It's not "the job market"; it's the profession (and it's your problem too)

I enjoyed Kathleen Fitzpatrick's recent piece in the Chronicle* on risk-taking and the responsibility of mentors to back up those junior scholars who are doing nontraditional work. The piece's key insight is that it's one thing to urge people to "innovate" and quite another to create the institutional frameworks that make innovation not only possible but consequential.**

Kathleen's observation comports with some ideas that have been floating around in my head lately, especially around "digital humanities." I and my Fox Center colleague Bart Brinkman were recently called upon to define digital humanities for the other fellows in residence, and in the process of talking it over with Bart, and during the discussion at the CHI, I've come to realize that I have some real pet peeves around the notion of the "job market" that come into relief specifically around the field of digital humanities.

It boils down to this: peeps, we're all connected.

The recent rise to prominence of digital humanities is indistinguishable from its new importance in "the job market" (I insist on those scare quotes); after all, digital humanities and its predecessor, humanities computing, have been active fields for decades. What's happening now is that they are institutionalizing in new ways. So when we talk about "digital humanities and the 'job market,'" we are not just talking about a young scholar's problem (or opportunity, depending on how you see it). We are talking about a shift in the institutional structures of the profession. And, senior scholars, this is not something that is happening to you. You are, after all, the ones on the hiring and t&p committees. It is a thing you are making—through choices that you make, and through choices that you decline to make.

There's something a little strange about the way that digital humanities gets promoted from the top down; it gets a lot of buzz in the New York Times; it's well known as dean-candy and so gets tacked onto requests for hires; digital humanities grant money seems to pour in (thanks, NEH!) even as philosophy departments across the country are getting shut down; university libraries start up initiatives to promote digital humanities among their faculty. I am waiting for the day when administrators and librarians descend upon the natural sciences faculty to promote history of science. No, I really am.

So it seems quite natural that there should be wariness and resistance to the growing presence of digital humanities. Perhaps there is some bitterness that you might get your new Americanist only on condition that her work involves a Google Maps mashup, because it was easy to persuade people that your department needed a new "digital humanist," whatever the hell that is, and it was not easy to persuade people that you needed somebody to teach Faulkner.

The situation is not improved by the confrontational attitudes of certain factions of the digital humanities establishment (such as it is), which are occasionally prone to snotty comments about how innovative DH is and how tired and intellectually bankrupt everybody else's work is. (Not so often, I find—but even a little is enough to be a problem.) Under those circumstances, DH seems clubby and not liberating; not a way of advocating the humanities but an attack on it, and specifically on the worth of that Faulkner seminar that you teach, and that non-digital research that you do. Why, an established scholar might reasonably ask, should I even deal with this "digital humanities" nonsense? Shouldn't I just keep teaching my Faulkner seminar, because somebody ought to do it, for Christ's sake?

Well, whatever else DH is, it is highly political, and it has political consequences. So, in short, no.

I'm persuaded that the widespread appeal of DH has much to do with the leveling fantasy it offers, a fantasy of meritocracy that is increasingly belied elsewhere in the professional humanities. As Tom Scheinfeldt points out in his useful "Stuff Digital Humanists Like,"

Innovation in digital humanities frequently comes from the edges of the scholarly community rather than from its center—small institutions and even individual actors with few resources are able to make important innovations. Institutions like George Mason, the University of Mary Washington, and CUNY and their staff members play totally out-sized roles in digital humanities when compared to their roles in higher ed more generally, and the community of digital humanities makes room for and values these contributions from the nodes.

This is true. Those involved in digital humanities have also seen the ways that THATCamps, blogs, and Twitter allow junior scholars and scholars at non-R1 institutions to cut geodesics across the profession, allowing them to spread their ideas, collaborate, and achieve a certain prominence that would have been impossible through traditional channels. I'm convinced that real possibilities lie here.

And as traditional scholarly publishing becomes more and more constricted and humanities department budgets are slashed, the fiction of academic meritocracy becomes harder and harder to sustain. Perhaps on the web, we think, through lean DIY publishing and postprint review, meritocracy (or its semblance) can return to the academy. It seems at once a way forward and a way to return to a (fabled) time when people cared about scholarship for the sake of scholarship—not because they needed X number of well-placed articles or a line on the cv or a connection at Y institution without which their careers would disappear. Perhaps DH offers us a way out of the increasingly rationalized death-spiral of "impact scores" and credential inflation. Perhaps it will let us out-quantify the quantifiers, or sidestep them altogether.

Of course, the web always comes with liberatory rhetoric that usually turns out to mean little more than "what the market will bear," and the ostensible meritocracy of digital humanities in the present moment is really no more than a misalignment between its alternative (and potentially even more aggressively capitalistic) value systems and those of the institutionalized humanities more generally. It can be disturbingly easy for the genuinely progressive intentions of digital humanists to become assimilated to the vague libertarianisms of "information wants to be free" and "DIY U," and from there to Google Books and charter schools and the privatization of knowledge—an enclosure of the digital commons ironically in the name of openness. At the same time, the naming of the "alt-ac" "track" (it is generally not a track, of course, by definition) seems to provide new opportunities for young scholars even as it raises research expectations for staff and requires those on the "track" to subordinate their research interests to those of the institutional structure that employs them. Digital forms are exceptionally good at occluding labor. How to navigate those waters thoughtfully—to realize the real promise of DH—is a question to which we must all apply ourselves.

So you see what I mean when I say that "digital humanities and 'the job market'" as it now manifests isn't a narrow, merely administrative sliver of life of interest solely to junior academics who are still gravely listening to advice about how to "tailor" the teaching paragraphs in their cover letters. Digital humanities has become important to "the job market" exactly insofar as it is causing major shifts in the institutions of the profession. These shifts are political. And if you are in my profession, then they are your concern.

*I know, "enjoyed" and "Chronicle" in one sentence... mirabile dictu.

**As we all know, I have a complex relationship with the word "innovation" and do not consider it an unqualified good, nor a transhistorical value. For today, however, we will leave that particular word a black box.

Thanks to Bart and Colleen for sitting through a less-worked-out live version of this rant last week.

Times are tough. Let the humanities help you.

A few weeks ago one of my friends was interviewed in a coffee shop about the crumbling economy. She was in that coffee shop working on her dissertation because she doesn’t have an office (neither does any grad student in my department). The reporter asked her how the stock crashes were affecting her. She responded that they didn’t affect her at all -- that she lived well below the poverty line, and did the reporter know what kind of money you have to have to get into the stock market?

Nonetheless, those who had anything to lose have lost it or are in the process of losing it. People want to point fingers.

The obvious people to blame are the people who somehow made money off of crazy meta-economic juggling and somehow made the rest of the economy depend on the aforementioned juggling.

But that’s boring. With our long-held Freudian taste for analysis, we’re moved to dig deeper, and by “dig deeper,” I mean “dig shallowly and pull up the first ready-made pat narrative you find.”

That narrative, of course, is the two cultures, for lo, it will not die.

Thus in yesterday’s New York Times, I find Maureen Dowd crowing that too much technocracy has gotten us into trouble and we must all go back to reading Latin so that we can learn from the Stoics that greed is bad. Capital is scarce: cultural capital is back!!

Then Op-Ed contributor Richard Dooling writes that “math and physics geeks” are raining destruction upon us, in the form of nuclear warfare and financial ruin.

And then there is Harold Bloom, who advocatesreading Emerson.

Let’s look for a moment at how Bloom quotes Emerson:

Pride, and Thrift, and Expediency, who jeered and chirped and were so well pleased with themselves, and made merry with the dream, as they termed it, of Philosophy and Love, — behold they are all flat, and here is the Soul erect and unconquered still.

“Pride,” “Thrift,” “Expediency”? That’s nineteenth-century talk for business school – which Dooling improbably aligns with physicists. In short, it’s all number-people collapsed together. “Philosophy and Love,” on the other hand -- the humanities.

So after hearing that the humanities are in crisis for basically the entire time I’ve been in the humanities, I’m starting to hear that this is our hour of glory.

The logic seems to go:

There are two cultures, numbers culture and humanities culture. Finance isn't part of the humanities, so it must be part of the numbers culture, which also includes, I don't know, botanists and the Maytag repair person. The soulless numbers culture, like the Republican party, squandered its period of dominance, and now the other party will rise to power. That would be the humanities. Here is the Soul erect and unconquered still!

That's where I'm balking. It takes some really confused categories (Dooling, I’m looking at you) to make nuclear physics, robot takeovers, and the world financial system into the same phenomenon. Physicists actually have nothing to do with the economic crisis. Correlation is not causation, and numbers per se do not create hubris.

It also takes some pretty confused categories to think of Latin, “philosophy and love,” or Emerson as the inverse of irresponsible economics. The economy is a mess, but Emerson is not going to come back into fashion. Latin is not going to come back either. The NYT editors will not suffer Dowd columns in Latin for long. People are not going to come flocking to the more decrepit buildings on campus beating their breasts and calling out, “Oh, literature professors! We were wrong! Sell us your academic monographs!”

The current economic situation is not about the two cultures. The two cultures are not real. The two cultures, as being invoked here, are an intellectually lazy binary that lets us point fingers without actually having to think about economics.

But I am pretty sure the current situation is actually about economics.

FYI

AP: "Nobel literature head: US too insular to compete"

Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.

Counters the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation: "Put him in touch with me, and I'll send him a reading list."

Funny: The claim that American literature can't measure up to European writing.

Funnier: The indignation with which Americans quoted in the article greeted the announcement.

Funniest: Calling the aforementioned Americans (David Remnick of the New Yorker, Harold Augenbraum of the National Book Award) "literary officials." What, now we have literary officials? Are they by any chance part of this country's vast aesthetic-industrial complex?

I wonder if The Onion knows that Adorno and Horkheimer got there first.

Michèle Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing

I recently read Michèle Le Doeuff's The Sex of Knowing (in translation). At its heart is a critique of difference feminism based on a historical observation: that women have been excluded from structures of knowledge, not because women have a different and undervalued way of knowing, but because they are women. The special kinds of knowing that have been attributed to women are not stable across history. The pattern that we see across them, Le Doeuff argues, is that these modes of knowing are devalued. Then they are attributed to women. She writes:

We are the little sisters who get the broken toys, the worn-out ideas, and the signs that are being discarded. However, the gift is snatched back when what appeared to be an ordinary stone is revealed as a diamond in the rough or something that could pass for one. The practice of attributing these negative values to women is constant in form, even if the precise content varies ad libitum. Women can be taxed with anything at all, in a way that is both arbitrary and not accidental, provided that at some point in history it has had a negative value. This phenomenon did not escape the attention of Gabrielle Suchon, who notes in 1693: “When desires are seen as marks of need and poverty, they will be attributed by the score to women and girls, since people are always ready to turn unpleasant things over to them.” She has discerned a kind of law, to which we may add a corollary underscoring the historic fluctuation of these gifts. In the seventeenth century, desire was in disrepute, and so women were said to have it in excess; today, it has been revalued by psychoanalysis, which even sees it as a sign of mental health. Since then, it has become a male characteristic, even in the writings of female psychoanalysts. (17)

The answer to women's systematic exclusion from institutions, Le Doeuff argues, is not to try to revalue failed intellectual modes. The answer is to insist once and for all that women can and do know things -- not intuit, not feel, but know, reason, and understand. (I may have more to say on this soon.)

Her point is well argued, although I don't think she gives difference feminism its due. Le Doeuff is at pains to distinguish between the modes of knowledge that have been called "masculine," which she argues are no such thing, and the ideologies that have kept the sciences largely populated by and entirely attributed to men.

One of her key arguments revolves around a critique of Evelyn Fox Keller's classic essay "Gender and Science," which reads Bacon's Advancement of Learning as envisioning a masculine subject pursuing violent knowledge of a feminine object. Le Doeuff happens to be a Bacon scholar, and she observes that Keller fails to read the original Latin. It is the translations on which Keller relies, Le Doeuff argues, that superimpose a masculinist ideology on Baconian science, which is itself neutral (149-50).

It's an effective take-down of the particulars of Keller's argument, but not a response to the broader point of "Gender and Science," which takes Bacon's wording as a metonym for a pervasive assumption in the sciences that by no means depends on Bacon.

Le Doeuff wants to say that science doesn't really fashion itself as masculinist per se; it just gets read that way all too often (and she readily points to other instances of Bacon being a raging sexist). But this ignores a problem of cultural dissemination. If science is couched in a masculinist ideology heartily espoused by its central theorists, even if it need not be masculinist, it effectively is.

In any case, Le Doeuff also elides the fact that, in the main, she and Keller almost entirely agree. As deserving of critique as some of the worst essentialist excesses of difference feminism are, Keller isn't guilty of them. Keller isn't out to prove that women by definition can't do science. Keller is a scientist herself. She's arguing that science has been theorized more or less formally as a masculinist pursuit. Thus:

A circular process of mutual reinforcement is established in which what is called scientific receives extra validation from the cultural preference for what is called masculine, and, conversely, what is called feminine -- be it a branch of knowledge, a way of thinking, or woman herself -- becomes further devalued by its exclusion from the special social and intellectual value placed on science and the model science provides for all intellectual endeavors. (Keller 202)

In fact, in this essay, Keller's a bit more willing to separate "real" science from the ideologies that surround it than I'm comfortable with (a problem she revisits in "Gender and Science: An Update").

There's another, non-essentialist, pragmatic argument for the idea that female knowledge could improve science, perhaps best articulated by example. Martha McClintock's 1971 paper establishing that when women live together, their menstrual cycles synchronize. This was groundbreaking in that it demonstrated a connection between a biological function and social interaction. But also? This is something that I and every other girl who went to summer camp knew long before we'd ever heard of Martha McClintock. (Of course, historical contingencies were involved in my own experience.) It's a phenomenon that men in science hadn't thought to investigate, because everyone knows that if you even whisper the word "tampon!" near a man, he may shrivel up and die, or at the very least lose his manhood. Le Doeuff does an excellent job of pointing out the ways in which the "object" of science may in fact know something about herself, despite claims to the contrary, in her extensive second chapter.

I found Le Doeuff overly dismissive of difference feminism, and of literary studies, but one of the real pleasures of the book is her sarcasm. There's a strong way in which The Sex of Knowing retreads the ground of A Room of One's Own, examining more systematically the phenomenon Virginia Woolf wryly points out in 1928/9:

Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? [...] Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was more surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex -- woman, that is to say -- also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.(27)

Le Doeuff wants to find out why women and knowledge have been defined as mutually exclusive; Woolf seeks the answer to the same question about women and writing. Like Woolf, she skewers bald instances of male vanity, like Joseph de Maistre's pronouncement (1808) that

Women have never created a masterpiece in any field. They did not create the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Phaedra, or Athaliah, or the Pantheon, or the Venus of Medici [etc., etc.]. They invented neither algebra, nor the telescope, nor the heat pump, [etc.]..."(qtd. in Le Doeuff 170)

"De Maistre," Le Doeuff points out,

did not invent the telescope himself, nor did he write the Iliad; but, when he affirms that the 'masterpiece' is always a masculine product, he can imagine for an instant that algebra is almost his own creation. Generally, the exclusion of female creators from the mythic representation of inventiveness allows any man to take himself for an Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci, without having to manipulate an equation or handle a paintbrush, and even without the slightest interest in painting or physics. (173)

Like Woolf, Le Doeuff is brilliantly sarcastic. Stories of Le Doeuff's own career occasionally pop up, like the time she was nearly laughed out of the room for suggesting that Mary Wollstonecraft be included in an encyclopedia of eighteenth century English philosophers (because the rights of women, don't you know, aren't important like the rights of "man"). Nobody is spared the snark, and especially not sexist philosophers. For instance, she mentions Jacques Lacan merely in passing as someone "whose fine remark 'woman is not' or 'there is no such entity as woman' is sometimes used to dismiss you when you want to create a program in women's studies" (33).

Although I have significant reservations, I found this an enlightening and interesting book. The problematic of gender and knowledge casts light on unexpected questions, as, for example, the controversy a few years ago over head scarves in the French schools. Le Doeuff points out that the controversy over whether to throw girls out of school over a slip of fabric reveals the fragility of those girls' right to be educated -- the ease with which their right may be denied. Examples like these bring home the urgency of reasserting women's capacity for and right to knowledge qua knowledge. Martha McClintock recalls,

[At] Harvard, [...] because I was a woman, I was barred from the stacks at the Widener Library. I remember a moment when the chairman of the psychology department took his first-year students to lunch at the faculty club. I had to sit at a card table in the vestibule because I wasn't allowed into the dining room.

Le Doeuff's book reminds us that even though, as McClintock says, "[t]hings have changed," there are still beadles all too ready to chase our female students off the grass.

* * * * *

Keller, Evelyn Fox. "Gender and Science." In Sandra Harding and Merill B. Hintikka, eds. Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Boston: Kluwer-D. Reidel, 1983. First published in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 1:3 (1978).

---. "Gender and Science: An Update." In Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Le Doeuff, Michèle. The Sex of Knowing, trans. Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Annotated and Introd. Susan Gubar. 1929; New York: Harcourt, 2005.

Émile Zola and Gertrude Stein walk into a bar...

Recently I checked my sitemeter to see what miserable search strings had directed people to my blog. As I've ranted before, it's usually people who honestly feel that they need Cliffs Notes in order to understand children's literature. (Ouch.) So I was surprised to see a large number of search strings that were simply my name.

In short, I was forced to Google myself.

Turns out this is what I get for actually following links. A while ago Hillary sent me a link to a funny/appalling newspaper article, which precipitated a calm evening's snark.

Google reveals that the aforementioned snarking was recently (very slightly mis-)quoted in a Chronicle of Higher Ed article, Britt Peterson's "Darwin to the Rescue." Evidently there was a widespread desire for -- well, I'm not sure what, exactly. In the article, the quotation is kind of awkwardly framed so that it isn't actually clear what I'm saying, so I suspect most of the googling of my name was in the spirit of trying to figure out wtf was being said.

Dang. I wish the Chronicle would ask me about my research instead. Zola and Stein? Anybody?

Akademiks and academics

Sociological Images comes through again with a post on Akademics clothing. Gwen writes:

Contrary to what you might think, it’s not part of a campaign to promote literacy or libraries. It’s an ad for Akademiks clothing (a clothing label aimed at the hip-hop community).

As the earlier t-shirt featuring Einstein suggested, apparently even academic study has become an icon of itself.

* * * * *

Quasi-relatedly, I recently saw a sign outside a clothing store on Telegraph:

"Affliction sold here!"

I thought, "No thanks; I get that free with my dissertation."

Professors and composition

Everybody knows that Ron Silliman has the best linkspam around. Recently he's linked to an Inside Higher Ed article by William Major titled "Teaching Composition: A Reconsideration."

In it, Major argues that it might be valuable for the whole university system if actual tenured professors taught composition sometimes.

At the very least, full professors of English belong in the composition classroom because they might learn a thing or two about writing themselves. Moreover, the benefits to those students who will not see a professor their first year could be intangible. They would understand that we in the university take writing seriously enough that someone with gravitas and experience is teaching it. They would benefit from close contact with instructors who are not looking to move up or into the more ethereal realm of literature, those who believe that strong, clear writing is as essential as oxygen.

In point of fact, where I did my undergrad, "composition" was absorbed into the core humanities sequence. There were grad students employed as "writing tutors" who would meet with the students in separate groups and grade the papers, but they were for all intents and purposes TAs. The courses themselves were taught by a mix of grad students, postdocs, and tenured or tenure-track professors. The College definitely tried to give the impression that we were doing Very Serious Things in those classrooms, even though secretly they were teaching us comp. (I remember with fondness my Soc teacher, a postdoc who must have had a hard time suppressing her nausea at my terrible writing.)

It does seem a little rough on undergrads -- and nonmajors at that -- to stick them with the least tried teachers in the department. William Major sort of faux-wonders why grad students are so eager to get to teach literature classes instead of comp. He answers his own question: teaching composition is the ghetto of academic life.

Of course, there's a reason for this relating to the prestige of the English department in the university. Everybody agrees that we need English departments, but it's seen as a place of preservation and passing on of The Tradition -- a teaching department, existing for historical reasons. Science departments, on the other hand, are seen as valuable for The New -- research. So English professors are understandably miffed when, after completing a head-hurtingly difficult Ph.D., they're expected by the world to spend their time obsessed with split infinitives (as they're often caricatured by Language Log).

In fact, Major opens his article with the observation that

When I tell new acquaintances that I am an English professor, they generally react two ways. First, they express dismay that they now have to watch what they say (as if I were grading their performance).

And the mild irritation with which the article begins registers the problem in his very reasonable suggestion that professors take on composition once in a while. Nobody with money actually cares about humanities research, and university administrations are increasingly loath to support it. And teaching can take over your life, to the serious detriment of your research. Nobody wants to go back to the misery of having your research stunted the perpetual grading of stacks of very bad papers on Walt Whitman, once they've escaped that life. So for an English department to turn around and embrace the role of a teaching department might seem like a move to cede crucial ideological ground. Major envisions a utopian future produced by the de-ghettoization of composition -- of which he writes:

Might we see smaller Ph.D. programs because there is less need for composition instructors and because the professors are more fully engaged with undergraduate education? Might we have fewer doctorates awarded? A meaningful loosening of the job market? Imagine a world where positions teaching literature and composition are actually available for the professionals we graduate from our programs.

That surely would be lovely. But the fear that prevents us from getting there is the very realistic fear of a dystopia: that the English department itself will become the composition ghetto; that research will never be supported again, even in the limited amounts that we have now; that we will all be stuck as eternal adjuncts, even if we're as brainy as Stanley Fish. (Stanley Fish, perhaps, can afford to teach composition because he's become a public intellectual and probably never has to worry about having his research supported again.) The fear is that the Language Log caricature of the English professor will become true, because we'll never get to work on our research again (an all-too-familiar feeling when one is confronted with yet another stack of grading).

I think William Major knows that this is a danger: he sounds the note before he even begins his argument, after all. And he's writing from the perspective of someone who knows that teaching composition can be rewarding, but that it's also a ton of work that actively siphons away research time. For this kind of de-ghettoization of composition to work, we'd have to have a climate in which writing and complex thought in the humanities were solidly valued, whereas in the current climate both are on the margins, if in different ways.

* * * * *

I'm puzzled by Major's allegation that English professors "don’t have to undermine their status or misuse their expertise with something as mundane as composition. Life is good when you can spend it with Gilbert and Gubar rather than Elbow and Belanoff." WTF? I am totally assigning my composition students Gilbert and Gubar. And they are going to love it! Seriously.

All the cultural capital money can buy

Here's another instance of the commodification of the idea of science, here embodied in the "genius" figure of Albert Einstein:





The t-shirt reads "GENIUS OF LOVE." Um. Okay.

Here's another funny item for sale, spotted at one of the many yuppie stores that have invaded Elmwood in recent years (I suppose I should say super-yuppie, since Elmwood wasn't exactly gritty when I moved here).



Seen in the photo below: posh white-painted, fake wooden books to, er, leave lying around on your floor?




Whatever, fools. I have the real deal.

On encountering your fifth grade class trip in the Moore archive

I don't know whether it is still the case that fifth-graders in Newport News routinely visit the Mariners' Museum. I admit that when I was a fifth-grader I was bored to tears by most of the exhibits, coming as I did from a family that was emphatically not the boat-owning type. I was interested in the exhibits of figureheads and in the rooms full of miniatures -- the handcrafts -- but found the large room full of watercrafts merely dull.

I'm reading a fascinating book on early twentieth century museums, Catherine Paul's Poetry in the Museums of Modernism (U of Michigan P, 2002). Theoretically, it's not overwhelming, but it's full of great archival finds, including an account of an unpublished review that Marianne Moore wrote about a 1937 exhibit on surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, titled "Concerning the Marvelous."

In an early draft of this essay, according to Paul, Moore compares the exhibit to the Mariners' Museum, using what my fifth-grade self considered essentially a big building full of boring crap to explain the curatorial rage for order.

"The objects that Moore finds together in the Mariner's Museum talk to each other, creating an impression of sea-faring life: collected shells combine with tattooers' apparatus; painted Portuguese boats, mastheads, whale skeletons, and walking sticks show what sailors brought with them on voyages as well as what they found. From these objects visitors are expected to piece together the big picture to which each object -- marvelous in its own right -- contributes; both the exhibitor's processes of selection and display and the visitor's interpretive ability shape that big picture." (146).

I must say that it's pretty much 100% certain that in fifth grade, I would have liked to see surrealism at the MoMA much better than the collection of small watercraft at the obligatory local maritime museum. But then, it's probably the podunk nature of that particular museum that suits it to Moore's purpose.

Access to "education"

Chancellor Birgeneau writes in USA Today, "Bravo for Yale and Harvard, but what about the rest?"

The short version: rich schools (e.g. Ivies) are giving more financial aid to richer students (families with annual incomes $120k-180k) and capping everyone's out-of-pocket costs at 10% of the family's income.

But since most people can't go to Harvard or Yale (this is not a question of ability but of space -- these are small schools), most students are still screwed. If you go to a cheaper state school (Birgeneau cites Cal's $25k/year versus Harvard's $45k), you still might wind up paying more for the state school, because State U has less money for financial aid.

Birgeneau's proposed solution is, naturally, to give state schools more money. The model he envisions is alumni donations matched by state funds. For instance, he muses, what if all of Cal's living alumni donated $1000 apiece, just once?

Birgeneau is living in a dream world if he thinks alumni really have $1000 lying around that they want to give to Cal, especially young alumni. On one hand, Birgeneau recognizes that paying for college punches students in the gut. But then, on the other, he supposes that once they graduate it's magically all better, and everybody's rolling in cash (the "B.A. = instant wealth" myth). I suspect that young alumni who find themselves with spare money will do things like try to pay off their $30,000 or more in student loans.

The problem that Birgeneau is fingering -- i.e. that Harvard et al.'s policies, however laudable, do nothing for most college students -- is real. But there's a certain bang-for-your-buck mentality that seems to underwrite his outrage -- if you got into an Ivy, you could get a better education for less money! But not everyone can get into an Ivy League school! They should totally get more checkers at this Trader Joe's; the lines are so long! Why can't I get my cheap, good sundried tomatoes education?

We tend to treat college as a gateway into the middle class, and college costs boatloads of money. Everybody knows that if you don't have the cultural capital of a B.A., you're doomed to poverty forever, so everybody goes for broke trying to get that B.A. in the faith that the gain in cultural capital will one day translate into actual capital.

Imagine if employment depended on skills rather than credentials. Imagine if you could learn things, really learn them, without getting an official bureaucratic stamp of approval, and have your learning valued over the stamp. Conversely, imagine if getting a degree were about really learning things instead of acquiring a credential.

We talk about access to education as if

a. it would solve everybody's problems, and
b. "education" necessarily meant accredited institutions of higher learning.

Unequal access to higher institutions is a problem, yes. But Birgeneau and everyone else is glossing over the cause of that unequal access, namely ridiculous gaps in wealth. "Education" is supposed to be the great equalizer, the thing that allows people from poor backgrounds to "make it"; education, in short, is supposed to rectify class inequality. In fact, it tends to reproduce class inequality. Perhaps we should work on that class inequality thing a little more directly. We could start by not considering expensive credentials the sine qua non of employment.

Also, what Michelle said.

MLA 2007: some notes

It's the second day of MLA, and I'm sort of horrified that there's just as much more to come.

I've heard many good talks and some miserable ones, and some in between. Here are some highlights so far:

Session 21: The Challenge of a Million Books

The crappy panel title notwithstanding, I thought this session, run by the Association for Computers and the Humanities (program here), was very good. Each of the presenters discussed computational methods in literary research. Brad Pasanek and D. Sculley (the latter not present at the panel) used a classification algorithm to test how well patterns in metaphor predicted political affiliations; they have a database of metaphors at http://metaphorized.net, which could come in handy sometime. Glenn Roe and Robert Voyer used text mining to try to understand the classification of knowledge in Diderot's Encyclopédie, and Sara Steger used similar techniques to try to make more precise the formulaic quality of sentimental writing. Good times. I would be especially interested in learning more about pedagogical applications for these techniques.

Session 85: Micro: Studies in the Very Small

Wai Chee Dimock gave the first paper, "Fractals: The Micro in a Global World," and much as I respect Dimock as a scholar, I must say that I found her use of "fractals" entirely specious. She began by suggesting a loosening of the idea of fractals in order to think of self-similarity in terms of scalablility and the structural self-similarity of epic as a genre. Perhaps I was missing part of what was going on, but Dimock's paper struck me as an old-school organic unity paper with the word "fractal" stuck on it. By loosening the definition of "fractal," the usefulness of which I was already dubious, I felt that she robbed it of its power as a concept. She also used the term "recursion" to mean, more or less, repetition, again diluting the meaningfulness of the concept of recursion. It is possible that the short format of the talk prevented Dimock from supplying some crucial justifications for these moves, but I simply came away from the talk with the sense that she has little understanding of complex dynamics, and that they bear no relation whatever to the epic as a genre.

I found Robert Rushing's paper, "Fractal Microscopy: Blowup, Greene, Calvino" more convincing and quite entertaining. Rushing discussed how three texts try to assimilate the traumatic sublime of quantum mechanics (its impossibly small scale, its discreteness, its counterintuitiveness) to everyday life through ideologically charged metaphors. This was my favorite talk in the panel, and came away with an urgent feeling that I need to see Antonioni's Blowup.

Anna Botta gave a paper on dust. I more or less liked it, but can't say much about it, since it was mainly an art history paper and discussed a lot of works that I wasn't familiar with.

James Ramey gave an interesting paper called "Micropoetics: Nabokov's Small-Scale Parasites," which refreshingly used science in a legitimate way. Ramey explored how Nabokov uses the metaphor of the parasite to characterize creativity, especially literary creativity--a sinister generativity. I wound up asking him a question at the end about the difference between being the gestating egg and the egg-laying parent bug, since Nabokov seemed to be enormously interested in the "sting" of the egg-laying. (Some dim person in the audience turned around and suggested that it would help to think of the parasite as species rather than as individual bugs, as if I were confused about it. Sigh.)

Session 93: The Press

This session was arranged by the Division on Nineteenth Century French Literature.

I really enjoyed Cary Hollinshead-Strick's paper, "Personifying the Press: Newspapers on Stage after 1830," which looked at how vaudeville and the press spoke to and about one another.

I also enjoyed Marie-Eve Thérenty's paper, "Vies drôles et scalps de puces: Des formes brèves dans les quotidiens à la Belle Epoque," which looked at a hitherto little-noted genre of short, humorous newspaper pieces. It was a very interesting talk, but as it was in French, I'm sure I only caught about a third of it.

Evelyn Gould's paper, "Among Dreyfus Affairs: The Emergence of Testimonial Chronicle," similarly engaged in a kind of genre study, this time of very long works somewhere in between journalism and autobiography. I'm not really sure I understood how she was theorizing "testimonial chronicle," but she discussed the texts in interesting ways.

I went to a mostly miserable panel late on Thursday evening. It will remain nameless.

I also went to a panel today solely because a friend was presenting a paper on it. In my completely unbiased view, hers was the best paper on the panel, which was on nineteenth century American women's religious poetry. Apart from my friend, one panelist seemed to be trying to recuperate this corpus, which has been widely charged with crappiness, but she seemed to want to do so by pointing out a few exceptional writers (i.e. yes, this genre is crappy, but here are a few diamonds in the rough), and by valorizing these writers in spite of form. I'm baffled. I do want to check out her book, however. The other panelist seemed to have, um, missed the last 30 years of feminist studies?

Session 324: Brave New Worlds: Digital Scholarship and the Future of Early American Studies

I mostly liked this panel; I didn't come away with anything portable, but I learned some stuff about Samson Occom, and am interested in the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive, which draws on fourteen different physical archives, which must be a giant pain in the butt for the people on the project. Interestingly, one presenter was Michelle Harper, the director of project management for Readex. Apparently they're coming out with an interesting feature in which you can annotate digital editions from their archive. It looks cooler that I'm making it sound here, but my notes are sadly devoid of detail, and I'm too spaced out now to remember it.

I gave my paper this evening, but perhaps I'll post on that panel separately, or not post on it at all.

Today I ran into some friends, a former professor, and a woman from Stanford with whom I once took summer German, which was nice. Margery Kempe was right, though: MLA is a desperaat tryal and a terribil oon amonges devils and hir ministeres and necromanceres.

A Vote for Taking Two Minutes to Stop Gazing at One's Own Navel

Harry Mount's NYT op-ed "A Vote for Latin" opines that learning Latin makes better statespersons. He deplores politicians' tendencies to have majored in -- oh, no! -- political science instead of classics. According to Mount, learning Latin makes you smarter. In his piece, Mount more or less sits there and extols the wonderful things he has learned from classics.

It's great that he had such a good experience with Latin, but it's ridiculous of him to suppose that other fields of study are not equally rich (in particular, the whipping boy, political science). To turn one's personal love for Latin into a prescription for all politicians reveals only ignorance and self-centeredness -- not to mention privilege, since it's often only élite high schools that even offer Latin, and even then only as an elective. Generally speaking, you don't enter college from a working-class background with no high-school exposure to Latin and say, "golly, I think I'll major in classics."

Meanwhile, Mount's claims that Latin is "the eternal language" or that it's "crucial . . . to learn Latin to become a civilized leader" (as opposed to, say, an uncivilized leader? like maybe those barbaric Turks, or some other, browner people?) simply disclose his reprehensible ethnocentrism.

I'm not opposed to people learning Latin, but to see it as the INDEX OF CIVILIZATION is not only absurd but contemptible. That they printed this op-ed is just one more reason to hate the New York Times.

Mount: "Because Latin is a dead language, not in a constant state of flux as living languages are, there’s no wriggle room in translating."

I wonder if Mount knows that, over the centuries of its use, Latin changed just like any other language? The proposal that a dead language is a static language, or worse still, that it leaves "no wriggle room in translating," only reveals what Harry Mount has not learned from his studies.

Ph.D. comics

Piled Higher and Deeper appears to be the grad-student-centric web comic of choice. Unfortunately, PHD is all about engineers. The recent addition of a humanities grad student (Gerard, the medieval Scandinavian philosophy student) only drives home that the author of the comic knows almost nothing about the humanities, and considers disciplines legitimate only insofar as they are quantitative.

On the other hand, there is Dinosaur Comics, which is pure brilliance.

Hardy and Ramanujan

Gilbert and Gubar open The Madwoman in the Attic provocatively with the question, "Is the pen a metaphorical penis?" Their aim is to show how literary creativity has historically been figured as specifically masculine. It's a nice opening, because it makes you think, "oh, those crazy 70's feminists!" And then they go on to quote male author after male author who makes it clear that he thinks the pen is a metaphorical penis.

I recently ran across an article [.pdf] by Moon Duchin that touches on the same subject, only with respect to the idea of mathematical genius. Moon's language is, of course, much more measured than Gilbert and Gubar's, but it's a fascinating read even sans provocative introductions.

A more substantial difference is the way that Moon addresses mathematical genius in particular. Mathematical genius and any other kind of genius were once pretty much the same (masculine) idea, but mathematical genius has since branched off and become a special creature on its own, due in part, I suspect, to the redistribution of cultural capital that attended industrialization. The article gestures toward some reasons why mathematics as a field has become the location of genius par excellence, which is in itself an interesting question.

One of Moon's examples of the mythologizing of mathematical genius is the biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan (the Wikipedia entry, as of this writing, reproduces many of the features Moon identifies--and his "genius" is brought up in the very first sentence). I didn't know much about Ramanujan before reading Moon's article; I'd always thought of him as "guy whose name is attached to theorems I don't understand."

This week the New York Times has a review of David Leavitt's novel The Indian Clerk, a fictionalized account of the relationship between G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. I'm almost tempted to read it to see what it does to the genius paradigm. Predictably, the review contains some howlers, to wit:

Class, like mathematics, consists of complex equations that may shift with the substitution of different values for X and Y, but the equations themselves remain rigid and fixed.

I'd be interested to see what, exactly, Leavitt does with class (surely he doesn't evaluate some equations).

I've long been contemplating a "poetry for physicists" syllabus, but I'd never considered using a novel (it would ruin the poetry gimmick, don't you know). I guess The Indian Clerk goes somewhere at the bottom of my reading list.