On bibliography-dumping

A widespread form of feedback to a junior colleague is what I hereby name "bibliography-dumping."

This is the practice of naming books and articles that you think a junior colleague ought to read, usually in response to hearing about that junior colleague's work. (This occasionally happens with a peer, but it's much more common with a junior colleague or a student.) Sometimes we recommend just one or two books, but all too often it's several. It's an incredibly common practice, and for a long time I've thought nothing of it (an occasionally engaged in it), because I think it's generally well meant.

I've been on the receiving end of many a bibliography dump in the past, of course, especially in grad school. But it's only recently, as a witness to (and occasional inflicter of) bibliography-dumping, that I've started to see it as problematic. It's taken me a little time to figure out why the bibliography-dump isn't necessarily the helpful gesture it's meant to be, but after some pondering, I believe I've detected a reason or two.

When I bibliography-dump, I might think I am saying: "Hey, I am interested in your work; it reminds me of a bunch of things I read! Let me name some! Enthusiasm!"

But the student in question hears: "I, your senior colleague, very strongly suggest that you read ten books only tangentially related to your actual project."

We're nerds; we relate to one another by talking about books. And it's usually in the spirit of bonding that we start naming books that a colleague's work reminded us of. So we're having a good time free-associating about media theory (or whatever) and at the same time patting ourselves on the backs for being so helpful, while our students frantically scribble down the titles we're spouting off.

But let's be real: most of the time, we're not helping. The truth is that it doesn't take that much work to suggest books; suggesting books is basically an associative process. It doesn't require deep engagement in the way that a truly good question does. So when we start naming books, it may be well meant, but it's actually a little insulting if we're doing it in lieu of taking our colleague's argument head on.

Of course, it is helpful to name relevant books. But the operative word there is "relevant." But do I, having just sat through my junior colleague's formal or informal presentation, have a good enough sense of the project to know what's relevant? Related is not the same thing as relevant. It's easy to find books that are related. It's hard to find books that are relevant. And nobody needs help doing their very basic, first-pass, the-keyword-is-in-the-title research. If I think I understand the project well enough to name resources that are relevant, then I should understand it well enough to ask an actual question. So, y'know, I could try that.

I can think of two situations in which the bibliography-dump is actually useful.

1. The person giving the presentation is actively looking for resources on [X]. Sometimes, despite diligence and all our catalogue-fu, it can take a lucky break to strike the article or bibliography that will let you into the world you're looking for. Usually such a need will be made apparent through the use of sentences like "I am looking for resources on [X]." By the way, if there is any feminist scholarship on the creepy oeuvre of Anne Geddes, I wish to enter that dark underworld, so tip me off.

2. You need to save the presenter from ignorance of a resource so foundational that your failure to mention it would be scandalously irresponsible. For instance: someone writing about feminist approaches to objectivity who has never heard of Sandra Harding.

If either of these two situations presents itself, we should go for it. Otherwise, by bibliography-dumping, we are only contributing to student angst and scope creep, while failing to really interrogate the project at hand.

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?

You can't appreciate my genius

Oh, you thought I was done with the posts on revision. Nay.

Today I'd like to reflect a little on feeling misunderstood.

I don't mean in a John Hughes way.

(Not this.)

I mean, of course, feeling like your writing has been misunderstood.

This post can be summarized in three words: get over it. But getting over it, as we all know, is hard to do.

Here's the thing: one way or another, your writing probably has been misunderstood. Nobody is more acutely aware of the slipperiness of language than literary critics. Reading is misreading, and writing is miswriting, and it is this inevitability against which we strive every day. I don't say this to dismiss the ideal of clarity--on the contrary. Rather, I want to emphasize just how hard we have to work to be clear, especially about difficult ideas. Being misunderstood is work. You worked hard to write something (unclearly), and a reader worked hard to misunderstand it. Rapprochement is achieved with pain.

That's okay, because that's how language works, and we like it that way. The things that make language infinitely misreadable are also the things that make it rich with possibility. Pure communication is a fantasy; an informatics model of communication doesn't apply when natural language is the medium for ideas, and no one has yet invented a philosophical language that is entirely unambiguous yet still as useful as natural language.

Moreover, the reason we have writing is that it allows us to have bigger thoughts than we can hold in our heads all at once. That means that your writing isn't just the mirror image of a clear and complete idea that once resided in your head (even if you think it did). The writing is your idea, insofar as it exists in the world.

When you craft that writing, you craft your idea. But that idea necessarily has holes--holes that you've always been filling in with the heuristics and narratives with which you've been living and thinking. When they read your work, your readers are filling those holes with other heuristics and other narratives. Enter misreading.

So now that we've been misread, in what does getting over it consist?

1. Not taking it personally. Even if your argument has been misconstrued in the dumbest possible way, it's just not going to do anything for you, your relationship with your colleague, or your writing to take it as a personal insult. It's puzzling, true, when you get a comment like "but why didn't you ever address X?" when you spent five pages teasing out the nuances of X. All you can do is revisit those five pages and see if there's some way to clarify that those five pages are, in fact, addressing X. It may just be a matter of terminology, or of where you stick a topic sentence. Either something in the writing made it possible for that misinterpretation to occur or your reader just missed something. If you determine that it's the former, fix. And if it's the latter, forgive. Even smart people space out while reading sometimes.


2. Finding ways to disallow certain misreadings, especially "near enemies" or "evil twins." Lisa Ruddick, borrowing a Buddhist term, calls the bad version of a good thing a "near enemy." Often this is a grossly dumbed-down version of a complex idea, or a loose association. For example, during the culture wars, deconstruction was often associated with "relativism," a hopelessly broad term that was usually extrapolated to mean moral relativism and The Downfall Of Civilization. It's probably not coincidental that Derrida wasn't known for his clarity, because the near enemy often has to be attacked directly. For example, a common misconception that I have to guard against in my own work is the assumption that "objective" is synonymous with "scientific," and that both are synonymous with "true." I can state explicitly in the first paragraph that scientificity and objectivity are not the same thing, and still get back comments riddled with the assumption that they are. That's totally maddening, but sometimes you have to remind readers more than once that you're using terms in a specific way. This can be a tedious task, or, alternatively, a very satisfying opportunity to rant about the distinction between objectivity and scientificity. After you've combed out the traces of anger and resentment, you'll probably have a pretty okay exposition of a premise that was underexplained in the first draft.


3. Accepting that if you're fairly junior in your field, then you do not have license to channel Donna Haraway. You want your writing to be exactly as difficult as is necessary to embody your ideas. Even Derrida was capable of being very, very crisp. Difficult, oblique, or formally unusual writing should be a strategic choice, not the only kind of writing you can produce. If you're a junior scholar, you have to establish that you can follow the rules before you break them. If you feel that that sucks, well, a lot of things suck. Here's another way of putting it: we've all had the student (hopefully rarely) who challenged a grade because we "misunderstood" an essay that lacked an argument, citations, and punctuation. "You," the student has told us, "do not appreciate my personal style. Which means you hate me, and that is not fair. Give me an A." Do not be this student.

My point, friends, is that we are all misunderstood, so we must be so with joy.


Previous posts on responses to writing:

• 9 May 2010: "On responding to writing"


• 28 May 2010: "How to respond to others' writing"


• 31 May 2010: "Receiving feedback on writing, part the first"


• 2 June 2010: "Receiving feedback on writing, part the second"


• 4 June 2010: If wishes were hobbyhorses

If wishes were hobbyhorses

This is the fifth (good grief) post in a series on the practice of responding to others' writing, which I've come to see as a core but relatively unsung element of the academic humanities.

For some reason I've chosen to dwell at length on the art of receiving feedback, which is, I believe, not entirely obvious. We've all taught courses in which we've laboriously commented drafts, only to get the final essays back and find that a good half of the students didn't do a damn thing to their essays. I have no illusions about the rampant snowflakery in this world, but I don't think it's entirely students' fault when they don't know what to do with a response to their writing. Receiving and using feedback is a practice that's partly intellectual and partly emotional. I try to prep my students to receive feedback using a pair of articles by Nancy Sommers (one co-written with Laura Saltz), which are pedagogically great in a number of ways (they're cited below), but which unfortunately don't really address the specifics of receiving feedback.

In my last post, I outlined some general things to do with feedback. Today I'd like to discuss a specific common feature of feedback, the hobbyhorse.

We've all encountered it. In fact, we've all inflicted it. For example, I have an incurable penchant for bringing up Luigi Galvani. I try to restrain myself, but somebody that awesome just can't be kept a secret. Yes, he is relevant to your chapter on the queer temporality of lolcats! He's relevant to everything! He matters, and I highly recommend that you rethink your account of temporality in light of his work. You know, his work on trying to re-animate dead frogs.

So you see what I mean by "hobbyhorses." You get a manuscript back, you're following along in the comments, and you realize that the reader has started harping on some really unlikely point, and it's something that reader talks about a lot. What, oh what to do?

In my last post, I exhorted one and all to distinguish between what it means and what to do. So I'll sort of do that now.

1. What does it mean?

• Often, it means genuine engagement. We all have intellectual investments and influences--we wouldn't be scholars if we didn't. I was sort of kidding about Galvani earlier (only sort of kidding, as some of my less fortunate friends can attest), but I'm definitely going to think about any drafts I read in terms of ideas I know well, questions I'm interested in, whatever book I've just been reading. Always. In fact, that's why you want readers who are not you: so they will bring their investments and mental bibliographies to an encounter with your ideas. So when a reader rides a hobbyhorse, she or he is often genuinely interested in your work and is trying to relate it, in a substantial way, to ideas that she or he is actively invested in. Which is cool!


• Occasionally, it means utter laziness. It's also possible that your reader hasn't read you carefully, and substituted greatest hits from her own personal Scholarship iTunes Playlist for what you were actually saying. There are uninvested readers who will tell you, every single time, that this is a fine draft but you need to devote more space to questions of aesthetics. It's regrettable, but it happens.


• Sometimes, you asked for it. I wrote a few posts ago that responding to someone else's writing is a creative act. That's especially true when it comes to very unpolished or incipient work. Your reader is working hard to fill in conceptual gaps, detect the unstated assumptions, understand unstated implications, and generally make sense of something that's about fifty percent nonsense. The less clear and less developed a piece of writing is, the more likely hobbyhorses are. In fact, hobbyhorses are kind of necessary in those situations. If I don't know what you're saying, I have no choice but to think you are talking about some likely idea that I already know and understand.

2. What should I do?

As before, it's all about making the writing better. So you don't precisely need to know why the hobbyhorse has trotted in in order to know what to do with it. Even a hobbyhorse ridden in laziness can be useful. The question is: how much of this hobbyhorse was elicited by my writing, and how much of it is my reader's fevered obsessions? It's up to us as writers to figure out two things:

• Is there really something to this seemingly zany connection? Roughly, we're asking here whether there's really something in your ideas that's related to the hobbyhorse. Depending on where you are in the writing process, even a truly weird connection could be worth fleshing out. Try honestly to evaluate the extent to which this is the case. Just give it some thought. You can't really know how carefully your reader read your work (I mean, you can have your suspicions, but that's something else). So it's best to take suggestions seriously and try to evaluate them on the merits, even if your reader does tell you you need to say more about Luigi Galvani every time. And if the hobbyhorse turns out to be relevant, then for goodness's sake, follow the reader's suggestions!


• But if you've considered it carefully and determined, in a sober and fair manner, that this hobbyhorse is not helpful, you need to then ask: Have I written something that would make it likely for others to make this zany suggestion? Now we're asking if some superficial formal element of your writing is related to the hobbyhorse. It's possible that something in your writing genuinely warrants the wacky ideas your reader just brought in; it's also possible that it was something about your writing that you didn't intend. If you've considered the hobbyhorse suggestion and rejected it, then check to see if there's anything about your writing that's unclear or that wrongly gestures in the terrible, mistaken direction your reader took it. In my experience, using a specialized term to mean something unspecialized is a common culprit (e.g. using "duration" to mean "period of time," without the Bergsonian sense). Clarify the writing (which often means clarifying the argument) in a way that disallows the kinds of misunderstandings that could have led to the hobbyhorse suggestion.

It seems that responding to writing, and responding to responding to writing, is my own personal hobbyhorse these days. It's in good company with Galvani, though.


Sommers, Nancy. "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers." College Composition and Communication 31.4 (Dec. 1980): 378-88. JSTOR. Web. 1 June 2010.

--- and Laura Saltz. "The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year." College Composition and Communication 56.1 (Sept. 2004): 124-49. JSTOR. Web. 1 June 2010.

Previous posts on responses to writing:

• 9 May 2010: "On responding to writing"


• 28 May 2010: "How to respond to others' writing"


• 31 May 2010: "Receiving feedback on writing, part the first"


• 2 June 2010: "Receiving feedback on writing, part the second"

Receiving feedback on writing, part the second

Receiving feedback on writing is a tricky skill, and one that is crucial for our profession. But by and large, it isn't taught formally. Maybe it can't be; I've learned through years of receiving feedback of better or worse quality on my writing, and also through my experiences giving feedback to composition students and to peers.

Today I'll offer four general ideas about how to receive feedback. The main idea that runs through all four of them is as follows: the point of receiving feedback is to produce a better piece of writing. This is, it would seem, obvious, but it's so easy to get caught up in some freakish sense of duty that makes the feedback seem more important than the actual writing.

• It's your writing. You do not have to take suggestions that stem from a misapprehension of what you're trying to do with the piece. (You should, of course, clarify your writing so that readers will no longer labor under the aforementioned misapprehension.) Suggestions are just that, and ultimately you're responsible for your work. Nobody understands what you're trying to accomplish the way you do. Take suggestions seriously, but in the end it's your call. That said...


• Be practical. Ideally your readers all respect your vision and are offering sincere, thoughtful suggestions. But sadly, that isn't universally the case, and the academy, like everything else, is full of power dynamics on which you'll often be on the weaker end. Sometimes you just need to recognize an unreasonable demand for what it is, bend, and save your magnum opus for another day--a day after you've received tenure. If an anonymous peer reviewer demands X, unless it morally offends you, then for Pete's sake just do it. If your advisor thinks you need to talk about Erving Goffman in your chapter on Havelok and the hagiographic tradition and won't approve your dissertation until you do, screw integrity and find a way to work poor Goffman in. (You should have enough of a relationship with your advisor to judge whether she or he is likely to insist on such things; if you're early in the dissertation-writing stage then now's the time to test those boundaries. Also, if you're at that stage and you find that your advisor isn't respectful of your project's direction, then now's also the time to think about finding another one, or at least adding some other people to the committee.) Another way of saying this is: pick your battles.


• Distinguish between what the feedback means and what you're going to do with it. Often feedback takes the form of observations: "in this section you give a review of literature"; "in this section you revise X's model of Y to account for Z." Sometimes those observations will strike you as wrong. What it means is that the reader hasn't understood what you were up to. But it won't help you or anybody to rant about the reader's failure to understand your writing. Instead, what you'll do with it is revise that section until it's clearer what you are doing. In general, it's tempting to think of feedback in terms of what it means the reader is thinking (about your writing! about you!). That's fine, but move beyond that reaction to turn what the reader is thinking into a concrete course of action.


• Bracket or outright ignore any feedback that impedes your ability to work on the piece. I really mean this. Truly unserious feedback, or feedback that sends you into a paralyzing spiral of self-doubt, should be summarily chucked, or at least placed in a drawer until the wounds heal. The point of receiving feedback is to produce a better piece of writing. If a response to your writing paralyzes you or prevents you from working, then it defeats the purpose of receiving feedback in the first place. It may be that you're oversensitive, true--most people are when it comes to their writing. And certainly, you can and should try to develop some distance on your writing. But if, in this moment, the response you're looking at is making you fear to open the Word file at all, and maybe eye the Golden Gate Bridge a little too fondly, a ritual burning is not out of place. You're a writer. Do whatever it takes to improve your writing, and if that means coddling yourself emotionally just a little, then so be it. Here are some kinds of feedback I think it's okay to ignore:
  
  
  
  • Proofreading, on a draft meant for substantive revision. If you've asked for comments on a draft, a response that fixates entirely on typos and the odd awkward phrase is not a serious engagement. You will proofread your writing after you've revised it. This, you can set on fire. (Follow local safety laws!) Next time, give this reader explicit instructions for how to respond to your writing.
  
  
  • The avalanche. If there are just too many suggestions for a mortal human being to deal with, to the point that you're unable to even start in on revisions, just put the comments aside. I don't recommend setting these sorts of suggestions on fire, because they're probably substantive, if poorly organized. Just read through them once and put them away. You'll take the matter into your own hands and figure out how to revise, maybe returning to these comments when you have a better sense of where you're going to go. And next time, ask this reader to focus on one or two particular aspects of the piece.
  
  
  • Invective. Insults of any kind, whether directed at you or at your writing, are unprofessional and non-substantive. They won't help you revise. If possible, don't solicit comments from this reader again.
  
  

In a future post (oh, promises, promises!) I'll discuss some common specific elements of receiving feedback and how to deal with them: hobbyhorses; feeling misunderstood; turf-warring. I say this as if I'm some kind of expert, but really I'm just bumbling along here, so please do add suggestions in comments, fair readers.

(Special thanks to Hillary, Benjamin, and Lila for the cat photo.)

Previous posts on responses to writing:

• 9 May 2010: "On responding to writing"


• 28 May 2010: "How to respond to others' writing"


• 31 May 2010: "Receiving feedback on writing, part the first"

Receiving feedback on writing, part the first

This is the third post in what appears to be a series on responses to writing. Previously I laid out my idea of what constitutes a good response to someone else's writing. Responding to writing is a nontrivial intellectual task. But it's also not entirely obvious how to receive feedback on writing. Most people have received a laboriously marked up draft, only to find themselves at a loss as to how to use it. Don't tell anybody, but sometimes those marked-up drafts wind up in the recycling bin. What a waste of everyone's time!

Today I'll mention some ways to get the most useful possible feedback from your readers.

• Set expectations. I can't overemphasize this. A respondent will be far more helpful if she or he knows what kind of response is needed. You don't have to give a lengthy report on your expectations, but you should signal what stage you imagine the piece to be in and what kind of time frame is available. If it's a draft for a long-term book project, the reader will respond to the substance of the ideas and perhaps suggest significant rewriting, theoretical reorientation, etc. If it's a writing sample that's due in a few days, the wise reader will catch all your typos and offer suggestions to improve the clarity of the language. The wise reader in that situation will not tell you that you need to engage with Nietzsche. Note, too, that regardless of what you say, the presentation of the manuscript also sends signals about the state of the draft. A poorly formatted, typo-ridden manuscript says "drafty draft draft draft," no matter what you say about it. Conversely, a polished manuscript signals assurance and a relatively more developed argument. More to the point, a clean manuscript allows the reader to focus on language and ideas, because she isn't being distracted by your wonky footnote formatting. And if you want feedback on particular issues ("I'm not sure whether the section about how the Cheezburger Cat formally reproduces the Bergsonian durée is clear"), then by all means ask the reader to respond to them.


• Hold up your own end of the deal. Give your reader a reason to take your argument seriously. Even if the work is incipient, give the reader enough to work with. How useful will it be to receive feedback on five introductory pages that don't actually start in on the body of the argument? The reader can't know if those pages do what they're supposed to do without the rest of the essay in hand. Similarly, meet the deadlines you set for yourself (true confession: I am entirely guilty of not following this advice on occasion). Responding to writing is a generous thing to do, and it's only right to respect your reader's time by delivering what you said you'd deliver, when you said you'd deliver it.


• Be strong. You've asked for feedback; now be willing to accept it. It's always hard to hear from someone else that your baby needs work, even when you already hold that opinion yourself. Make up your mind now that you're going to use this feedback productively.

If I don't flake out (always a possibility -- I mean, this is a blog, after all), then I'll proceed in a future post to outline how to distinguish between helpful and unhelpful feedback, and some of the ways to use feedback productively, including relatively low-quality feedback.

(A lolcat for Gladys.)

Previous posts on responses to writing:

• 9 May 2010: "On responding to writing"


• 28 May 2010: "How to respond to others' writing"

How to respond to others' writing

I recently wrote a fairly rambling post about responding to other people's writing, which was partly an appreciation of those who have done it for me and partly a reflection on how I learned to respond to writing (in short: haphazardly).

What I didn't do in that post was give a concrete account of my idea of how one should respond to writing. I'll attempt to outline it briefly below. These statements apply to writing by peers and by students alike.

• Writing is an act of creation. Properly conducted, so is responding to writing. A good response is the product of a serious intellectual engagement with a document, usually a document in an unpolished state, which takes a bit more effort to read than a fully articulated, proofread, edited document. It's your job to figure out what the document is accomplishing, what it aims to accomplish, and what it could accomplish. You're partaking of the creative act and projecting for the writer what you think the piece will be once fully realized. Consequently, a response should be positive in both senses. I don't mean this in a warm and fuzzy way. I mean that a response should offer suggestions, point out successful moves (that should be extended or repeated, perhaps), and ask questions, because these are the things that will help a writer proceed. It is easier to work from models than from interdictions. You can say what not to do, but the task of the writer is not to not do but to do -- something. The writer needs to know what you think that something ought to be, even if she or he will ultimately reject your suggestion.


• A response is not the same thing as an evaluation. When a piece of writing is truly good, it's important to say that, because handing over your work to somebody else is an act of trust. But the chief aim of a response is not to evaluate but to analyze. In particular: telling somebody that a piece of writing is bad gives the writer nothing to go on as far as revision is concerned. What should the writer do, upon being told the piece is bad? Chuck the piece and start over? Start over how? A response should reveal dimensions of the piece that the writer did not previously perceive. Honesty is necessary, of course, and on occasion a reader will be called to save a colleague from the grips of a truly terrible idea for a project. The Queer Temporality of Lolcats: A Bergsonian Analysis in Limericks was never meant to be. But these occasions are rare.


• A response should summarize what you see the writing accomplishing. Writing does not entail having an idea fully formed and then typing it out. Sophisticated writing is a recursive process of articulating, revising, and nuancing ideas that are at first only incipient. A good response summarizes what the reader has understood to be the aims and accomplishments of the piece of writing, usually with questions when unclarity arises. The reader helps the writer to identify the ideas that have developed in the writing, and the further implications that the writer may wish to draw out.


• A response should be appropriate to one's relationship with the writer and to the task at hand. A response must always be respectful, period. Apart from that, audiences vary. You can be colloquial with a friend from grad school. It's helpful to repeat composition terminology (like that old classic, "topic sentence") with a student. It's important to be gentle (not dishonest: gentle) with someone whom you know is having a mid-grad-school crisis. Likewise, comments that will prompt substantial rewriting are appropriate for an early draft of a dissertation chapter, and not appropriate for a draft of a proposal due tomorrow. Think of the person, the time frame, the situation.


• A few targeted comments are more helpful than a comprehensive account of every possible thing upon which the writer could improve. Time is finite, and while we all cherish hopes of writing the perfect essay, it's not reasonable to suppose that anyone ever will. Far more harmful to anyone's writing life than an essay circulating with a few flaws is the awkward, insular prose of the sitter-and-polisher. Each of us has an inner sitter-and-polisher, and that's not a bad thing (it's also known as our inner critic), but there must be limits. A tragic affliction often seen among advanced graduate students is the inability to show anyone work in progress and an utter unwillingness to submit essays before they are "ready." That way lies incompletes, a fifteen-year time-to-degree, and abject misery. Meanwhile, the writing becomes more and more stilted and anxious, because it never sees the light of day or benefits from the refreshing reality-checks of scholarly communication. Inundating a writer with a flood of comments only encourages the inner sitter-and-polisher who never circulates a draft with which she is not happy--and she is never happy. If there really are a lot of problems, then at minimum impose a hierarchy on your suggestions. When you give a response, you're suggesting revisions, and those revisions should be possible and finite. The goal, after all, is to end up with a good piece of writing, and part of being good is being done.

I much enjoyed this ProfHacker post by Nels P. Highberg on "What We Can Do for Graduating Seniors Today" [Chronicle paywall]. In general I think the ProfHacker series is good (though of course nothing matches the perfect wisdom of Ms. Mentor).

All ye need to know

A commenter writes of this post on an inappropriate literary reference:

"Aw, come on, no need to cll it inappropriate. They probably think they have made a profound, beautiful slogan! XD"

My response is apparently too long to fit in the comment box, so here it is as a blog post. It occurs to me that when I spot literature in advertising I would do well to explain what's going on, so that this blog could be educational rather than just a place for me and my friends to laugh at the inappropriateness of quoting that particular line from Keats on the wall of a drug store.

* * * * *

Right, Dare, the glibness of the quotation -- the idea that you could just take that line and attribute it to John Keats like he was giving you life advice, or beauty tips -- is exactly what's so hilarious, because in the context of the poem that line is incredibly problematic. That particular line was a bone of contention for the New Critics and the subject of a famous essay by Cleanth Brooks in The Well Wrought Urn (1947), precisely because of its fortune-cookie quality, its apparent quotability. Brooks quotes T.S. Eliot as writing of it, "this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem; and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue."

Whatever you feel about the New Critics, I think it has to be agreed that you can't take the line straight. Keats is not offering you life advice. Brooks writes that "[t]he very ambiguity of the statement, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' ought to warn us against insisting very much on the statement in isolation, and to drive us back to a consideration of the context in which the statement is set." Brooks, for his part, points out that the line quoted on the pharmacy wall is "spoken" not by a lyric "I" but by the urn, a work of art whose beauty lies in its silent withholdings.

As my friend Charlie Légère has pointed out, Brooks, with disconcerting pro-rape cheerfulness, describes the scene painted on the urn as one "of violent love-making." This is the painted scene -- of a rape -- that Keats praises in the "Ode," and indeed, the urn itself partakes of the nature of the scene that it depicts.

"Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness" -- what a beautiful line, and what a troubling one. The figures depicted in the scene are suspended in time, just on the point of rape, "the maiden," as Brooks says (with offputting enthusiasm), "always to be kissed, never actually kissed." But the "still unravish'd bride" is not the woman on the urn; it is the urn itself, still unravished, always on the point of being ravished -- by quietness, not by loud speech (nor by an ad slogan) but by "quietness," the soft speech that could undo the urn (the soft speech, one might speculate, of criticism).

For Brooks, the source of tension is this deathly stillness, the contrast between the violence of the rape scene ("What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?") and the fixity of the art work. That the rape is never actually completed seems to Brooks to be -- not a defect, for it's the condition of the urn's status as art, but a loss. The art work, by being art, must exit life and movement. It's a reading enabled by the theory that rape is something to be followed through with, a consummation of life itself! -- Which, no doubt, it is, for certain values of "life."

A somewhat less pro-rape reading might see the suspension of both maiden and urn in their about-to-be-raped state as a suspension in dread, a fixing of a moment of terrible intensity. It's like that feeling you get reading L'Assomoir and having to put the book down for a while because you know Lantier is about to show up, and you know it will be seriously bad news. You dwell in a state of dread.

The urn, Keats writes, will persist in its fixity long after we're gone; "Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours." Being in midst of woe seems to be the point, the enabling condition for that final, rather too-smug sentence, "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'" The maiden frozen in the terror of facing a rapist, the urn "still unravish'd" only because it can be ravished, we amidst our woe and some future viewers of the urn amidst theirs are all canceled out, and yet fed upon, by that final line. Does beauty trump woe when it (because it) encodes a permanent state of violence? The urn may tell us that, but is it right?



Of course, everything I've just said has to do with the internal logic of the poem. A more obvious source of incongruity is that "beauty" in the "Ode" is a timeless, unmoving beauty in art, a beauty rather fearsome for being so very suspended in time, so chilly, so violent. In the photo, it's sitting above a shelf full of "beauty products," where "beauty" is now a debased commercial term for the stuff you're supposed to do to your body to avoid social censure, a "beauty" to be acquired by means of apricot scrub.

Questions that I had forgotten were questions

I was speaking to a fellow grad student who will remain nameless in a program (not here) that will remain nameless whose advisor has been, shall we say, kind of hands-off.

A situation arose in which Grad, who, despite assiduous badgering, had not received any substantive feedback for more than a year, was suddenly given a deadline by which to make a lot of deep changes. When Grad mentioned the whole year-of-no-feedback thing, Advisor pulled the old I Will Not Spoonfeed You, as if timely, substantive comments on drafts were an whiny crybaby thing to expect from an advisor.

Okay, so that was my encounter with a failure in mentorship today, fortunately for me not first-hand. (My committee is, in fact, awesomely on top of things.)

I got kind of steamed up about Grad and Advisor, because I think that thinking of basic mentoring as "spoonfeeding" is classist, irresponsible, and unrealistic. There is such a thing as spoonfeeding, but telling students about the profession that they are entering is not it.

It reminded me that mentoring involves tipping people off about things that seem like second nature to you, because they are not in fact normal things in the wider world.

The fact that you hear Christmas music and think "oh yeah, MLA" does not mean that you are normal; it means that you are a strange Gollum-like creature that lives in darkness.

I mean that in a good way.

Conversely, if someone asks you whether MLA is a conference or an association, it does not mean that person is stupid. It means that he or she is still a hobbit.

So I think I'll use this blog space from time to time to record questions that I had forgotten were questions. Hopefully some hapless person on the internet will benefit, and in any case I will remember that academia is not second nature to everybody.

Today's:

Q. What do you call a professor?

A. Conventions vary from school to school, and if an instructor requests a particular name or title, then that's the one to use. But when in doubt, go with "Professor So-and-So." Err on the side of an overly formal title. Since I'm a graduate instructor and first names are the convention for GSIs at Berkeley, I have my students call me Natalia.