?
What other industry can insist that going over what was once a purely hypothetical deadline by a couple of days (not me going over, I might add, but others) is now a matter of life and death, even though the production schedule for the book says it will not be ready for ten months?
What other industry could get away with having someone resubmit a book proposal to them, sit on it for seven months, and then write back that they had decided to accept another book in the same vein that just happened to be submitted while they were holding up your proposal. Oh, and the author of said book just happens to be from the university at which the press is located.
I could go on, but won't. Let's just say that in the next month I have to:
Finish indexing one book.
Proof second set of galleys on that book.
Proof blue-line galleys on another book.
Make all final edits and decisions, write a style guide and do final editing on a third book.
Finish editing / galley proofing another volume.
Write 14 35-minute lectures on Science Fiction (but they can't be written in such a way I can read from them).
Turn 14 lectures into a course book.
Then by April 1 I need to write a book chapter / lecture.
Then by May 1 I need to write my Kalamazoo paper on Albert S. Cook and Cynewulf.
Oh. Also hosting Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf performance and giving a talk to the Wheaton faculty on Beowulf.
Probably some time before then I will be dropping dead.
I really, really do right now.
What other industry can sit on something for -- I am not making this up -- three years and then give you surprise a 10-day deadline?
What other industry can insist that going over what was once a purely hypothetical deadline by a couple of days (not me going over, I might add, but others) is now a matter of life and death, even though the production schedule for the book says it will not be ready for ten months?
What other industry could get away with having someone resubmit a book proposal to them, sit on it for seven months, and then write back that they had decided to accept another book in the same vein that just happened to be submitted while they were holding up your proposal. Oh, and the author of said book just happens to be from the university at which the press is located.
I could go on, but won't. Let's just say that in the next month I have to:
Finish indexing one book.
Proof second set of galleys on that book.
Proof blue-line galleys on another book.
Make all final edits and decisions, write a style guide and do final editing on a third book.
Finish editing / galley proofing another volume.
Write 14 35-minute lectures on Science Fiction (but they can't be written in such a way I can read from them).
Turn 14 lectures into a course book.
Then by April 1 I need to write a book chapter / lecture.
Then by May 1 I need to write my Kalamazoo paper on Albert S. Cook and Cynewulf.
Oh. Also hosting Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf performance and giving a talk to the Wheaton faculty on Beowulf.
Probably some time before then I will be dropping dead.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Modern Philology Rules!
A while back I wrote about a lame journal that took five months to send me a one-line email rejection. At the end of that post I noted that I had now submitted the article to the journal I originally thought would make a better home.
Well, Modern Philology accepted "A Note on the Style of Beowulf 1864a" today, so I'm very happy.
But I want to praise MP not just for having the wisdom to like my scholarship [well, in my mind it's "wisdom"!], but also for operating the way a journal should.
I submitted (electronically!) the Note to MP on 11/30. I immediately received an email saying that the article had been received and that I should have a decision in 90 days. On 1/4 (so just over a month after submission), I received a reader's report and the absolutely most encouraging "revise and resubmit" request I have ever read. The tone taken by Prof. Richard Strier made me want to rush to the library and immediately track down the few loose ends. I re-submitted the article on 1/23 and received the acceptance (with a few additional suggestions from the outside reader) on 2/1. So that's two months from submission to acceptance even with a revision in there.
That, Notes and Queries, is the way you run a journal.
This excellent management is good for MP in so many ways: even if the article hadn't been accepted, I would definitely submit my next article to the journal, and I would spread (and am spreading) the word that Prof. Richard Streir is a good human being and an excellent colleague and his journal is efficient, supportive and comes up with first-rate reader's reports. Hopefully others will hear of my experience and submit their best work. More people, one hopes, will then subscribe individually to the journal (i.e., not just take the library copy out)--because, remember, the most likely reader of Modern Philology is the kind of person who at some point in a career will submit an article of MP.
My larger point is this: good professional practice, from politeness to all deliberate speed to meeting deadlines, could do so much to pull unnecessary angst out of the profession.
And Modern Philology rules!
A while back I wrote about a lame journal that took five months to send me a one-line email rejection. At the end of that post I noted that I had now submitted the article to the journal I originally thought would make a better home.
Well, Modern Philology accepted "A Note on the Style of Beowulf 1864a" today, so I'm very happy.
But I want to praise MP not just for having the wisdom to like my scholarship [well, in my mind it's "wisdom"!], but also for operating the way a journal should.
I submitted (electronically!) the Note to MP on 11/30. I immediately received an email saying that the article had been received and that I should have a decision in 90 days. On 1/4 (so just over a month after submission), I received a reader's report and the absolutely most encouraging "revise and resubmit" request I have ever read. The tone taken by Prof. Richard Strier made me want to rush to the library and immediately track down the few loose ends. I re-submitted the article on 1/23 and received the acceptance (with a few additional suggestions from the outside reader) on 2/1. So that's two months from submission to acceptance even with a revision in there.
That, Notes and Queries, is the way you run a journal.
This excellent management is good for MP in so many ways: even if the article hadn't been accepted, I would definitely submit my next article to the journal, and I would spread (and am spreading) the word that Prof. Richard Streir is a good human being and an excellent colleague and his journal is efficient, supportive and comes up with first-rate reader's reports. Hopefully others will hear of my experience and submit their best work. More people, one hopes, will then subscribe individually to the journal (i.e., not just take the library copy out)--because, remember, the most likely reader of Modern Philology is the kind of person who at some point in a career will submit an article of MP.
My larger point is this: good professional practice, from politeness to all deliberate speed to meeting deadlines, could do so much to pull unnecessary angst out of the profession.
And Modern Philology rules!
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
"You got it all wrong."
UPDATED below
Profession is published by the MLA every December. It's a weird mix of interesting articles and tendentious self-promotion by the 'big names' in the profession, and I don't always get around to reading it, but this year I did. One essay, by someone named Louis Menand, is actually somewhat interesting, not so much for his thesis or his conclusion (which I predicted from the first two paragraphs), but for some of the internal discussion.
Menand notes that the scandalous time-to-PhD average for English (a psychotic 9.8 years--UPDATE--that's time enrolled to complete the degree; if someone takes a year off, that's not included in th 9.8) is an intellectual problem as much as it is a labor problem, noting that "the profession is not reproducing itself so much as cloing itself" (very well put), and "there appears to be little change in dissertation topics in the past ten years. Everyone seems to be writing the same dissertation, and with a tool kit that has not altered much since around 1990." Oh, this is so, so, so true, (Drout says, after having read over 100 applications). Menand suggests that if it were easier to get out of a doctoral program, people would be willing to take more risks and challenge the paradigms. I doubt that length of time in a doctoral program is the only force (and Menand doesn't say it is the only one) at work in the stifling intellectual conformity on display in the files I read, but I'm sure it is a significant factor.
I think Menand is a prisoner of his generational myopia in his celebration of "humanists' skepticism about empirical forms of knowledge," and his idea that the best thing that humanists have to offer is "criticisms of ethnocentrism" (Yawn!), but he really hits the nail on the head with this:
So, please, I'm speaking from the heart here, when I say, with utmost respect:
You got it all wrong.
Now, that out of the way, can we please move ahead with new forms of theory and new approaches? Can powerful people like Prof. Menand (I assume he is powerful) stop supporting the retreads and immitators and go searching for the new and the exciting? Can people please not say with a straight face that "the interaction of public space and private space" is "exciting"? (No. It is done to death, trust me on this). Can everyone please admit that tired sexual/textual puns are really not particularly groundbreaking? Does the fact that they don't even get a snicker anymore give you a clue that they're old? Let's see PMLA publish some articles that aren't same old, same old. Let's try to support the "new voices" (as, to its credit, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists has done, recently sponsoring sessions at Kalamazoo).
Like any of that would ever happen. People of Prof. Menand's generation are happy to talk revolution, but, well, we all have enough experiences of baby boomers and revolution talk that I don't need to expand.
[By the way, although I think that the theorists of the 80's did get it all wrong (or much of it wrong), I have no interest in going "back" to New Criticism and its presumed good old days in 1957. We need to come up with something new and exciting. The New Criticism's tedious "ambiguity this, ambiguity that" is just as boring as the "polyvalent this, polyvalent that" or the "ooh, look. A binary! Let's deconstruct it! for the one millionth time!" approaches of the post-structuralists.
I'm proofing the galleys of my first attempt, but it's not that we need everyone to go out and adopt my theory: we need lots of people to be coming up with new, different, theories of their own.]
and then when the baby-boomers either retire or die we can have some real fun...
UPDATE: Natalia said...Would you consider Moretti's current work theoretically innovative? YES!!! And I just read over 100 applications for a position in 18th-century (where there were novels, unlike medieval lit, which is why I wasn't previously familiar with Moretti) and not one single person mentioned his work. Not one. It's funny that as I was following that link, I was taking a break from proofing the section of HTW where I work through the Dan Sperber materialism stuff that was being quoted.
That said, I have a hunch that I'd disagree with Moretti's conclusions, but that's not the point. The point is that the approach is different and interesting.
UPDATED below
Profession is published by the MLA every December. It's a weird mix of interesting articles and tendentious self-promotion by the 'big names' in the profession, and I don't always get around to reading it, but this year I did. One essay, by someone named Louis Menand, is actually somewhat interesting, not so much for his thesis or his conclusion (which I predicted from the first two paragraphs), but for some of the internal discussion.
Menand notes that the scandalous time-to-PhD average for English (a psychotic 9.8 years--UPDATE--that's time enrolled to complete the degree; if someone takes a year off, that's not included in th 9.8) is an intellectual problem as much as it is a labor problem, noting that "the profession is not reproducing itself so much as cloing itself" (very well put), and "there appears to be little change in dissertation topics in the past ten years. Everyone seems to be writing the same dissertation, and with a tool kit that has not altered much since around 1990." Oh, this is so, so, so true, (Drout says, after having read over 100 applications). Menand suggests that if it were easier to get out of a doctoral program, people would be willing to take more risks and challenge the paradigms. I doubt that length of time in a doctoral program is the only force (and Menand doesn't say it is the only one) at work in the stifling intellectual conformity on display in the files I read, but I'm sure it is a significant factor.
I think Menand is a prisoner of his generational myopia in his celebration of "humanists' skepticism about empirical forms of knowledge," and his idea that the best thing that humanists have to offer is "criticisms of ethnocentrism" (Yawn!), but he really hits the nail on the head with this:
Critical inquiry requires young Turks to keep it alive, and it is hard to see many out there on the horizon. There is a post-theory generation, bristling with an "it's all over" attitude, but when people of my generation look at the post-theory people, we recognize them immediately. They're the theory people. And their attitude is not "You got it all wrong." It's "Stop repeating yourselfs; we know this stuff better than you do." The profession could use some younger people who think that the grownups got it all wrong."
So, please, I'm speaking from the heart here, when I say, with utmost respect:
Now, that out of the way, can we please move ahead with new forms of theory and new approaches? Can powerful people like Prof. Menand (I assume he is powerful) stop supporting the retreads and immitators and go searching for the new and the exciting? Can people please not say with a straight face that "the interaction of public space and private space" is "exciting"? (No. It is done to death, trust me on this). Can everyone please admit that tired sexual/textual puns are really not particularly groundbreaking? Does the fact that they don't even get a snicker anymore give you a clue that they're old? Let's see PMLA publish some articles that aren't same old, same old. Let's try to support the "new voices" (as, to its credit, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists has done, recently sponsoring sessions at Kalamazoo).
Like any of that would ever happen. People of Prof. Menand's generation are happy to talk revolution, but, well, we all have enough experiences of baby boomers and revolution talk that I don't need to expand.
[By the way, although I think that the theorists of the 80's did get it all wrong (or much of it wrong), I have no interest in going "back" to New Criticism and its presumed good old days in 1957. We need to come up with something new and exciting. The New Criticism's tedious "ambiguity this, ambiguity that" is just as boring as the "polyvalent this, polyvalent that" or the "ooh, look. A binary! Let's deconstruct it! for the one millionth time!" approaches of the post-structuralists.
I'm proofing the galleys of my first attempt, but it's not that we need everyone to go out and adopt my theory: we need lots of people to be coming up with new, different, theories of their own.]
and then when the baby-boomers either retire or die we can have some real fun...
UPDATE: Natalia said...Would you consider Moretti's current work theoretically innovative? YES!!! And I just read over 100 applications for a position in 18th-century (where there were novels, unlike medieval lit, which is why I wasn't previously familiar with Moretti) and not one single person mentioned his work. Not one. It's funny that as I was following that link, I was taking a break from proofing the section of HTW where I work through the Dan Sperber materialism stuff that was being quoted.
That said, I have a hunch that I'd disagree with Moretti's conclusions, but that's not the point. The point is that the approach is different and interesting.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
How (One Part) of the "System" Works
As do most academics, I think very little of the U. S. News ranking of colleges. The formula that is used to calculate the ranks has (in common with far too many other things in social science, sadly) a whole pile of constants that can charitably be described as "numbers we pulled out of our butts." For example, let's say, arguendo, that freshman retention rate is somewhat important (I don't actually thinks so, but bear with me). Then we can assign it some percentage of the total score for the school. What percentage? Well, we can construct elaborate post-facto rationalizations, but really it's a number that we pulled out of their butts (how could you tell is 7% was more accurate than 15% or 2% as a reflection of the importance of this piece of data).
But even people like me who think that the U. S. New rankings are crap (sorry, but anyone who thinks a general undergraduate degree at Michigan is more intellectually rigorous than one at Carnegie Mellon hasn't spent any time at both schools) often pay attention to the "academic ranking" part of the formula. For most of us in academia, that's all that matters in terms of the "rank" of the institution.
Well, even that piece of data should now be called into question, because I've just learned how it is calculated. The "academic ranking" is determined by a survey of college Presidents and Provosts about their opinions of schools in the same category as the schools they preside over (i.e., they use the survey of liberal arts college Presidents and Provosts to rank those colleges). That's it. That's all the data.
So it's no wonder that the older and more established a school is, the higher it ranks (a point made by many critics of the U.S. News rankings: there's an almost perfect correlation between age of school and rank -- with a major exception being Brandeis, which ranks very high despite being very young, a point about which they should be justifiably proud).
But can a survey of Presidents and Provosts, who are very, very busy people, really show anything about what's actually going on at so many schools. Unlikely. I doubt that the President of, say, Pomona, has a clue about how good (or bad) the English department is at Wheaton.
On the other hand, the system does potentially generate some good results: Presidents and Provosts come from a huge variety of academic specialities, and they are so busy that they probably only read the leading journals in their own specialities, so the only way to get your college's name in front of these people is to scatter your seed very widely. If each department in your school (and each subspeciality in your department) publishes in leading journals, you'll be more likely to catch the attention of those Presidents and Provosts. So, if you're a President or a Provost, a good strategy for making the ranking system work for your school is to encourage your faculty to do a lot of research and publish widely. That should translate into support across the curriculum, or at least far enough across the curriculum to have work appear in the major journals read by Presidents and Provosts (my guess is that there are relatively fewer Presidents and Provosts from the Fine and Performing Arts -- though ours is; go Wheaton! -- and so working the system this way might be more difficult).
You can also see why research that gets picked up in the mainstream media is so valuable for colleges: the people doing the ranking, Presidents and Provosts, are far more likely to read about your research if it gets picked up in the New York Times than if it is in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology despite the fact that the intellectual standards and likely accuracy of JEGP are about 1000 times that of the NYT).
My conclusion: in many ways the system is bogus: it almost certainly furthers the continuation of an outdated picture of the system, (i.e., which departments were strong when Presidents and Provosts were mere faculty a decade or two ago), and it almost certainly perpetuates a rich-get-richer dynamic (i.e., the English department at William and Mary could be a bunch of useless old fossils who haven't published anything good since 1973 -- n.b., I do not know if this is true--but the school is so old that it picks up a good ranking anyway, because everyone has heard of it, and so the higher rank attracts better faculty and more students and more money, etc). But the good news is that one good way to "game" the system and raise your ranking is to support your faculty and attempt to disseminate their research.
As do most academics, I think very little of the U. S. News ranking of colleges. The formula that is used to calculate the ranks has (in common with far too many other things in social science, sadly) a whole pile of constants that can charitably be described as "numbers we pulled out of our butts." For example, let's say, arguendo, that freshman retention rate is somewhat important (I don't actually thinks so, but bear with me). Then we can assign it some percentage of the total score for the school. What percentage? Well, we can construct elaborate post-facto rationalizations, but really it's a number that we pulled out of their butts (how could you tell is 7% was more accurate than 15% or 2% as a reflection of the importance of this piece of data).
But even people like me who think that the U. S. New rankings are crap (sorry, but anyone who thinks a general undergraduate degree at Michigan is more intellectually rigorous than one at Carnegie Mellon hasn't spent any time at both schools) often pay attention to the "academic ranking" part of the formula. For most of us in academia, that's all that matters in terms of the "rank" of the institution.
Well, even that piece of data should now be called into question, because I've just learned how it is calculated. The "academic ranking" is determined by a survey of college Presidents and Provosts about their opinions of schools in the same category as the schools they preside over (i.e., they use the survey of liberal arts college Presidents and Provosts to rank those colleges). That's it. That's all the data.
So it's no wonder that the older and more established a school is, the higher it ranks (a point made by many critics of the U.S. News rankings: there's an almost perfect correlation between age of school and rank -- with a major exception being Brandeis, which ranks very high despite being very young, a point about which they should be justifiably proud).
But can a survey of Presidents and Provosts, who are very, very busy people, really show anything about what's actually going on at so many schools. Unlikely. I doubt that the President of, say, Pomona, has a clue about how good (or bad) the English department is at Wheaton.
On the other hand, the system does potentially generate some good results: Presidents and Provosts come from a huge variety of academic specialities, and they are so busy that they probably only read the leading journals in their own specialities, so the only way to get your college's name in front of these people is to scatter your seed very widely. If each department in your school (and each subspeciality in your department) publishes in leading journals, you'll be more likely to catch the attention of those Presidents and Provosts. So, if you're a President or a Provost, a good strategy for making the ranking system work for your school is to encourage your faculty to do a lot of research and publish widely. That should translate into support across the curriculum, or at least far enough across the curriculum to have work appear in the major journals read by Presidents and Provosts (my guess is that there are relatively fewer Presidents and Provosts from the Fine and Performing Arts -- though ours is; go Wheaton! -- and so working the system this way might be more difficult).
You can also see why research that gets picked up in the mainstream media is so valuable for colleges: the people doing the ranking, Presidents and Provosts, are far more likely to read about your research if it gets picked up in the New York Times than if it is in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology despite the fact that the intellectual standards and likely accuracy of JEGP are about 1000 times that of the NYT).
My conclusion: in many ways the system is bogus: it almost certainly furthers the continuation of an outdated picture of the system, (i.e., which departments were strong when Presidents and Provosts were mere faculty a decade or two ago), and it almost certainly perpetuates a rich-get-richer dynamic (i.e., the English department at William and Mary could be a bunch of useless old fossils who haven't published anything good since 1973 -- n.b., I do not know if this is true--but the school is so old that it picks up a good ranking anyway, because everyone has heard of it, and so the higher rank attracts better faculty and more students and more money, etc). But the good news is that one good way to "game" the system and raise your ranking is to support your faculty and attempt to disseminate their research.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Good News, Bad News
Sorry no posts for so long. I've been enjoying the relaxing break that we lazy college professors get every year when we do nothing for a month or so and then return to our jobs of luxury.
The day after New Year's email brought good news and lots of additional work. I have had a couple of articles out at journals since the end of July, one which I discussed here. That one was given a very gracious, positive, "revised and resubmit" by a much more prestigious journal than the one that had rejected it back in November. The other was accepted by Oral Tradition, but I also had to do some significant revisions. I also had a deadline to finish my own J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia entries and my Introduction, and I had to write my syllabi -- this coming semester is going to be great, with an advanced Beowulf in OE course, a Tolkien-only course (offered for the first time at Wheaton and also for the first time open to the general student population) and the second half of the Math / Science Fiction course. I also have to finish up the course book for the Fantasy course with Recorded Books (we recorded that in two marathon days in NYC in December), write the SciFi course for Recorded Books (we'll record that in two marathon days in NYC in March), do the editing and layout for Tolkien Studies volume 3 (due to the printer soon), and write the paper I'm giving at the "Form and content of instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the light of contemporary manuscript evidence" in Udine, Italy in April. And my daughter started a new school, which has made life hectic.
And this all has to be done before the galleys for How Tradition Works arrive on the 20th (Finally!!!!!!!)
But, things are good and I hope to have a response to the comments on the previous post (in particular the distressing story related by M. Smith) soon.
Now, quick story about the inexorable nature of fate, or just being cursed: We recorded 13 of the 14 lectures for Recorded Books in NYC back in December -- and I had a really terrible cough that I suppressed with about 8 times the recommended dosage of cough medicine, sucrets, hot tea, etc. (mmmmm, woozy). By the time we got to the last lecture, we were cutting it very close to my missing my plane. So we bailed out on it, decided to record the last lecture at a studio in Boston, and I left. Of course I had Mario Andretti as my cab driver, and we got to La Guardia in 20 minutes (at 3:30 p.m.). Then my flight was cancelled and then the replacement delayed for 5 hours due to weather (so obviously I could have finished up the last lecture without any trouble beyond my wrecked voice).
So we schedule studio time in Boston for the end of the next week. In the meanwhile, the stomach flu works its way through the family (son on Friday, wife on Sunday, daughter on Tuesday). By Friday, I am sure that I have somehow escaped the stomach flu. Go to the studio, do the lecture, and during the last ten minutes I start sweating profusely. I figure I've taken too many cough drops, finish up, and leave. Let's just say that I did not miss the stomach flu, and missed having a very bad time at the studio by about ten to fifteen minutes, and sorry about that patch of sidewalk in front of Symphony Hall. So perhaps the final lecture for the Fantasy course was in fact cursed. I hope it comes out ok. If we were to try to record it again, a runaway milk truck would probably crash into the studio or an escaped python would strangle me.
Sorry no posts for so long. I've been enjoying the relaxing break that we lazy college professors get every year when we do nothing for a month or so and then return to our jobs of luxury.
The day after New Year's email brought good news and lots of additional work. I have had a couple of articles out at journals since the end of July, one which I discussed here. That one was given a very gracious, positive, "revised and resubmit" by a much more prestigious journal than the one that had rejected it back in November. The other was accepted by Oral Tradition, but I also had to do some significant revisions. I also had a deadline to finish my own J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia entries and my Introduction, and I had to write my syllabi -- this coming semester is going to be great, with an advanced Beowulf in OE course, a Tolkien-only course (offered for the first time at Wheaton and also for the first time open to the general student population) and the second half of the Math / Science Fiction course. I also have to finish up the course book for the Fantasy course with Recorded Books (we recorded that in two marathon days in NYC in December), write the SciFi course for Recorded Books (we'll record that in two marathon days in NYC in March), do the editing and layout for Tolkien Studies volume 3 (due to the printer soon), and write the paper I'm giving at the "Form and content of instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the light of contemporary manuscript evidence" in Udine, Italy in April. And my daughter started a new school, which has made life hectic.
And this all has to be done before the galleys for How Tradition Works arrive on the 20th (Finally!!!!!!!)
But, things are good and I hope to have a response to the comments on the previous post (in particular the distressing story related by M. Smith) soon.
Now, quick story about the inexorable nature of fate, or just being cursed: We recorded 13 of the 14 lectures for Recorded Books in NYC back in December -- and I had a really terrible cough that I suppressed with about 8 times the recommended dosage of cough medicine, sucrets, hot tea, etc. (mmmmm, woozy). By the time we got to the last lecture, we were cutting it very close to my missing my plane. So we bailed out on it, decided to record the last lecture at a studio in Boston, and I left. Of course I had Mario Andretti as my cab driver, and we got to La Guardia in 20 minutes (at 3:30 p.m.). Then my flight was cancelled and then the replacement delayed for 5 hours due to weather (so obviously I could have finished up the last lecture without any trouble beyond my wrecked voice).
So we schedule studio time in Boston for the end of the next week. In the meanwhile, the stomach flu works its way through the family (son on Friday, wife on Sunday, daughter on Tuesday). By Friday, I am sure that I have somehow escaped the stomach flu. Go to the studio, do the lecture, and during the last ten minutes I start sweating profusely. I figure I've taken too many cough drops, finish up, and leave. Let's just say that I did not miss the stomach flu, and missed having a very bad time at the studio by about ten to fifteen minutes, and sorry about that patch of sidewalk in front of Symphony Hall. So perhaps the final lecture for the Fantasy course was in fact cursed. I hope it comes out ok. If we were to try to record it again, a runaway milk truck would probably crash into the studio or an escaped python would strangle me.
Friday, December 23, 2005
On Being Played by a Student
I generally love my students, and I don't have much patience with the blogs (usually anonymous) that do nothing but complain about students, but every once in a while I get a really egregious example, and this is one.
For this particular class, one paper was due Friday the 9th and the other on Monday the 12th (the one on Friday was a revision, so it's not like I was piling the work on). On Monday the 19, I received the following [n.b.: I've paraphrased the emails so as not to be posting the student's exact words, though I don't see why I shouldn't]:
Now it's very strange that a student writes on Monday the 19th to ask if I received papers from a week before. A few students, who were worried about dropping things off at my office, emailed immediately afterwards, but to be unworried enough to wait a week, but then worried enough to email was strange. Also, this student hadn't received essays X and Y back because the student had never turned them in.
Back when I was a naive paper I would have said "Oh no! Your papers must have gotten lost! Do you still have an electronic copy?" Now I write:
Student replies:
Note that we're still talking about a final paper (singular) although two papers were due.
I write back:
Student replies:
Notice that now (that I've reminded the student) it's two papers, not one. Notice also that they are put "in" the wrong office (implying that the student walked in. Now what's in my office is very different than what's in the office of the film prof next door and the creative writing prof on the other side, and office doors aren't left completely open any more.
So I write:
Student replies:
Now the papers might have been put "in the wrong place," rather than in the wrong office. So that seems to limit it to the baskets on the doors of the professors on either side of my office (again, ridiculous, as I have Beowulf pictures on my door while the door material of the other two profs is very distinctive -- not to mention the names on the doors).
I write:
At this point the student stops emailing, so perhaps the student has gotten the message that I'm not going to fall for the "I turned it in, but it disappeared" story. Students used to always blame the custodian, which I found particularly odious, since he is a friend of mine and has never in his life thrown away a student paper stuffed under an office door.
Now, before you think I am too mean or obnoxious (ok, I am, but not too much) note that I could have set a trap by accepting an e-submission and then checking the "created" date in the MS Word file. There is a small chance that this is entirely a cock-and-bull story (although the attempt to suggest that two previous missing papers had been turned in is pretty sleazy), but I'm skeptical, also because this semester students have tried to pull all kinds of stunts with electronic submissions (including the famous "I forgot to attach the attachment but now I'm home on mid-term break" -- which also may be true, but which is why I don't allow e-submissions without a hard-copy submission the same day).
Memo to any students reading this: Your professors are not as dumb as you think we are. And this isn't high school -- be a responsible adult and own up to your mistakes and you'll get a lot more slack than if you're trying to weasel something.
I generally love my students, and I don't have much patience with the blogs (usually anonymous) that do nothing but complain about students, but every once in a while I get a really egregious example, and this is one.
For this particular class, one paper was due Friday the 9th and the other on Monday the 12th (the one on Friday was a revision, so it's not like I was piling the work on). On Monday the 19, I received the following [n.b.: I've paraphrased the emails so as not to be posting the student's exact words, though I don't see why I shouldn't]:
Professor Drout,
Just wrtiting to make sure you got my final paper. Also, what did I get on essays X and Y, I don't remember getting them back.
Now it's very strange that a student writes on Monday the 19th to ask if I received papers from a week before. A few students, who were worried about dropping things off at my office, emailed immediately afterwards, but to be unworried enough to wait a week, but then worried enough to email was strange. Also, this student hadn't received essays X and Y back because the student had never turned them in.
Back when I was a naive paper I would have said "Oh no! Your papers must have gotten lost! Do you still have an electronic copy?" Now I write:
I have gone through all of the student papers that were submitting to my office and I have not received yours..
Student replies:
I don't know what happened then, can I email/fax it to you or something?
Note that we're still talking about a final paper (singular) although two papers were due.
I write back:
where and when did you turn the papers in?
Student replies:
On last Monday, I thought I put them in your office. Maybe I accidentially put them in the wrong office.
Notice that now (that I've reminded the student) it's two papers, not one. Notice also that they are put "in" the wrong office (implying that the student walked in. Now what's in my office is very different than what's in the office of the film prof next door and the creative writing prof on the other side, and office doors aren't left completely open any more.
So I write:
What do you mean you put them "in my office"? Where exactly did you put them? Did you turn in both at the same time, even though one was due on Friday? Why would you put them in the wrong office when office doors are marked with names?
Student replies:
I'm not sure where I put them, I did turn them both in on Monday though. That is the reason I emailed you, because I checked my binder at the end of the week, and there was nothing there. But, I didn't really remember dropping them in your office. I honestly can't tell you where I put them, I might have spaced out and put them in the wrong place, I'm not sure.
Now the papers might have been put "in the wrong place," rather than in the wrong office. So that seems to limit it to the baskets on the doors of the professors on either side of my office (again, ridiculous, as I have Beowulf pictures on my door while the door material of the other two profs is very distinctive -- not to mention the names on the doors).
I write:
Well, we'll have to figure out where you put them. I will email the colleagues in the offices next to mine to see if they received them by accident. But generally if a paper gets turned in to the wrong office, the person who receives it posts it in the department secretary's office. There were no papers there when I checked on Monday.
At this point the student stops emailing, so perhaps the student has gotten the message that I'm not going to fall for the "I turned it in, but it disappeared" story. Students used to always blame the custodian, which I found particularly odious, since he is a friend of mine and has never in his life thrown away a student paper stuffed under an office door.
Now, before you think I am too mean or obnoxious (ok, I am, but not too much) note that I could have set a trap by accepting an e-submission and then checking the "created" date in the MS Word file. There is a small chance that this is entirely a cock-and-bull story (although the attempt to suggest that two previous missing papers had been turned in is pretty sleazy), but I'm skeptical, also because this semester students have tried to pull all kinds of stunts with electronic submissions (including the famous "I forgot to attach the attachment but now I'm home on mid-term break" -- which also may be true, but which is why I don't allow e-submissions without a hard-copy submission the same day).
Memo to any students reading this: Your professors are not as dumb as you think we are. And this isn't high school -- be a responsible adult and own up to your mistakes and you'll get a lot more slack than if you're trying to weasel something.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Dan Timmons, R.I.P.
I was very sad to get the news today that Dan Timmons, best known as the editor (with George Clark) of J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, passed away yesterday after a long illness.
I met Dan a number of years back at Kalamazoo, before Beowulf and the Critics or his book came out, and we had a wonderful, late, long and apparently too loud (someone yelled at us to get out of the courtyard because it was after 2 a.m.) conversation about our frustrations at getting Tolkien studies taken seriously by the academy.
Dan was an excellent scholar, a talented critic, and, most of all, a warm and generous person.
About a month ago, he sent me some very large and important entries for the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (this led me to believe that he might be getting better, but, alas, that was not the case). His entries are testament to his excellent scholarship and, even more importantly, his essential fair-mindedness (a quality sadly lacking in too many critics -- and not my own strong suit). Dan wrote balanced and insightful treatments of controversial topics, and he combined a deep and abiding love of Tolkien's work with effective critical judgment. The field will miss the many additional contributions he would have made over the years, but even more, we will miss him.
I was very sad to get the news today that Dan Timmons, best known as the editor (with George Clark) of J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, passed away yesterday after a long illness.
I met Dan a number of years back at Kalamazoo, before Beowulf and the Critics or his book came out, and we had a wonderful, late, long and apparently too loud (someone yelled at us to get out of the courtyard because it was after 2 a.m.) conversation about our frustrations at getting Tolkien studies taken seriously by the academy.
Dan was an excellent scholar, a talented critic, and, most of all, a warm and generous person.
About a month ago, he sent me some very large and important entries for the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (this led me to believe that he might be getting better, but, alas, that was not the case). His entries are testament to his excellent scholarship and, even more importantly, his essential fair-mindedness (a quality sadly lacking in too many critics -- and not my own strong suit). Dan wrote balanced and insightful treatments of controversial topics, and he combined a deep and abiding love of Tolkien's work with effective critical judgment. The field will miss the many additional contributions he would have made over the years, but even more, we will miss him.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Where are all the female orcs?
I have to admit that one of my favorite bits of speculation/inference in Middle-earth studies is the problem of the orcs, their origin and reproduction. Here's are the inter-related suites of problems as succinctly as I can express them:
To have exciting battles, you need lots of cannon fodder (which is why in FRPGs the generic term for relatively weak bad guys who are easily killed is "orcs").
Morgoth and Sauron, by theological definition, "cannot make, they can only mock," that is, they cannot generate ex nihilo free-willed (or pseudo-free-willed) creatures to serve them.
So you need a source for orcs.
The only free-willed creatures in Middle-earth are Valar and Maiar ("powers," angelic/demonic spirits), the "Children of Iluvatar" (elves and men), and a kind of special dispensation given to the dwarves, ents, and apparently the eagles.
So, I think Tolkien reasoned, the orcs were somehow transformed elves, elves who had been subject to torture until they became orcs.
But this clashes, possibly, with his reincarnation of the elves idea.
And there's an associated problem, that the production of countless orcs for cannon fodder purposes then requires a very extensive operation of elf-torture over many years, even years when Morgoth and/or Sauron are not present in Middle-earth.
So, you could let the orcs breed (and at least in LotR and Silm there are hints that Tolkien adopts this idea).
But breeding is problematic, as it includes elements of sexual pleasure (we'd assume) and even more so that someone would have to love and nurse the cuddly little baby orcs. And so when you're spearing Shagrat, you're killing some mother's beloved son.
I think towards the end of his life, JRRT was tending towards making the orcs having been men who volunteered for Morgoth's evil and were thus transformed (doesn't solve the breeding / raising innocent little cuddlesome orc babies).
But I think there might be a simpler explanation, consistent with both the origins of the word "orc" and the later development of Tolkien's thought regarding the reincarnation of the elves.
"Orc" comes from Beowulf 112; a list of monsters includes "eotenas ond ylfe ond orc-neas", usually translated as ettins (trolls), elves and animated corpses (in some of his earlier work Tolkien translated orc-neas as "barrow wights"). So we have the concept of the animated corpse.
Now, what animates the corpse? Here I turn to the philosophical essays in Morgoth's Rings. Morgoth, in his attempt to control Arda, became like a glacier of evil, calving off bits of evil throughout the world. He puts forth some of his spirit, and gets Glaurung, and when Turin kills Glaurung, that little bit of evil is gone from Morgoth. Thus Morgoth grows smaller and less powerful the longer he is in Angband, but the amount of evil in the world stays the same or grows slightly larger as his evils creations work evil into the very fabric of the world.
Now, where does the corpse come from? I think from elves. Tolkien's original ideas about elves and orcs could work if the process of elvish reincarnation that Tolkien eventually settled on were to work. There are, for elves, two components in a living creature: a Fea, or spirit, and a hroa, or body. And, Tolkien says, the Fea creates the body (he got this idea from Charles Kinglsey's The Water Babies but don't you dare steal it because I'm writing it into an article for Chris Vacarro, whom I went to high school with, but I digress...).
So, if an elf's body, his Hroa, is killed, his spirit, Fea, goes to Mandos to wait until such time as it is appropriate for him to grow a new body (Tolkien ended up rejecting the idea that the elf spirit would be borne as a baby to its parents, or to some other parents, etc).
So, if Morgoth captures an elf, and tortures it until its spirit leaves its body and goes off to Mandos to grow a new body, the old body remains in the possession of Morgoth. He can imbue that tortured body with his dark spirit, thus making a orc without creating something new.
I know there are some subtle problems still, but for the sake of argument, let's say that the above can explain the origin of orcs: Morgoth has calved off bits of himself and set them in elf bodies. It explains the "animated corpses" connection and the "not allowed to make" objection.
But once Morgoth was cast out of the Doors of Night, where did the new orcs come from? We're back to breeding in some way. I'd propose some kind of hideous rite in which the orcs hack off pieces of their limbs, which then re-grow into new creatures. These each have the same identity of the orc from whom they are chopped, so they're immediately viciously rivalrous with that orc. That way you squeeze out sexual love and familial affection. Maybe orcs force other orcs to breed because the process is so miserably painful.
So really this is just a long train of bizarre speculation set off by Emma Goldman's interesting post on the possibility of female orcs in Middle-earth.
I have to admit that one of my favorite bits of speculation/inference in Middle-earth studies is the problem of the orcs, their origin and reproduction. Here's are the inter-related suites of problems as succinctly as I can express them:
To have exciting battles, you need lots of cannon fodder (which is why in FRPGs the generic term for relatively weak bad guys who are easily killed is "orcs").
Morgoth and Sauron, by theological definition, "cannot make, they can only mock," that is, they cannot generate ex nihilo free-willed (or pseudo-free-willed) creatures to serve them.
So you need a source for orcs.
The only free-willed creatures in Middle-earth are Valar and Maiar ("powers," angelic/demonic spirits), the "Children of Iluvatar" (elves and men), and a kind of special dispensation given to the dwarves, ents, and apparently the eagles.
So, I think Tolkien reasoned, the orcs were somehow transformed elves, elves who had been subject to torture until they became orcs.
But this clashes, possibly, with his reincarnation of the elves idea.
And there's an associated problem, that the production of countless orcs for cannon fodder purposes then requires a very extensive operation of elf-torture over many years, even years when Morgoth and/or Sauron are not present in Middle-earth.
So, you could let the orcs breed (and at least in LotR and Silm there are hints that Tolkien adopts this idea).
But breeding is problematic, as it includes elements of sexual pleasure (we'd assume) and even more so that someone would have to love and nurse the cuddly little baby orcs. And so when you're spearing Shagrat, you're killing some mother's beloved son.
I think towards the end of his life, JRRT was tending towards making the orcs having been men who volunteered for Morgoth's evil and were thus transformed (doesn't solve the breeding / raising innocent little cuddlesome orc babies).
But I think there might be a simpler explanation, consistent with both the origins of the word "orc" and the later development of Tolkien's thought regarding the reincarnation of the elves.
"Orc" comes from Beowulf 112; a list of monsters includes "eotenas ond ylfe ond orc-neas", usually translated as ettins (trolls), elves and animated corpses (in some of his earlier work Tolkien translated orc-neas as "barrow wights"). So we have the concept of the animated corpse.
Now, what animates the corpse? Here I turn to the philosophical essays in Morgoth's Rings. Morgoth, in his attempt to control Arda, became like a glacier of evil, calving off bits of evil throughout the world. He puts forth some of his spirit, and gets Glaurung, and when Turin kills Glaurung, that little bit of evil is gone from Morgoth. Thus Morgoth grows smaller and less powerful the longer he is in Angband, but the amount of evil in the world stays the same or grows slightly larger as his evils creations work evil into the very fabric of the world.
Now, where does the corpse come from? I think from elves. Tolkien's original ideas about elves and orcs could work if the process of elvish reincarnation that Tolkien eventually settled on were to work. There are, for elves, two components in a living creature: a Fea, or spirit, and a hroa, or body. And, Tolkien says, the Fea creates the body (he got this idea from Charles Kinglsey's The Water Babies but don't you dare steal it because I'm writing it into an article for Chris Vacarro, whom I went to high school with, but I digress...).
So, if an elf's body, his Hroa, is killed, his spirit, Fea, goes to Mandos to wait until such time as it is appropriate for him to grow a new body (Tolkien ended up rejecting the idea that the elf spirit would be borne as a baby to its parents, or to some other parents, etc).
So, if Morgoth captures an elf, and tortures it until its spirit leaves its body and goes off to Mandos to grow a new body, the old body remains in the possession of Morgoth. He can imbue that tortured body with his dark spirit, thus making a orc without creating something new.
I know there are some subtle problems still, but for the sake of argument, let's say that the above can explain the origin of orcs: Morgoth has calved off bits of himself and set them in elf bodies. It explains the "animated corpses" connection and the "not allowed to make" objection.
But once Morgoth was cast out of the Doors of Night, where did the new orcs come from? We're back to breeding in some way. I'd propose some kind of hideous rite in which the orcs hack off pieces of their limbs, which then re-grow into new creatures. These each have the same identity of the orc from whom they are chopped, so they're immediately viciously rivalrous with that orc. That way you squeeze out sexual love and familial affection. Maybe orcs force other orcs to breed because the process is so miserably painful.
So really this is just a long train of bizarre speculation set off by Emma Goldman's interesting post on the possibility of female orcs in Middle-earth.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
In this post, I mentioned my displeasure at a journal that took five months to reject a note with a one-line email. Such sloth and discourtesty is, it seems to me, a symptom of a very serious problem in academia that is not regularly addressed but is near the heart of the discontent that so many people (inside and outside) seem to have with academia: the keepers of many of our key academic institutions are failing in their duties.
I think this is as big a factor in the stress and discontent of junior faculty as the job crisis itself: when the keepers of important institutions (journal editorships, society presidents, press directors, chair holders) don't do their jobs efficiently, they don't pay the price: junior faculty do (when a press drops the ball and takes years too long to publish a book, it doesn't hurt my tenure prospects; if an article is out for a year, or gets accepted last year for the 2007 issue of a journal, I can wait. Not so for junior faculty).
If there is a backlog of work (which we've all had happen), then it is incumbent upon those who hold substantial privileges to buckle down and plow through the work. If there is such a backlog at presses and journals, then that fact should be made public so that we can have an academy-wide debate about what to do (rather than just letting the backlog lengthen).
Here at Wheaton there is, right now, a lot of the standard end-of-term griping from junior faculty (well, from everyone really, because it is end of term, but I've happened to notice the junior faculty griping). Because I am currently the chair of the Educational Policy Committee, I feel like I have to look into this griping to see if there are any real grievances. Almost every thing I've been able to track down has the same source: people not doing their jobs in a timely manner and thus putting more stress on others (and if you think junior faculty have this bad, you should see what faculty obliviousness about deadlines does to the staff).
Where does this problem come from? See the title of this post. There's almost no supervision (which is good) and no recourse (which is bad). The system is supposed to work because scholarly peers, also of advanced standing, put pressure to do a good job on those who are also high up in the system. But no one wants to be the bad guy, no one wants to be the heavy, and so everything just slips (and I will say that Wheaton is about 500 times better than any other place I've been).
What to do? Herewith a few simple rules of thumb.
I think that following my few rules would do an enormous amount to pull angst out of the system and make people a little happier in their jobs (and to do these things is just a tiny bit easier than revising the entire academic labor system, by the way)
[Readers might reasonably ask "Drout, you have tenure. Why don't you name names?" It's a good question, and I had thought about saying that Notes and Queries was the journal that couldn't be bothered with a timely response or a reader's report. But to make specific charges against specific individuals would require a new level of research that I don't have time to do. For instance, if a journal loses an article or a reviewer takes eleven months to return a reader's report or a contributor bails out from a project three weeks before the deadline (after having eleven months to do the work), I have a right to be irritated, and I can assemble this material into a pattern and comment on it, but I don't want to blast the single person or institution and then find out that the specific example I've chosen happens to have a new baby or a financial crisis or, God forbid, a serious illness. I'm sure that not all of the people/institutions failing to do their jobs have these problems, but I don't know which ones do, and that makes naming names problematic.]
In this post, I mentioned my displeasure at a journal that took five months to reject a note with a one-line email. Such sloth and discourtesty is, it seems to me, a symptom of a very serious problem in academia that is not regularly addressed but is near the heart of the discontent that so many people (inside and outside) seem to have with academia: the keepers of many of our key academic institutions are failing in their duties.
I think this is as big a factor in the stress and discontent of junior faculty as the job crisis itself: when the keepers of important institutions (journal editorships, society presidents, press directors, chair holders) don't do their jobs efficiently, they don't pay the price: junior faculty do (when a press drops the ball and takes years too long to publish a book, it doesn't hurt my tenure prospects; if an article is out for a year, or gets accepted last year for the 2007 issue of a journal, I can wait. Not so for junior faculty).
If there is a backlog of work (which we've all had happen), then it is incumbent upon those who hold substantial privileges to buckle down and plow through the work. If there is such a backlog at presses and journals, then that fact should be made public so that we can have an academy-wide debate about what to do (rather than just letting the backlog lengthen).
Here at Wheaton there is, right now, a lot of the standard end-of-term griping from junior faculty (well, from everyone really, because it is end of term, but I've happened to notice the junior faculty griping). Because I am currently the chair of the Educational Policy Committee, I feel like I have to look into this griping to see if there are any real grievances. Almost every thing I've been able to track down has the same source: people not doing their jobs in a timely manner and thus putting more stress on others (and if you think junior faculty have this bad, you should see what faculty obliviousness about deadlines does to the staff).
Where does this problem come from? See the title of this post. There's almost no supervision (which is good) and no recourse (which is bad). The system is supposed to work because scholarly peers, also of advanced standing, put pressure to do a good job on those who are also high up in the system. But no one wants to be the bad guy, no one wants to be the heavy, and so everything just slips (and I will say that Wheaton is about 500 times better than any other place I've been).
What to do? Herewith a few simple rules of thumb.
1. The deadline actually does apply to you. [Faculty whine constantly about students missing deadlines but then constantly miss their own. And I mean all the time.]
2. Return phone calls within 24 hours and emails within 48.
3. 30 days for straight rejections/acceptance from a journal. Any later and the person gets a reader's report.
4. 90 days for rejection/acceptance with a reader's report. If your readers can't turn things around that quickly, get some new readers and fire the old ones. Book manuscripts may take a little longer, but you have to inform the person who submitted when the decision will be made.
5. Let people know when they have failed at the above (i.e., being collegial is important, but give feedback like "I'm really glad you accepted my article, but making me wait eleven months was a little out of hand, don't you think?" -- this kind of thing is hard to do, but it's essential. People respond to social pressure; the squeaky wheel gets the grease).
Or, to sum up: Do your job!
I think that following my few rules would do an enormous amount to pull angst out of the system and make people a little happier in their jobs (and to do these things is just a tiny bit easier than revising the entire academic labor system, by the way)
[Readers might reasonably ask "Drout, you have tenure. Why don't you name names?" It's a good question, and I had thought about saying that Notes and Queries was the journal that couldn't be bothered with a timely response or a reader's report. But to make specific charges against specific individuals would require a new level of research that I don't have time to do. For instance, if a journal loses an article or a reviewer takes eleven months to return a reader's report or a contributor bails out from a project three weeks before the deadline (after having eleven months to do the work), I have a right to be irritated, and I can assemble this material into a pattern and comment on it, but I don't want to blast the single person or institution and then find out that the specific example I've chosen happens to have a new baby or a financial crisis or, God forbid, a serious illness. I'm sure that not all of the people/institutions failing to do their jobs have these problems, but I don't know which ones do, and that makes naming names problematic.]
Sunday, November 27, 2005
A Helpful Tip
[UPDATE: In response to comments below: I am fortunate that I am not relying on this piece--or another one that has been at a journal for five months--for tenure or promotion. I'm tenured and already have enough scholarship for promotion when the time comes. My point is not "woe is me, I have been wronged," but "here's something seriously wrong with the academic system." I hope to do a post in a few days about how poor performance by the keepers of major institutions is doing as much to harm and frustrate junior faculty as the state of the job market.]
Dear Editor of Relatively Respected Journal,
A. It is perfectly acceptable to reject an inappropriate article with a one-line email.
B. It is perfectly acceptable to reject an inapproriate article after a thorough review that takes five solid months. The reader's report rejecting the piece is well worth the wait.
Combining the terse reply of A with the slothful response time of B is not at all acceptable. The article so rejected is a brief note. I could translate it into Gothic, translate it from Gothic into Old Norse, translate it from Old Norse to Latin and then paint it on the side of my house in less than five months. To get only one pro forma line out of that long wait is a fairly grotesque failure of courtesy and, more importantly, intellectual responsibility. I'll bet those slothful, lazy reviewers put their reviewing duties on their vitae.
If you wonder why so many younger scholars are starting to submit articles simultaneously to multiple journals (creating headaches and strife for editors), see above.
Cheers,
Mike Drout
P.S.: Now I'll be sending the article off the journal where I thought it belonged in the first place.
[UPDATE: In response to comments below: I am fortunate that I am not relying on this piece--or another one that has been at a journal for five months--for tenure or promotion. I'm tenured and already have enough scholarship for promotion when the time comes. My point is not "woe is me, I have been wronged," but "here's something seriously wrong with the academic system." I hope to do a post in a few days about how poor performance by the keepers of major institutions is doing as much to harm and frustrate junior faculty as the state of the job market.]
Dear Editor of Relatively Respected Journal,
A. It is perfectly acceptable to reject an inappropriate article with a one-line email.
B. It is perfectly acceptable to reject an inapproriate article after a thorough review that takes five solid months. The reader's report rejecting the piece is well worth the wait.
Combining the terse reply of A with the slothful response time of B is not at all acceptable. The article so rejected is a brief note. I could translate it into Gothic, translate it from Gothic into Old Norse, translate it from Old Norse to Latin and then paint it on the side of my house in less than five months. To get only one pro forma line out of that long wait is a fairly grotesque failure of courtesy and, more importantly, intellectual responsibility. I'll bet those slothful, lazy reviewers put their reviewing duties on their vitae.
If you wonder why so many younger scholars are starting to submit articles simultaneously to multiple journals (creating headaches and strife for editors), see above.
Cheers,
Mike Drout
P.S.: Now I'll be sending the article off the journal where I thought it belonged in the first place.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Fanboys and Scholars (and Twenty-sided dice)
Jeff at Quid Nomen Illius? has a really good post on the influence of Dungeons and Dragons on the current conquest of popular culture by fantasy (and props for Jeff on his excellent post titles: "Bree-yark" for this one, and a very obscure Jethro Tull reference on the next).
I was one of those kids influenced by D&D, and if I'd been a bit older or younger, I would probably have had a happy career as a game designer: I was too young to be really caught up in the first wave of paper-and-dice D&D (I was mostly interested in it in 6th-8th grade; I don't think I played at all in high school), but a little too old to really get into on-line gaming and high quality computer RPGs. But I wrote a lot of "modules" for D&D, always with a very Tolkienian aspect, plumbing Unfinished Tales for details, sketching out details of weaponry or costume, and making my own weathered-looking maps (I once got into huge trouble because I'd been using my mother's iron to heat lemon-juice-impregnated paper in order to age it: I didn't clear the iron afterwards, and thus some piece of clothing ended up with a large lemon-juice stain on it).
I think all of that give me at least a little fanboy cred when I use the term (despite a reader on The One Ring's amusement). I don't think fanboys are (any more) stalkers or hopelessly in love with movie characters (and I know not all self-identified fangirls are either), but they (we) are obsessive about aspects of our chosen afficion. I haven't had time to do the research, but I'm relatively certain that fanboy/girl are originally pejorative terms (which would fit Squire's interpretation of the word), but they have now been taken up by those inside a subculture as self-identifying labels (and "fanboy" is equivalent to Japanese "otaku," which seems to mean "person who still lives in his parents' house and is obsessed with gaming/anime/manga").
[I'm getting tired of typing fanboy/girl, so I'll use "otaku" from now on].
I think that being an otaku is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for being a good scholar. Scott Nokes here says much the same thing, arguing that scholarship starts in otaku-ish appreciation (I'd add, 'and obsession over detail') and then progresses, through the addition of theory (and I'd add, 'method') and formal communication, to scholarship. I'm not entirely comfortably with the way Scott treats 'theory' here, but I think he's basically right, and his point could be justified historically: literary studies, particularly medievalism, grew out of the practices of gentleman scholars and antiquaries who were collecting manuscripts and trying to understand them and, essentially, writing fan newsletters about Old English texts instead of computer games.
All kinds of scholarship (not just literary work) require the focus of the otaku, the obsessive ability to spend twenty years studying one genus of dragonfly or, like Darwin, work for hours just about every day for a decade dissecting and classifying barnacles.
From these obsessions we generate new insights into the natural and human worlds and, since we've seen the enormous payoff from 18th-century and Victorian gentleman scientists and their journals, we have, as a culture, tried to copy them in the humanities, with many great results (and probably a lot of wasted time as well).
But the social structures built by those early, gentleman otaku--the departments of English, the journals, the lecture circuits--provide real-life benefits (salaries, tenure, publicity, security) that people who are not otaku also covet. And thus, I think, the evolution of problems in scholarship that are usually put under the umbrella of "professionalization." People no longer publish strictly from love of the subject and a desire to inform (though obviously that's important) but also to get financial rewards, respect, power and influence (and it's not like the original Victorian gentlemen were immune to such temptations, either).
Well, if you are attracted to academia because you want to be free to pursue your obsession, you're going to have a very different focus than if you are attracted to academia because you want summers "off," job security, and some initials after your name. Academia is, for many (obviously for me) a very, very appealing life.
But (and here comes the unproveable assertion) if you didn't go into academia because you were an otaku about your subject, then you begin to resent the obsessive work required to be good at it. And you do things like continually re-publish your dissertation (my pet peeve right now) with minor variants ("The bleeding saint in Andreas," "The bleeding saint in Judith," "The bleeding saint in Elene," "The subtextual figure of the bleeding saint in Beowulf" ... you get the idea). Or you stop writing after you get tenure. Or you become bitter and miserable about your students.
But, thankfully, a fairly high percentage of the scholars I know are, in one way or another, otaku. I know a Hawthorne otaku, a Poe otaku, a Louisa May Alcott otaku, a Victorian ghost story otaku. They have (to switch cultures) enthusiasmos or (to switch again) afficion, and it shows in their teaching and their scholarship and their happiness.
I think attempts to bring too much "method" or "theory" to literature can interfere with enthusiasmos, and likewise literary scholars' ill-starred forays into political interpretations undercuts their own afficion (because once you move into politics, you are accepting the idea that there is something that is more important to you than your subject).
Being a fanboy/girl or otaku isn't quite socially mainstream, and being a literary scholar shouldn't be, either: you are doing something that is very weird, and to do it well, you have to be a little weird yourself. You have to get carried away, you have to have a little too much enthusiasm for your obsession than is completely normal.
"a little too much enthusiasm for your obsession than is completely normal" -- sound familiar?
Jeff at Quid Nomen Illius? has a really good post on the influence of Dungeons and Dragons on the current conquest of popular culture by fantasy (and props for Jeff on his excellent post titles: "Bree-yark" for this one, and a very obscure Jethro Tull reference on the next).
I was one of those kids influenced by D&D, and if I'd been a bit older or younger, I would probably have had a happy career as a game designer: I was too young to be really caught up in the first wave of paper-and-dice D&D (I was mostly interested in it in 6th-8th grade; I don't think I played at all in high school), but a little too old to really get into on-line gaming and high quality computer RPGs. But I wrote a lot of "modules" for D&D, always with a very Tolkienian aspect, plumbing Unfinished Tales for details, sketching out details of weaponry or costume, and making my own weathered-looking maps (I once got into huge trouble because I'd been using my mother's iron to heat lemon-juice-impregnated paper in order to age it: I didn't clear the iron afterwards, and thus some piece of clothing ended up with a large lemon-juice stain on it).
I think all of that give me at least a little fanboy cred when I use the term (despite a reader on The One Ring's amusement). I don't think fanboys are (any more) stalkers or hopelessly in love with movie characters (and I know not all self-identified fangirls are either), but they (we) are obsessive about aspects of our chosen afficion. I haven't had time to do the research, but I'm relatively certain that fanboy/girl are originally pejorative terms (which would fit Squire's interpretation of the word), but they have now been taken up by those inside a subculture as self-identifying labels (and "fanboy" is equivalent to Japanese "otaku," which seems to mean "person who still lives in his parents' house and is obsessed with gaming/anime/manga").
[I'm getting tired of typing fanboy/girl, so I'll use "otaku" from now on].
I think that being an otaku is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for being a good scholar. Scott Nokes here says much the same thing, arguing that scholarship starts in otaku-ish appreciation (I'd add, 'and obsession over detail') and then progresses, through the addition of theory (and I'd add, 'method') and formal communication, to scholarship. I'm not entirely comfortably with the way Scott treats 'theory' here, but I think he's basically right, and his point could be justified historically: literary studies, particularly medievalism, grew out of the practices of gentleman scholars and antiquaries who were collecting manuscripts and trying to understand them and, essentially, writing fan newsletters about Old English texts instead of computer games.
All kinds of scholarship (not just literary work) require the focus of the otaku, the obsessive ability to spend twenty years studying one genus of dragonfly or, like Darwin, work for hours just about every day for a decade dissecting and classifying barnacles.
From these obsessions we generate new insights into the natural and human worlds and, since we've seen the enormous payoff from 18th-century and Victorian gentleman scientists and their journals, we have, as a culture, tried to copy them in the humanities, with many great results (and probably a lot of wasted time as well).
But the social structures built by those early, gentleman otaku--the departments of English, the journals, the lecture circuits--provide real-life benefits (salaries, tenure, publicity, security) that people who are not otaku also covet. And thus, I think, the evolution of problems in scholarship that are usually put under the umbrella of "professionalization." People no longer publish strictly from love of the subject and a desire to inform (though obviously that's important) but also to get financial rewards, respect, power and influence (and it's not like the original Victorian gentlemen were immune to such temptations, either).
Well, if you are attracted to academia because you want to be free to pursue your obsession, you're going to have a very different focus than if you are attracted to academia because you want summers "off," job security, and some initials after your name. Academia is, for many (obviously for me) a very, very appealing life.
But (and here comes the unproveable assertion) if you didn't go into academia because you were an otaku about your subject, then you begin to resent the obsessive work required to be good at it. And you do things like continually re-publish your dissertation (my pet peeve right now) with minor variants ("The bleeding saint in Andreas," "The bleeding saint in Judith," "The bleeding saint in Elene," "The subtextual figure of the bleeding saint in Beowulf" ... you get the idea). Or you stop writing after you get tenure. Or you become bitter and miserable about your students.
But, thankfully, a fairly high percentage of the scholars I know are, in one way or another, otaku. I know a Hawthorne otaku, a Poe otaku, a Louisa May Alcott otaku, a Victorian ghost story otaku. They have (to switch cultures) enthusiasmos or (to switch again) afficion, and it shows in their teaching and their scholarship and their happiness.
I think attempts to bring too much "method" or "theory" to literature can interfere with enthusiasmos, and likewise literary scholars' ill-starred forays into political interpretations undercuts their own afficion (because once you move into politics, you are accepting the idea that there is something that is more important to you than your subject).
Being a fanboy/girl or otaku isn't quite socially mainstream, and being a literary scholar shouldn't be, either: you are doing something that is very weird, and to do it well, you have to be a little weird yourself. You have to get carried away, you have to have a little too much enthusiasm for your obsession than is completely normal.
"a little too much enthusiasm for your obsession than is completely normal" -- sound familiar?
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
The Horned Moses, The Twilight of the Gods, and the Spoiled Eel
Or, can an error improve a text? And if so, who owns it?
Part of the discussion that's been going on here, on Scott Nokes' Unlocked Wordhoard, and on The One Ring circles around (without, I think, actually mentioning it, the idea of "author intent." Now "author intent" is a phrase very out of favor in contemporary literary criticism. The loci classici for its discussion are essays by Roland Barthes ("The Death of the Author") and Michel Foucaul ("What is an Author?"), which are mainstays of introductory theory classes. (I discuss these two essays in regard to Tolkien in my essay "Towards a Better Tolkien Criticism," which is in this book that is supposed to be out soon, so I won't rehearse the whole argument here).
There are a lot of reasons why many (not all, by any means) scholars are wary of author intent: you can't ever be sure you've found it, and the text may have effects that the author did not intend but which nevertheless manifest themselves in the minds of some non-trivial subset of readers. For instance, Tolkien asserted that the name "Galadriel" had nothing to do with the root "galadh" (meaning "tree"), but it's not unreasonable to discuss what effects might be created in the minds of many readers when they notice the similarity (in, for example, the place-name Caras Galadhon or the name for the people of Lothlorien, the Galadhrim). Similarly (but not exactly the same), Tolkien took great exception to a critic's linking "Moria" with the biblical "Moriah," noting that in his invented languages the root "mor" = "black" was sufficient to explain the various "mor-" compound names.
But figuring out what Tolkien meant can't be the end of criticism. Whether or not he intended Moria to be like Moriah (or for readers to perceive an association between Mordor and Murder), in the minds of some readers there will be an association and hence some kind of effect while reading. These may be "mis-readings" or "misprisions" to use Harold Bloom's terms, but if criticism is going to describe what it's like to read The Lord of the Rings, then it has to take these associations and effects into account, regardless of what the author said he wanted.
Now the two instances I've given above a pretty trivial in that they might create some kind of literary resonance for the reader but they don't really change the interpretation of the text significantly, and they are not really significant "errors" for the reader who adopts them. But what about when something goes really wrong? For example, what if you translate a Hebrew word that means "beams" or "rays" of light as Latin "cornu," horns? And then you start a tradition of depicting Moses with Horns (Michelangelo obviously followed this tradition). As I noted in this post, I am not a fan of the hand-waving school of criticism ("Oooh, this is great!! You know why? Because of its essential greatness!! Ooh, look, more greatness!!") that is a somewhat (only somewhat) unfair exaggeration of "conservative" art and literary criticism (the quote from Roger Kemble in the link above illustrates this phenomenon, and Harold's Bloom's introduction to the second edition of his The Anxiety of Influence is almost entirely handwaving about Shakespeare's greatness without ever offering any analysis), but I think Kemble may be on to something in this quote:
I think he's on to the idea that the Moses with horns is better (that is, creating stronger emotional and intellectual responses in viewers) than the same Moses without horns would be. So in this case a translation error has led to an improvement in the quality of the art.
Likewise look at the phrase "Twilight of the Gods" used most famously, obviously, in Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung. This is a mis-translation of Old Norse "ragna-røkr" (it shows up in Snorri's Edda), which actually means "the doom of the Gods" [philology: røk = destined end; røkr = twilight. The "r" on the compound is a nominative ending in ON, but it caused early German scholars mistranslate the word]. Now there's nothing particularly wrong with "Doom of the Gods," but (here I will hand-wave a little due to lack of time) it's not nearly as poetic, beautiful and unexpected as "Twilight of the Gods. " A scholar's error has ramified through the culture to help produce a work of great beauty in Wagner's opera (and it would be impossible, I think, to tease out how much of the opera and the cycle as a whole--musically as well as in terms of plot--is due to Wagner's thinking of the final piece as a "twilight" rather than as just a "doom.").
Finally, the spoiled ell. This is a famous, famous line (or it was, early in the 20th century) from Melville's Moby Dick: a net drops a load of fish on the deck, and there lies a "spoiled eel." Articles were written about the spoiled eel; great existentialist meanings were ascribed to it: had man "spoiled" the eel by wresting it from the sea? Was it "spoiled" intrinsically, the horror of nature apart from humanity? Didn't it show Melville's great poetic genius.
It was a printer's error for "coiled eel," a phrase that would attract just about zero attention because it is so conventional.*
So, is Moby Dick better if it contains "spoiled eel"? Early critical consensus would seem to so indicate. Yet "spoiled eel" was not the author's intent for the passage. So the printer's error is "better" than the author's intent?
What if Melville had noted the error in reading the proofs but had decided to let it stand because he thought it was better than his original? Who gets credit for the poetry of the line?
I could go on raising various questions, but this entry is getting too long, and I actually want to propose some kind of possible solution.
If my theory is correct in describing how traditions evolve (that they involve the accumulation of small differences over time), then an "error" like the horned Moses, the Twilight of the Gods or the spoiled eel provides a saltation, a jump from one portion of the adaptive landscape into another. The vast majority of these kinds of errors are going to be harmful, in that they'll make the text less "adaptive" (that is, aesthetically appealing to the reader): they will add mis-spellings or confusion. But some very small set of these errors will be "better" than the original, and they then may start their own, new, traditions, opening up new areas of adaptive space.
I think this theory might be right because it comes around from an entirely different directon (meme theory, evolutionary biology) and ends up at a place similar to Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, that "strong misreading" drives literary improvement and evolution.
And that's an awful lot of half-argued points to leave off in two paragraphs, but I have a few lectures to write. I'll look forward to further discussion and debate in the comments or on other blogs.
*I think I got the spoiled eel example from Donald Foster's Author Unknown, a book which would be much more interesting if Foster gave more methodology (and which also points to a serious crime that might have been committed by the White House during the Lewinski hearings but which the special prosecutor was too sex-focused to notice).
Or, can an error improve a text? And if so, who owns it?
Part of the discussion that's been going on here, on Scott Nokes' Unlocked Wordhoard, and on The One Ring circles around (without, I think, actually mentioning it, the idea of "author intent." Now "author intent" is a phrase very out of favor in contemporary literary criticism. The loci classici for its discussion are essays by Roland Barthes ("The Death of the Author") and Michel Foucaul ("What is an Author?"), which are mainstays of introductory theory classes. (I discuss these two essays in regard to Tolkien in my essay "Towards a Better Tolkien Criticism," which is in this book that is supposed to be out soon, so I won't rehearse the whole argument here).
There are a lot of reasons why many (not all, by any means) scholars are wary of author intent: you can't ever be sure you've found it, and the text may have effects that the author did not intend but which nevertheless manifest themselves in the minds of some non-trivial subset of readers. For instance, Tolkien asserted that the name "Galadriel" had nothing to do with the root "galadh" (meaning "tree"), but it's not unreasonable to discuss what effects might be created in the minds of many readers when they notice the similarity (in, for example, the place-name Caras Galadhon or the name for the people of Lothlorien, the Galadhrim). Similarly (but not exactly the same), Tolkien took great exception to a critic's linking "Moria" with the biblical "Moriah," noting that in his invented languages the root "mor" = "black" was sufficient to explain the various "mor-" compound names.
But figuring out what Tolkien meant can't be the end of criticism. Whether or not he intended Moria to be like Moriah (or for readers to perceive an association between Mordor and Murder), in the minds of some readers there will be an association and hence some kind of effect while reading. These may be "mis-readings" or "misprisions" to use Harold Bloom's terms, but if criticism is going to describe what it's like to read The Lord of the Rings, then it has to take these associations and effects into account, regardless of what the author said he wanted.
Now the two instances I've given above a pretty trivial in that they might create some kind of literary resonance for the reader but they don't really change the interpretation of the text significantly, and they are not really significant "errors" for the reader who adopts them. But what about when something goes really wrong? For example, what if you translate a Hebrew word that means "beams" or "rays" of light as Latin "cornu," horns? And then you start a tradition of depicting Moses with Horns (Michelangelo obviously followed this tradition). As I noted in this post, I am not a fan of the hand-waving school of criticism ("Oooh, this is great!! You know why? Because of its essential greatness!! Ooh, look, more greatness!!") that is a somewhat (only somewhat) unfair exaggeration of "conservative" art and literary criticism (the quote from Roger Kemble in the link above illustrates this phenomenon, and Harold's Bloom's introduction to the second edition of his The Anxiety of Influence is almost entirely handwaving about Shakespeare's greatness without ever offering any analysis), but I think Kemble may be on to something in this quote:
What we see in Moses here--Moses the law-giver, Moses the chap who has just had an awful (in the old sense) encounter with God--is the results of an artist's effort to represent visually something that exceeds the boundaries of the representable: the horns are a sort of objective correlative of that overwhelming moral awesomeness: forbidding, grotesque, yet commanding.
I think he's on to the idea that the Moses with horns is better (that is, creating stronger emotional and intellectual responses in viewers) than the same Moses without horns would be. So in this case a translation error has led to an improvement in the quality of the art.
Likewise look at the phrase "Twilight of the Gods" used most famously, obviously, in Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung. This is a mis-translation of Old Norse "ragna-røkr" (it shows up in Snorri's Edda), which actually means "the doom of the Gods" [philology: røk = destined end; røkr = twilight. The "r" on the compound is a nominative ending in ON, but it caused early German scholars mistranslate the word]. Now there's nothing particularly wrong with "Doom of the Gods," but (here I will hand-wave a little due to lack of time) it's not nearly as poetic, beautiful and unexpected as "Twilight of the Gods. " A scholar's error has ramified through the culture to help produce a work of great beauty in Wagner's opera (and it would be impossible, I think, to tease out how much of the opera and the cycle as a whole--musically as well as in terms of plot--is due to Wagner's thinking of the final piece as a "twilight" rather than as just a "doom.").
Finally, the spoiled ell. This is a famous, famous line (or it was, early in the 20th century) from Melville's Moby Dick: a net drops a load of fish on the deck, and there lies a "spoiled eel." Articles were written about the spoiled eel; great existentialist meanings were ascribed to it: had man "spoiled" the eel by wresting it from the sea? Was it "spoiled" intrinsically, the horror of nature apart from humanity? Didn't it show Melville's great poetic genius.
It was a printer's error for "coiled eel," a phrase that would attract just about zero attention because it is so conventional.*
So, is Moby Dick better if it contains "spoiled eel"? Early critical consensus would seem to so indicate. Yet "spoiled eel" was not the author's intent for the passage. So the printer's error is "better" than the author's intent?
What if Melville had noted the error in reading the proofs but had decided to let it stand because he thought it was better than his original? Who gets credit for the poetry of the line?
I could go on raising various questions, but this entry is getting too long, and I actually want to propose some kind of possible solution.
If my theory is correct in describing how traditions evolve (that they involve the accumulation of small differences over time), then an "error" like the horned Moses, the Twilight of the Gods or the spoiled eel provides a saltation, a jump from one portion of the adaptive landscape into another. The vast majority of these kinds of errors are going to be harmful, in that they'll make the text less "adaptive" (that is, aesthetically appealing to the reader): they will add mis-spellings or confusion. But some very small set of these errors will be "better" than the original, and they then may start their own, new, traditions, opening up new areas of adaptive space.
I think this theory might be right because it comes around from an entirely different directon (meme theory, evolutionary biology) and ends up at a place similar to Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, that "strong misreading" drives literary improvement and evolution.
And that's an awful lot of half-argued points to leave off in two paragraphs, but I have a few lectures to write. I'll look forward to further discussion and debate in the comments or on other blogs.
*I think I got the spoiled eel example from Donald Foster's Author Unknown, a book which would be much more interesting if Foster gave more methodology (and which also points to a serious crime that might have been committed by the White House during the Lewinski hearings but which the special prosecutor was too sex-focused to notice).
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