Arrived today in the mail: volume 1 of LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism. Get your own.

(Also arrived in today's mail: a Comcast bill. You win some, you lose some.)

MSA 13

It seems that the era of liveblogging is over, at least for me. In fact I barely tweeted, thanks to my janky phone. But I had a blast at MSA, as usual; I particularly enjoyed a talk by Karen Leick on Gertrude Stein's reception in the 1960s (the whole panel was great, in fact) and Benjy Kahan's provocative talk on climate and temporary homosexuality.

I felt that my own panel, "Against Innovation," went very well, despite a minor a/v fail; Stephen Ross and Joel Burges gave rich and interesting talks—Stephen's a metacritical meditation on haunting in modernist studies in several registers, and Joel's a clever look at the formalization of obsolescence in Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox. Ted Martin was our panel chair and kept things moving along admirably, and the people who showed up to the panel asked smart and difficult questions.

Beyond all the talks, of course, it was wonderful to see old friends and meet new people. MSA always wisely supplies ample breaks between panels and free-flowing coffee, which make for great conversations. I'm coming away from this MSA with lots of energy for my book, new readers for some unbearably delayed work in progress, and the general excitement of being reminded that I'm not the only one interested in these things.

I also came to the decision over the weekend that I should make a habit of posting my conference talks to the web, which is something that lots of people already do. I haven't done it in the past for a variety of familiar reasons—not feeling as though the idea were well enough developed or the talk well enough written; or the thought that I might develop the talk into an article one day.

Well, I'm starting to think better of these fears (let's call a spade a spade). It's not going to shock anyone that twenty-minute conference talks tend to be a little undercooked, for one thing. It's true, my conference talks aren't always well wrought urns. I think I can live with this revelation about my scholarly practice being made public. (By the way, my conference talks are also intentionally informal in tone—I believe I use the phrase "random garbage" in this one, for instance. I consider this a feature, not a bug.)

And as for thinking I might develop an idea—sometimes I do and sometimes I don't—but mostly I don't. And in this particular case, I'm pretty sure I won't. I have an article in the works that's related to the talk I gave at this year's MSA, but quite different in focus.

So, in short, here's my MSA 13 talk: "The Time-Sense: On Stein's Repetition."

Sentimental Spaces

“And what a quantity of animal beings there are in the being of a man!”

     — Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

My essay "Sentimental Spaces: On Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's Nest" is now up at at Jacket2.

One of the many nice things about Jacket2 is that it's fully online and open access. There are some drawbacks to this, of course: in MS the article is about 27 pages, which makes the lack of pagination in the online version perhaps a little heartwrenching. But the trade-off is that you don't need a library subscription to read it. (I'd be happy to send a pdf to anyone who really feels that the pagination issue is beyond the pale.)

Many thanks to the great Julia Bloch for the opportunity, and for the patient editing.

Return of the pre-internet age

I want to be a good citizen and comment on the AAUP report "Sustaining Scholarly Publishing," currently up on the estimable MediaCommons, but I think I'm going to have to refrain. It feels too much like grading.

For example:

Publishers were essential to the scholarly ecosystem of the pre-web age. For scholars to see their work disseminated within their scholarly community, it had to be published by a publisher. For some, this pre-web reality implies that university publishers are no longer required, because the conditions have changed.

The. Pre-web. Age.

Without giving too much detail, I would like to appeal to longtime colleagues' memories of one of my all-time most hilarious grading moments: a student (writing on eighteenth-century poetry) attributed something to "the pre-internet age."* You know, things were thus-and-so in the eighteenth century because there was no internet. This means that the AAUP report closely reproduced, in all earnestness, one of my go-to examples of a hilarious freshman blooper.**

Back-in-the-day versus Now is a convenient historical formulation, but not an illuminating one. The AAUP might be interested to learn that scholars have also communicated in other ways, such as letters, or even (I know this sounds crazy) conferences. In the pre-web age, no less!

I have to read C papers from time to time, but this is definitely not going to be one of those times.

*This was years ago, and said freshman has no doubt gone on to do great things, blissfully unscarred by her-or-his crime against history.
**Some troll inevitably points out that the internet and the web are not the same thing. This is true, but not relevant.

We all saw the numbers put out by VIDA recently. (A propos, here's Pollitt pointedly noticing something about a position I happen to hold.) I would just like to add that Jim Behrle's recent series of profanity-laced attacks on the VIDA-named pubs is hilarious. That is all.

Seriously, [name of press redacted]? Papyrus?

The weird thing about the recent Huckleberry Finn "controversy"

The words "Huckleberry Finn" have been trending on Twitter all day. Evidently some dubious press of which neither you nor I has ever heard is putting out an edition in which the word "nigger" is replaced by the word "slave."

This is not really newsworthy. It wouldn't be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn if someone weren't trying to censor it--I believe Myra Jehlen wrote an essay on this very subject. That the press doing the censoring is so very, very marginal speaks to how utterly canonical the novel--and its quasi-iconoclasm--has become.

What's interesting to me is the way the news is being received on Twitter. Most of what I've seen is plain outrage. How could they etc. My impression is that most people don't realize the following:

1. There are multiple editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, put out by different presses and different editors, among which readers are free to choose, and also the first edition is in the public domain and widely available for free.

2. The press that is putting out this edition is negligible, not least because the only thing of note that it has ever done is put out a bad edition of Huckleberry Finn.

3. Huckleberry Finn is not a franchise like Dora the Explorer. There is no single corporation that can or will control its image or content. You can't "update" Huckleberry Finn the way you can "update" Nancy Drew or Strawberry Shortcake or the aforementioned Dora.

It's the last point that's the most striking to me. It gives us tweets like these:

[Source.]

"They're really changing Huckleberry Finn? America lost their common sense"

[Source.]

"Huckleberry Finn is eliminating the "N" word from new editions to be less offensive. Also, Moby Dick will now be called Moby Penis."

[Source.]

"New editions of Huckleberry Finn will be censored to remove the "n" word? #fuckyourpoliticalcorrectness #apparentlyfuckclassicliterature"

Huckleberry Finn becomes a unified brand, like Coca-Cola. It's as though we cannot imagine an art work that is not first and foremost corporate intellectual property. It suggests that those of us whose job it is to know about publishing, intellectual property, textual editing, and so-called classics (a word that I've seen thrown around a lot regarding this most recent of HF controversies) haven't done enough to get the word out to those whose job it isn't, but who would benefit from knowing. It would be worth tipping people off that, yes, bad editions exist, and so do good ones. Sometimes it takes a little investigation to tell the difference.

The truth is that the academic humanities has often relied on the publishing industry to do its public outreach. Sometimes that works out, but not in this case. It's not in trade publishers' interests to get people to care about textual editing, because critical editions are almost by definition not what they sell. (How much does Viking care about the Schulman edition of Marianne Moore's poems? Not very much, because it's still in print.)

Cheap reprints of public domain works--like the Higginson editions of Dickinson's poems, of which I remember receiving a pretty hardcover edition from an aunt one Christmas--have long been a boon for publishers wanting to exploit the cultural capital of "classics." The most recent version of this is the fact that you can read Project Gutenberg editions for free on the Kindle. Which is true enough, but there are some situations in which the Gutenberg edition is fine and others in which it's a dreadful idea. This has always been true; it's just more obvious when it comes to removing the word "nigger" from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And in fact it wouldn't be a controversy if it weren't news that texts are always mediated, that multiple editions of a work can coexist, and that a novel isn't always the same thing as a franchise.

I've heard it lamented that, since Wikipedia reached its effective saturation point, it's no longer possible to assign the salutary "write a Wikipedia article" project. Perhaps the next step is to get our students to go to existing Wikipedia articles for particular works and add summaries of the major textual issues.

Somewhere, Roland Barthes is having a big laugh. But then, I guess that's always true.

This is a little late, but Kathleen Fitzpatrick has a great post up about the demise of Rice University Press and the fallacy of thinking digital = practically free. In particular:

This is perhaps not the moment at which institutions want to hear that they have to make additional investments in something that feels optional, but they really need to hear this:

• If you expect your faculty to publish, you must provide the means for them to do so.


• If you expect scholarly publishing to turn a profit, or even break even, you may want to stop holding your breath.


• If you allow commercial entities to take over scholarly publishing, because they can afford to do so, you must expect their predatory, monopolistic practices to encroach on the access you have to your own faculty’s work, and to diminish the impact that their work can have both inside and outside the academy.

There is no solution to this conundrum except for institutions to recognize that they must become responsible for supporting scholarly communication, and that this support will require treating the technologies and the labor involved in publishing as part of the institution’s infrastructure.

Assigning monographs

I found Cathy Davidson's recent post (reprinted from ADE Bulletin 149 (2010): 53-60), "Research Is Teaching," perceptive and enlightening. Davidson explores discrepancies in our profession between stated and practiced values, e.g. for hiring and tenure.

One of the arguments she makes is that there is a bewildering discrepancy between how we say we value the academic monograph (foundation of our profession! gold standard for tenure!) and how we actually value them (won't buy them unless they're remaindered for $6 at Moe's, won't assign them). Cathy asks why this is:

We require a monograph for a scholars entry into the profession but do not respect the form enough to teach it in our classes. This imbalance is field-specific and almost singular. We are monographic fundamentalists in our theology but monographic agnostics in our religious observance. No wonder young professionals in our field are confused about the relation between teaching and research. Other fields teach what they prescribe. Historians teach the best new books in history in their undergraduate and graduate classrooms. They take as the subject of their courses not only the content about a given historical field but also the practice of writing professional history. So do anthropologists. Where do English students learn about the finest practices of writing professional, book-length literary criticism? Articles are not equivalent in form to a scholarly monograph. Or maybe they are. Consider the misalignment in the reverse direction. If course packs of articles constitute the gold standard of what we want to communicate to our students about the best practices of the profession of English, then why are we pretending there is something special about the monograph as a form so special that tenure and promotion depend on its production?

Good point. Cathy suggests making a conscious effort to assign monographs, which made sense to me up until I thought about my syllabus for this spring. "Oh no," I thought, "I can't assign a monograph. I teach undergrads!"

This is of course patently ridiculous. I read a number of academic monographs as an undergrad at a school that was culturally different from but certainly no better than the one at which I now teach. But somehow I'd gotten it into my head that I couldn't expect advanced English majors to read a whole book that wasn't a novel.

So now I'm wondering what made me think that, and whether others have the same feeling about whether they're allowed to assign monographs--whether it would be considered a prudent decision.

I mean, really, why the hell not, right?

A few links on the Nature/UC Library thing:

• The boycott.


• Faculty letter and fact sheet [pdf].


• Jen Howard at the Chronicle: "U. of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs"


• NPG's response


• Ars Technica: "California libraries gearing up for fight against Nature"


• UC Library's response to NPG's response [pdf].


• Bethany Nowviskie: "Fight Club Soap"


• Mark Sample: "Fight Club soap, sold by SD-6"


• Janet Stemwedel: "Shrinking budgets + skyrocketing subscription fees = UC boycott of NPG."


• Dorothea Salo: "Gauntlet volleying"


• Dan Cohen and crew on the most recent Digital Campus [podcast]

For timely updates, follow the usual suspects (@dancohen, @samplereality, @kfitz, @TheRepoRat, etc.) on Twitter.

Good on the UC library and science faculty for proposing a boycott of Nature and affiliated journals. Nature Publishing Group wants to increase its rate by 400% in 2011, though well aware that the UC library has had its budget cut by $1.9 million. As the letter from Laine Farley et al. (which I highly recommend) astutely points out, Nature and its affiliated journals depend heavily on the research, reviewing, and editorial labor, all uncompensated, of UC faculty. As Barbara Hui writes, "[i]t's Fight Club soap."

Update: Jen Howard's Chronicle article.